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This is more of a geek blog for me, on the average, but there's always the divergence that I expect and plan for. In this case, posting on here was a narrow decision over my xanga. I don't know that it matter much.
I bought "Spook Country" from the half-price bookstore not too long ago and took my sweet time in getting down to read it, partially because I'd been spending a lot of time re-watching Stand Alone Complex. I have a kind of incidental love of cyber-punk as a genre that I believe is 1) dead and 2) never really makes it into my gaming. Cyberpunk is an interesting genre because, as the name suggests, it is somewhat tied to a socio-political movement. I don't know that I want to say that it's a dead movement, but it's changed, and so has 'cyberpunk'.
Spook Country has a throwaway line in the first hundred pages to a character in Pattern Recognition, the book published right before it which informs me that the two books are in the same world. Unlike the Sprawl trilogy, these two more recent novels are published in a contemporary setting instead of the future, and the contemporary setting of now is still the future to when the Sprawl trilogy was actually published. While I doubt anyone seriously believed our present would occur in the toxic landscape of the Sprawl trilogy, it's certainly different then what actually hit the pages.
William Gibson writes about information, people, and the exchange that occurs between them. Geeks love him because he played on a lot of tropes we loved or came to love, but I believe that the deep and abiding love that he has inspired is partially because of the core themes of the nature of information. In his earlier works, the writing on the nature of information was a little more immature, because our understanding of these memes and of the way we'd begin to process information was a little immature. As he continued to work, he moved from ninja, space stations, and loa AI to archaeologists, advertisers, and journalists. If the pacing is similar, I imagine that's on purpose; the roles the characters play are similar, only their names are changed.
I'm not entirely finished with Spook Country, but the above thoughts occurred to me last night.
I bought "Spook Country" from the half-price bookstore not too long ago and took my sweet time in getting down to read it, partially because I'd been spending a lot of time re-watching Stand Alone Complex. I have a kind of incidental love of cyber-punk as a genre that I believe is 1) dead and 2) never really makes it into my gaming. Cyberpunk is an interesting genre because, as the name suggests, it is somewhat tied to a socio-political movement. I don't know that I want to say that it's a dead movement, but it's changed, and so has 'cyberpunk'.
Spook Country has a throwaway line in the first hundred pages to a character in Pattern Recognition, the book published right before it which informs me that the two books are in the same world. Unlike the Sprawl trilogy, these two more recent novels are published in a contemporary setting instead of the future, and the contemporary setting of now is still the future to when the Sprawl trilogy was actually published. While I doubt anyone seriously believed our present would occur in the toxic landscape of the Sprawl trilogy, it's certainly different then what actually hit the pages.
William Gibson writes about information, people, and the exchange that occurs between them. Geeks love him because he played on a lot of tropes we loved or came to love, but I believe that the deep and abiding love that he has inspired is partially because of the core themes of the nature of information. In his earlier works, the writing on the nature of information was a little more immature, because our understanding of these memes and of the way we'd begin to process information was a little immature. As he continued to work, he moved from ninja, space stations, and loa AI to archaeologists, advertisers, and journalists. If the pacing is similar, I imagine that's on purpose; the roles the characters play are similar, only their names are changed.
I'm not entirely finished with Spook Country, but the above thoughts occurred to me last night.
