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 Now online (1)dariusgriffin ...and 572 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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great book. perfect portrayal of tokyo, the possible future of the internet, and the entertainment industry. chris cunningham needs to get cracking on the neuromancer film. now. |
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excellent book, yes. very clear, very believable. |
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all tomorrows parties is also very good, although the ending left me wanting feeling a bit cheated. too much build up maybe, probably should have been a bit more ambiguous. |
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I bought "idoru" when it came out - it had a nice cover then, been pretty crap since then. |
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nice cover, although that womans kind of odd looking. which, i suppose, might be the point. |
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I loved the structure of the book, the two storylines jumping each chapter, each chapter having it's own tiny cliffhanger. I did buy "pattern recognition", haven't come round to reading. that one has an excellent cover: |
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are these the british covers? because in the US we get really shit ones. yeah, i like the chia storyline a bit more than the other one but when they finally flow together its excellent. pattern recognition is good, but its not quite up to his normal standard. i'd say idory, atp, and neuromancer are his best. |
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yes, those are Penguin covers. a review of "pattern recognition" sums up Gibson's work pretty well: "In the end, William Gibson's novels are all about sadness - a very distinctive and particular sadness: the melancholy of technology." |
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if you like Gibson, you might also like Jeff Noon's books. more out there than Gibson, but very worthwhile. |
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yeah, that quote is very true, especially of idoru and atp. i've never heard of that author, have to check him out. |
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if you've read burning chrome, that quote is true of basically everything in there, especially "new rose hotel", "fragments of a hologram rose" and the title story. i like his stylistic choices in his shorter stories also, bit more like burroughs. |
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I have read "burning chrome". I think he's better at longer story-curves. although there is that story in there about that kind of alien stargate, with people going through and returning completely insane, isn't there? I can't remember exactly, it's been at least 5 years since I read it. I thought that was a good story. |
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i think i know what you're talking about, although i haven't read the book in ages. he is better with longer story curves, as you said, but i like how stylized his short ones are. i'd like to forget the jonny neumonic movie though. |
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another nice cyberpunk-y novel is "schismatrix", by Bruce Sterling, with whom Gibson wrote "the difference engine". more sci-fi though, very far in the future, but very fascinating. the human race has devided in two kind of factions - the Shapers, who use genetics and the Mechanists, who use all kinds of prosthetics and cybernetics, all to live longer and longer. a very strange society. the story takes place over hundreds of years, if I remember correctly, seeing as the main character gets very old. |
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that film is total crap. even more sad because Gibson was heavily involved with the production, drawing how for example the lobby of the hotel was supposed to look and faxing it. |
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all tomorrow's parties is my favourite gibson, followed by pattern recognition. the first half of pr was strong, but then it lost some steam in the second half, which lowered the overall quality. |
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yeah, i've read most of sterlings stuff. i like zeitgeist and schismatrix the most. his short stories are good as well. |
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interestingly, gibson wrote the screenplay for an early version of alien 3. i'd have liked to have seen that. |
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this Guardian review of Noon's last book "falling out of cars" sounds excellent.. "Falling Out of Cars by Jeff Noon 352pp, Doubleday, £12.99 "I started to break language down, to let it dissolve. And then to see what stories I could find in the debris... " So said Jeff Noon in an Australian arts mag called Retort, during an interview that supposedly took place in a non-existent town on the border between Turkey and Mindset, entirely fitting for a writer whose works are mostly extended poems to the unreal. If Needle in the Groove was a novel written to be sung, then Falling Out of Cars is fragments of a diary as ambient music. Noon has taken the idea of signal-to-noise (the ratio of useful information to background static), turned it around and made a viral disease of it, creating a world in which information is still contained in road signs, books, television shows and on radio, but the static in the human brain has become so strong that few people can now process the signal which offers that information. In this world, mirrors suck out your soul and words disappear from the page as soon as you've read them; events repeat endlessly and shops feature simple signs like "Food" for those whose minds are still virus-free enough to read. Only government-supplied drugs can keep you sane, and every sight, every coincidence has such significance that, paradoxically, all the meaning has been bled from life. The diary of Marlene Moore, which is what Noon gives us in Falling Out of Cars, is a mirror set up to look at a mirror; her tricks and prevarications reflect Noon's own as the lies of autobiography meet those of the novelist. Somehow, amid the suffocating clutter of an abandoned marriage and disintegrating sanity, Marlene still finds room in her wreck of a car for three passengers: a man with a gun who goes by the name of Peacock; his brittle some-time lover Henderson; and a teenage runaway, who hitches the disintegrating wastes of England with a sign reading "wherever". |
