I barely knew her!

> every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak,

I am like this with a lot of books. I'll remember a very high level overview ("The Historian is about a modern day hunt for Dracula, and it's really cool, and I liked how the story was told, but I can't remember why or any of what happened."), but can't remember much about plot details.

It makes re-reading things fun, but also is frustrating because I can't explain why something was good, and I also remember just enough that plot twists don't surprise me the second time. It also means that I completely forget about the "bad" parts of the book, or the parts that didn't resonate with me.

It gets better: I could not finish Pattern Recognition, it was a struggle and I cannot remember anything from it!

I have the same experience, but with Snow Crash...

Dosadi Experiment is better than Dune. Just sayin.

>A girl I barely knew

:(

>handed me Neuromancer

:)

Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to surpass the original. We Israelis also had one of our more famous poets (Alterman) translate some Shakespeare but I'm not aware of the translation being considered a masterpiece on its own (personally it felt too archaic to appreciate).

We have two translations of Lord of the Rings (Tolkien fans being one of the more picky bunches of book geeks here, I'll refer to it in depth.) The older one, by Lavnit, is considered more beautiful and poetic and flowing (my nick comes from it though I was never much of a Tolkien geek, just hung out with them - Elves were translated into the Sons of Lillith from Hebrew mythology, and my mother's name is Lillith...). It's also long out of print and goes for (lowish I believe) collector prices. The newer one by Dr Emanuel Lotem is more... I don't know, academic maybe would be the word? Anyway, the Tolkien community hates him so much that he's one of their main memes. He also translated Dragonlance, which I grew up with, so I had no ill will towards him myself, and at some point I realized he's the one who managed to translate the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is... quite a feat. I wouldn't expect it to be translatable. So now I hold a deep appreciation for him.

The local Harry Potter geeks treated the translator as a minor celeb.

Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any other translators that are held in special regard.

The Bulgarian translation I read was a valiant effort by a guy who ran the Bulgarian "science fiction and fantasy BBS".

(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)

(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)

Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".

In French, I find that translations of Edgard Allan Poe by Baudelaire are really nice. I enjoy them as much as the original version. Sci-fi translations of US science fiction classics (Orwell, Bradbury etc..) are usually excellent too. I find myself re-reading these books in French and/or English according to mood.

On the other hans, I find that French translators usually utterly fail to capture the dry kind humor from British authors. From Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, it reads so serious in French translations!!

He really tried IMO. Actually I wrote this story to him, the translator of the Greek edition when I happened to find him on Facebook. He told me he felt he didn't do justice to the original work and always felt a bit bad.

Generally I don't like translations. After the Internet became a thing and Amazon started shipping to Greece (probably after 2000) I never read Greek translations of English literature again.

"translated by GPT"

Yes I read them and I loved them. Not the same effect of course, as Gibson's futuristic world was already described, but good nonetheless.

The heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.

A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point.

It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!

Really interesting, because his writing kinda gives you that wide-T sense, it's like the way Wu Tang rapped -- especially Raekwon, and to a lesser extend Ghostface -- where they avalanche you with all of these richly visualized and highly contrasted scenarios of this that and the other without ever go too deeply into any of them. Really does leave you awash in a lot of flavorful vibes and in 1991/1992 when I wasn't doing too much computering at all it gave me such a strong sense that sooner than later I'd be doing a lot of it

I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.

For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense.

It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.

Ahem:

https://www.gregegan.net/

> Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)

Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!

As I’m sure you know, Gibson himself briefly worked as a fashion model. Unlike most male authors and most sci-fi authors, and especially unlike most male sci-fi authors, he describes what people are wearing with great precision and creativity. For example, Molly’s first appearance in Johnny Mnemonic has her “wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.” I wanted to dig up a contrasting quote from Asimov, so I went to my Asimov shelf and although I had a great time looking, I had trouble finding a description of what any of the characters looked like, let alone what they were wearing.

Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.

You know this makes a ton of sense and why his writing is so compelling. We experience the “vibe” of a world, not the technical details. And I am saying this as someone who came into Sci-Fi from Heinlein who to a fault focused on the technical. I think the moment you get into the mathematics of anything it starts feeling more mundane. But perceiving a different reality by how it feels is what we do as children and that’s why it’s such a magical feeling.

One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).

>his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)

I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.

Totally disagree. He has the deepest understanding of all, of humans, aesthetic, culture, and art. Much more important than specifics about technology which is almost always completely irrelevant.

Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...

EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...

I enjoyed the world of Tron a lot more when I understood that it was more about how people saw computers at the time than how they actually were, too. The result was something arguably more unique than a "realistic" view would have been, too.

Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)

> Sci fi is always about people.

I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.

