Tag Archives: William Gibson

Interview with William Gibson

Posted on by

My favorite author, far and away. Just finished his new novel, Zero History. Here are a few bits that caught my attention in the interview:

  • I find Twitter to be the most powerful aggregator of sheer novelty that humanity has yet possessed.
  • “I think the concept of “mainstream” is probably becoming archaic in some sense.”
  • “The mainstream is more digestible by osmosis”
  • “I wonder if we’ll ever have consensus (again)?”
  • “Generally, we don’t know what we were doing with something until we quit doing it.”
  • “When I see Glenn Beck –to the very small extent I do, if I can help it– it’s like Devo’s vision made flesh”
  • “I now write with the assumption that someone will google every unfamiliar word and term as they go through the book.”
  • “The footnote now lives in cyberspace, a click away”

Lady Gaga meets Pattern Recognition?

Posted on by

Okay, this post is for William Gibson fans only. Specifically, fans of his novel, Pattern Recognition. Here’s a grossly over-simplified plot summary. Actually it’s not even that, but I had to provide some context, so…

“…a cult-like group of Internet obsessives strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called “the footage,” let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source.”

This morning on his Twitter feed, Gibson posted:

“That putative Lady Gaga virus is as seriously Footage-y as anything I’ve seen on YouTube.”

Curious, I found my way to this video:

UPDATE: There were a couple of videos on YouTube to which I had linked but they’ve been pulled. Very suspicious.

Wild Palms

Posted on by

Wildpalms150“It’s the year 2007 in Los Angeles, Harry Wyckoff (James Belushi) is a patent attorney and family man. His wife Grace (Dana Delany) is a formidable suburban housewife and mom who also owns a chic Melrose Avenue boutique. Grace is the daughter of Tony and youthful Josie Ito (Angie Dickinson), a socialite radiant with charisma (and with an agenda of her own). Harry and Grace have two children: little Deirdre has been a slow developer, yet to speak a word, and elder son Coty (Ben Savage) — a television addict — has just got an acting job on a new sitcom, Church Windows, alongside fabu superstar and fashion icon Tabba Schwartzkopf (Bebe Neuwirth). However, Wyckoff is plagued by strange dreams — of himself being pursued by a rhinoceros, and visions of a strange tattoo of a palm tree.”

I saw this mini-series in 1993 and 2007 seemed a long way off.

“The slow swarm of spinning things” (Count Zero)

Posted on by

The Sprawl trilogy is William Gibson’s first set of novels, composed of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). One of the “characters” in Neuromancer is Wintermute, “one-half of a super-AI entity.” On page 274 of Count Zero, we find a description of Wintermute creating art.

Cornellbox“She caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill … They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundred of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.

Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.

A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat … Endless, the slow swarm of spinning things…”

I love the image and I love the idea of an artificial intelligence creating art. In this story, futuristic Joseph Cornell style boxes.

Steampunk gas mask

Posted on by

Leathergasmask

Three reasons why I don’t own this steampunk gas mask: a) I can’t imagine where I’d wear it, b) It’s probably hot as hell, c) and damned expensive. But I’d be set for all Halloweens to come.

Like many others, I developed an appreciation for steampunk from the novels of William Gibson.

“Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.” – Wikipedia

Cloverfield: Some Thing Has Found Us

Posted on by

CloverfieldMaybe it’s just my love of video shot with cheap, hand-held cameras, but I really enjoyed Cloverfield. (Has anyone ever made a good monster-destroys-Manhattan movie?) You can watch the trailer at the official movie website and get all the particulars at IMBD.

I loved the camera work. From the get-go, I was there. At the party. In the street. A little motion sickness but nothing I couldn’t live with.

Rating on IMDB is 8.1 (out of 10) and (so far) nobody has posted a plot synopsis (I was tempted but didn’t know what to say). I enjoyed this movie. Running time: 15 minutes.

Update: The story is supposed to have been shot with a cheapo handheld consumer camera. Convincing the audience of that point was one of the movie’s most successful angles. Here’s the camera they actually used.

Update: Here’s what William Gibson had to say about the movie:

“I saw Cloverfield last night, and nothing about it bugged me more than those quotes around “Central Park” on the DoD evidence tag that opens the film. It immediately tells us that this film has not been made by native science fiction minds. If Central Park is no longer called Central Park, but is officially referred to as “the area formerly known as ‘Central Park'”, but the DoD still exists, we know that this is not a *far-future* evidence tag. So if Central Park is now known as “The Killing Fields”, or “The Ghastly Black Glass Ocean”, then *tell* us. Those quotes are extraordinarily clumsy (and the card itself is typographically unconvincing). Very first thing in the film. Matters. Hugely.”

Mr. Gibson (my favorite author) obviously has a greater eye for detail than I. Would love to know what he thought of the rest of the movie.

“Instead of shouting the message, hide it”

Posted on by

Will we still get carpet bombed by mindless 30 second commercials in the future? (And by future I mean a couple of weeks from now.) Seems unlikely, but how will savvy marketers reach –and more importantly– engage us? How do you “reach people who are so media-saturated they block all attempts to get through.”

Perhaps with alternate reality games (ARG’s). That’s the subject of a fascinating article by Frank Rose in this month’s Wired Magazine (Issue 16.01).

“The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it. On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails’ European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled “i am trying to believe.” Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing “iamtryingtobelieve.com” into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site’s contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: “I’m drinking the water. So should you.” Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?”

I’m not a gamer. At all. But I love shit like this. Reminds me of the viral video snippets in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. The Wired article is well worth the read.

Ubiquitous computing, blended reality

Posted on by

“Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.”

— From Rolling Stone interview with William Gibson