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distraction by bruce sterling is great sci fi, and i pretty much hate sci fi except for the occasional gibson. |
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..Damaged objects, damaged people and an irredeemably damaged society provide the backdrop as Marlene hunts down slivers of a broken mirror, maybe Alice's own (Alice and her looking glass are important motifs in Noon). And Marlene hunts because hunting gives her life what little meaning it still contains. One of Noon's strengths in this book is the way he presents the impossible as ordinary, yet he does it so bleakly that the brightness of Latin American magic realism becomes infused with a smalltown English greyness. No sufferer from the virus may look in a mirror, so looking glasses are painted over or turned to the wall, as though the whole country had gone into high-Victorian mourning for a lost way of life - our way. Noon's other signature is a refusal to compromise with his readers. In fact, it's probably fair to say that he is currently engaged in a war, if not with all his readers then certainly with his old SF fans, those who originally helped to make his name and found in Vurt and Pollen a perfect updating of the work of William Gibson. At the Cheltenham literary festival recently, Noon put his frustration on record, referring to SF's "zombie life as pure escapism", and announcing: "Science fiction no longer has a role. It's a dying genre." This position was only slightly softened by his rider that "in an ideal world, there would be no genres, or an infinite number, one for every book produced". And there you have the core of Noon's approach. Things do not only change, they mutate; become other. Falling Out of Cars is part of Noon's continuing revolt out of genre and into creative resistance against all traditional forms of fiction, as if he believes that the ultimate incomprehensibility of life must be matched by an equal incomprehensibility of narrative. This is a road novel, stripped of plot and meaning. What you get is what you read. Anything else might risk making life comprehensible; and one gets the feeling that, for Noon, this would be to collude with his readers."< |
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you can still find that screenplay on the net, here and there. |
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excellent indeed...i'll have to check this guy out. |
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this should be it. |
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i'm a fan of sci fi much the same way i'm a fan of electronic music. i take the gems with the loads of shit that surround them. |
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ah, great. i heard this had something to do with the soviet union. |
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I haven't read this yet. Good to hear about it though. I really like William Gibson's visionary sense. Cyberpunk is so hit-or-miss... I'm hoping for an MMORPG that takes place in a Gibsonian sort of future world and not too distantly off -- maybe 2050 A.D. or so. Even Deus Ex timeframe would be great, but I think Eidos is botching that franchise :( I find it even more amazing Gibson created his early visions without a computer at hand. He really must have such an imagination. On the other hand, if you don't know the boundaries of technology, then perhaps you are free to roam and explore freely. |
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he apparently wrote all of neuromancer while on LSD as well, so that might have contributed. |
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maybe thats shy i didn't understand half of it when i first read it, might have to read it again sometime. Are all is other books written in the same style? Are they easier to follow? Neoromancer was one of the first books I read so maybe i'd 'get' it next time i read it. |
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read the book this topic is based around, Idoru. its a bit more clear and concise and, paradoxically, the ideas in it actually seem a lot more complex and abstract than the ones in neuromancer. the sequel, all tomorrows parties, is more stylized, but slightly better in my opinion. |
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i'd like to take up reading since my brain is turning into mush. perhaps i'll read this. how strong on the sci-fi side is it? |
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i'd say its really true "speculative" fiction. it takes place in tokyo at some point in the future, but the elements are all quite realistic and believable. most of the sci fi comes from gibsons ideas about the future of the internet. but its very thought provoking. |
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sound good enough to me. i'm not too big on sci-fi. if i get any ambition i'll pick it up. |
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You should all see the film 'New Rose Hotel' based on one of the short stories with the same name in Burning chrome. I love the atmosphere of it, very Gibson...and Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe play the main characters, wich makes it even better |
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Gibson is way too formulaic though I've read everything he's written 5 times or so- the images stick with me but not the ideas. I prefer Greg Bear- Especially Darwin's Radio. |
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