Yes. Neuromancer is actually about drug addiction in the same way as PKD's work is, with the cyberspace being a psychedelic non physical drug. It is also about cybernetics as systems of control; you can trace the machinery of each character being driven by and struggling against external forces of control. Case, Molly, Armitage, and ultimately the AI.

Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi:

https://www.gregegan.net/

Similar situation with Abbott's Flatland fiction from the 1800's. No math/physics background, but a very interesting perspective on different dimensions from a humanistic point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts in ways that at the time many felt impossible.

Alas. I would love a story with utterly alien paradigm but nobody can actually write them and neither will the artificial minds anxiously crafted in the image of human mind be able to.

The trick is to invent future tech that feels organic, cohesive, and believable, and not just whatever happens to be needed for the story you’re trying to tell.

Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.

> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.

I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.

Zing!

So the basic desire of the ruling class is to definitively control the underclass.

And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.

There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.

Māyā.

>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.

"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.

Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell

> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.

I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.

The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.

E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.

Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.

Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.

But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.

(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)

I read an interview in the back of one of the volumes of Gundam: Origin where original series creators Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Yoshiyuki Tomino reflected on their history in the student protest movement of the 1960s. It was a fascinating read because I didn't know anything about the Japanese New Left, and all of a sudden it made Gundam click for me in a way that it hadn't before.

It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.

I would suggest you think about what you don't know.

> Grand Theft Auto, ... Andor

Those were made in Britain by British creators.

Fascinating how people can make "counterculture" into a contest between nation-states.

"my country counterculture is so much better" could be ridiculously funny if it wasn't so sad to consider a presumably intelligent adult could utter it in complete sincerity.

Producing more in quantity, with far biggest allocated budget, and even better quality on everything that can be measured at surface level, all that is no guarantee to reach a work that is deeper in spirit.

Those who don't question what's wrong in themselves due specifically to the culture they were fed with are not on the path to elude its sway.

Right: bascially, 1980s-vintage William Gibson is a post-New-Wave SF writer who's a fan of hard-boiled novels and of New Hollywood "outlaw" bohemianism, so his heroes are pimps, thieves and murderers. 1980s-vintage Shirow is a fan of military SF, so his heroes are paramilitary death squads. Now, that's a little jaded, but I think mostly simply accurate. I don't think that generalises well to a US/Japan distinction though. As others have said, Akira is surely more of an outsider story. (Beyond cyberpunk, have a look at the political backgrounds of senior Ghibli people like Isao Takahata, Kondo Yoshifumi and Hayao Miyazaki. I've read somewhere, but can't confirm, that people like that tended to end up in animation precisely because Communists were blackballed out from more respectable industries.) And the US is the land of Dirty Harry and Niven and Pournelle as much as Bonnie and Clyde and Blade Runner.

> Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.

The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...

It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.

> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.

...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?

Ah..

Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.

It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..

GTA "equivalent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)

> Tetsuo: The Iron Man

It's not actually framed as cyberpunk: Shinya Tsukamoto positionned it as "human size kaiju".

On the perception...I think its fans are mostly outside of Japan, and it was basically reversed imported. Tsukamoto sent it to foreign film festivals first, and only brought it to domestic theaters after it won at the Rome festival. Even now in interviews it's only brought back as it's directorial debut, and a stepping stone for getting money for bigger movies.

I have the feeling the whole notion of mixing human and technology just doesn't resonate as much in a country that is way more technology friendly and doesn't see robots as much as a threat than in the west.

PS: the "action hero" genre is basically humans transforming into machines, that speaks to the wide acceptance of the concept.

The way I see it, works like Tetsuo is Japanese extreme cyberpunk - niche-within-a-niche kind of thing.

Synners is a very much an underappreciated jewel

Dreams of Flesh and Sand by William T. Quick reads like a rip-off of Neuromancer ... and it should be bad ... but I really like the writing style and the characterisation -- Berg, Toshi and Calley seem pretty cool and real, and so it may be a rip-off, but it feels like a fun and interesting rip-off. Worth a look.

Void Star by Zachery Mason is also good.

Perhaps publications like Mondo 2000 and WIRED (and Boing Boing) killed Cyberpunk the way The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis stuck a knife in the beatniks of the 1960's. Not that they made fun of Cyberpunk, but rather they so overly-embraced it that they kind of unintentionally made a mockery of it (so perhaps not so much like Dobie Gillis?). That was the way I saw it in the 90's anyway.

> Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.

Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.

In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in". I am of that age and I remember General Motors was a great place to work at that time. My friend "got in" after high school because his father was a union boss. For me, "getting in" to General Motors was literally impossible because I had no connections.

I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.

The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.

Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.

I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk" appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea that all technology is socially transformative, just not in the ways we hope it will be.

Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.

I partially disagree, there are still some cyberpunk medias that feel fresh for today. But yes, they're definitely not as famous as the previous ones.

Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.

Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.

I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any

Counterculture moved underground.

Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…

Computers, the internet, it is all mainstream now, the opposite of a counterculture.

If you want a counterculture, look the other way. "digital detox", permaculture, degrowth, etc... In the tech world you have the "small web".

"Maker" movements, repair/reuse/recycling, etc... used to be countercultures but they have gone towards mainstream in the last few years (and I think it is a good thing).

Not all countercultures are "good". For instance what we now call "wokism" used to be a counterculture, it is now mostly mainstream. The opposite is now a counterculture, including incels, red pill, etc...

Countercultures change and go. Very few countercultures of the past still remain, they either integrate in mainstream culture, or become so niche that they effectively disappear.

Another reading is that there is no more counterculture because it won and became the culture.

It was already a libertarian/neoliberal fantasy - one where everything is corrupt, everyone is competing with everyone else, and the point of the game is to grab as much as you can for yourself while selling your services to the highest bidder.

There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.

Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.

fascinating insight

I don't know about that. There are very powerful corporations in Neuromancer, more like governments than corporations. They (or powerful people inside / owning them) largely drive the action in Neuromancer.

I disagree. Hyperion has some of the surface elements of a cyberpunk work - primarily by way of "The Detective's Tale" (Lamia's story) - but it isn't cyberpunk overall, no more than it's a horror novel by way of Duré's story (for instance).

I'd say parts of the universe and one and a half of the pilgrim's tales are cyberpunk, but a lot of it isn't tonally so.

I think you might be missing the mark. The "cyberpunks", the original authors who started the genre, raised eyebrows because in their stories technology wasn't described as something that invariably had a positive impact on people's lives, quite the contrary. That is was what set them apart from the techno optimistic utopianism that dominated science fiction at the time. The authors were called punks because they were going against the grain and, like punk, did a sort of reset of science fiction.

Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology.

The caper plots are just a coincidence.

If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.

Gibson isn’t the only person writing cyberpunk although he definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from words like

>> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer

Or

>> There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process. ~ idoru

I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer.

I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.

> Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot.

I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.

Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades

I don't remember exactly, but I think most of these short stories aren't crime fiction. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" definitely isn't.

It's not my article and I don't 100% agree with it. But I think it's interesting to read. I think the article spends some time making your points about the esthetic over the contents

The Shockwave Rider is brilliant, and the savant hero reflected in many subsequent works. Neo, anyone?

> Suck Fairy

Well that’s a new one on me.

https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Suck_Fairy

It has been a million years since I read Stand on Zanzibar, but that technique of giving a set of cultural snippets to paint a picture really stuck with me. These days I'll be reading news headlines or Reddit's front page and be struck by how easily I could compose one of those that would be perfect for a novel imagining our era.

And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these "curtains for Zoosha" moments:

https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/114819416384262242

https://infosec.exchange/@cjust/114820379745453988

Agree. Same experience. Zanzibar (1968) is almost eerie sometimes.

You should be amazed then. It's brilliant.

> You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive

It sounds like you're trying to build the Cyberpunk equivalent of the shared semi-hard-SF Orion's Arm universe / world building project?

- https://www.orionsarm.com/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm

In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the Bathtub".

In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when they are obvious for the characters. Similar to how books set in the present don't try to be science fiction for people in the past, even though they would be, and therefore don't avoid or explain modern terminology.

I’ve reread Transmetropolian more times than Neuromancer and Snow Crash. And I love Neuromancer and Snow Crash. It rewards rereads like few graphic novels. Highly recommended.

Exactly. If anything, Gibson's evocative style reminded me of the Strugatsky brothers; while the story is different, you get this sense of looming despair all through the book.

I struggled with Neuromancer and never finished it (as far as I recall), and I've later discovered I have aphantasia.

I haven't tried reading it again since but I can't help but feel it's related, as I really struggled to get into it, despite reading and enjoying a lot of various sci-fi.

Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson:

"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."

I like his books, but I have to read them at least twice to understand what's going on. Sometimes I'll read the plot summary on Wikipedia and realize I missed a lot. I think I've read everything he's written though because I enjoy the prose even when I'm not really following along.

I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...

> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade

This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.

There are worlds of difference between analysing the syntax and semantics of languages in a structured and scientific way, and writing "good" prose (as subjective as that is).

I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?

In which case, have you read https://archive.is/20241231024916/https://www.newyorker.com/... in which Michael Moorcock calls Tokein's work:

"...a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".

Which I'm not saying should change your opinion on anything, I just find it's always a good exercise to find the juiciest criticism of one's darlings.

Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly, some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists and (mostly) wrote very quickly.

English is not my first language, and Tolkien's prose is one of the easiest English language texts I've ever read. Even the occasional stylizations to old scaldic verse is very easy to comprehend.

You're suggesting their arent any other authors who have taken over a decade to write a book? Prousts' In Search of Lost Time took 13 for example.

Chiba feels a little cliche now in some regards but the Sprawl section rules and is probably my favorite but. But the space station is also pretty neat and and I'm a big fan of the matrix/VR stuff AS LONG AS you recognize that it's basically a tech induced-hallucination/drug trip where you enter some shared alternative reality that only has a very tentative relationship with 1s and 0s, NOT some sort of VR headset thing.

(ok mild spoilers ahead) Really why! I enjoyed them both and I read Deepness in the Sky first. It was a bit of a shock about FTL for me but I kind of granted narrative license so he could explore the range of consequences there, like with FTLness being distributed over a field of sorts. But yeah the dogs were dope, their packs, the interaction of the technological bootstrapping with them. Yadda yadda. I can't say I am familiar with his philosophy either

Any essays or articles in particular you're thinking of in relation to his philosophy?

Stephenson's pre-cyberpunk first novel, Zodiac, is about an eco-warrior uncovering a chemical company pollution scheme. In Diamond Age, he talks about an air pollution crisis caused by dead nanobot swarms. From what I remember, most of his anti-corporate messaging was strongly tied to pollution but I don't even see that popping up in his later novels and I never really thought of anti-corporatism as a recuring Stephenson theme.

Give Stephenson a try. "Snow Crash" in particular.

Downvoting is for mere disagreement as well, and has always been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674260

That's why I don't read Fantasy in the first place, but Scifi often has technological concepts and ideas that are interesting by itself. I don't give a damn about mountains, whether people have green or pink skin or the stupid songs they enjoy to sing though.

This is really great, thanks! Looks like it's also possible to group them by book, e.g. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/AuthorSpecAlphaList.asp?BkNum=...

The prose immediately made me think of a clockwork orange when I read it way back. Two of my favorites and that is a big reason. Not easy to pull off.

If you read Snow Crash before the age of 25 it's revelatory.

If you read it after 25 it's laughably on-the-nose.

In highschool it was the greatest book I ever read.

Some books require the reader to be in a particular place in their lives.

I mean idk when you read it, but like the author said I've seen this language be absorbed so I can't take it in as fresh innovative stuff. I was born after the novel came out so obviously was decades old when I read it.

Japanese artists in the nineties stanned so hard for Blade Runner. The influence on their media aesthetics is pretty pervasive.

Agreed. I find the books enjoyable because of the language and world-building, and Gibson can write good action set pieces and decently fleshed-out characters.

However, in retrospect, I can't rate most of them very highly because they don't work well as stories. I struggle to remember anything from the Blue Ant books except the mildly irritating forays into location-based art, which seemed dated even then. (Gibson frequently injects art into his books. I think his use of Joseph Cornell boxes in Count Zero was fun, and it serves a real plot point, as the boxes are a trap meant to ensnare a particular art buyer. But the use of objects or people as bait or pawns is a ridiculously overused gimmick in his books, to the point where I wonder if it's lack of creativity or actually something pathological...)

Come to think of it, Gibson's career shares some similarities with that of J. G. Ballard. Started out with sci-fi, amazing prose stylist, gradually moved more mainstream, but struggled to escape a certain plot mold (many variations on the idea of wealthy people seeking outlets for their base instincts). I think that like Gibson, Ballard is always super readable, but his best stuff is his earlier works.

Recently read and enjoyed Red Team Blues! It was very cool yes, readable and a good yarn too, straddled the line between "making points" and keeping the story going well I thought. Is there any you particularly liked or recommend?

The Dispossessed was great! I wanted to read something by Ursula K. Le Guin for ages, and then happened to be staying in a friend's house where that book happened to be on a bookshelf. So I'd the happy experience of just giving it a go, knowing nothing. And it was very good.

Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though - thank you for sharing!

I've read one or two of Moore's things. Only very recently saw Transmetropolitan described somewhere as the best depiction of neoliberalism anywhere. Will definitely try something from Ellis soon then, thanks!

Pattern Recognition is the most accessible book of his that I have read, and it has such a great story. Neuromancer is incredible, but it's often hard to understand his prose.

I figured this type of basement dweller response would happen

This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the language, which he imitated in his works.

> The prose is the art

I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over writing style.

I didn't say it doesn't have meaning. I'm saying that I prefer simple language around complex topics, rather than the other way around. As one example, the discussion of "quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the language isn't difficult or opaque, but that's a concept that has stuck with me since I first read it in the '80s.