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14009963 No.14009963 [Reply] [Original]

Should I just stop reading science fiction if I didn't enjoy this?

>> No.14010243

yes

>> No.14010274

>>14009963
Is that the first science fiction book you've read? What didn't you enjoy about it?

>> No.14010282

>>14009963
No, read PKD and Eastern European Sci-Fi. The finest you’ll read

>> No.14010294

>>14009963
"You cut my thumb, mon, wi’ secon’ one," Maelcum said. "Coriolis force," the ninja said, bowing again.
"Most difficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended."

Gibson is a fucking liberal now but he said some cool things back in the day

>> No.14010295

>>14009963
no, it's shit

>> No.14010302

>Eastern European Sci-Fi
gib

>> No.14010304

>>14009963
no, read Ballard

>> No.14010334

read something fun like PKD or space opera like pandoras star

>> No.14010342

>>14009963
It's incredibly overrated. I would say it's about average for a published SF book.

>> No.14010369

>>14009963
Read "A Scanner Darkly" by PKD. Beautiful. I don't recommend reading his other work.

>> No.14010714

Just read Gene Wolfe desu, the only scifi writer worth reading.

>> No.14011603

>>14010302
The Strugatsky bros are where its at

>> No.14011735

>>14009963
Should I just stop reading because I did not like one book?

>> No.14011743

Russian science fiction is some of the finest, highly recommend Metro 2033 and Roadside Picnic.

>> No.14011868

>>14010714
This, but unironically. Nobody else comes even close.

>> No.14011968

>>14011603
aw man. i was expecting some kind of obscure slovakian or hungarian

>> No.14012039

>>14010714
Absolutely this.

>> No.14012133

>>14010342
It's considered average because Gibson set the paradigm that most scifi is written about. Try reading PKD or Isaac Asimov if you want something different.

>> No.14012153

>>14011968
Sorry, don't know any authors from there. There's always Solaris and We, but those are the only two major ones I can think of right now.

>> No.14012227

>>14009963
No. Try the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.

>> No.14012385

>>14009963
No, Gibson is way overrated

>> No.14012408

>>14009963
There are other science fiction novels written by other science fiction authors.

>> No.14012437

Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular re lationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.
`How you doing, Dixie?'
`I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.'
`How's it feel?'
`It doesn't.'
`Bother you?'
`What bothers me is, nothin' does.'
`How's that?'
`Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin' all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the _other_ goddam thumb.' When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. `Do me a favor, boy.'
`What's that, Dix?'
`This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.'

>> No.14012474

>>14012437
Is this an actually excerpt from the book or a parody of it? The annoying dialogue is the main reason I dropped it half way through.

>> No.14012500

From Chaper 8

>> No.14012502

Case didn't understand the Zionites.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. `Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga.' He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
`It's the ganja,' Molly said, when Case told her the story. `They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to _him._ It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?'
Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn't like that.
`Hey, Aerol,' Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run in the freefall corridor. `Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing.' He held out the trodes.
Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green al gae. He blinked mildly and grinned.
`Try it,' Case said.
He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. `What did you see, man?'
`Babylon,' Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor.

>> No.14012511

Space adaptation syndrome was worse than Molly's de scription, but it passed quickly enough and he was able to sleep. The steward woke him as they were preparing to dock at _JAL_'s terminal cluster.
`We transfer to Freeside now?' he asked, eyeing a shred of Yeheyuan tobacco that had drifted gracefully up out of his shirt pocket to dance ten centimeters from his nose. There was no smoking on shuttle flights.
`No, we got the boss's usual little kink in the plans, you know? We're getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.' She touched the release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of the foam. `Funny choice of venue, you ask me.'
`How's that?'
`Dreads. Rastas. Colony's about thirty years old now.'
`What's that mean?'
`You'll see. It's an okay place by me. Anyway, they'll let you smoke your cigarettes there.'

>> No.14012513

Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started build ing. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull re minded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the ir regular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders.
Molly and a skinny Zionite called Aerol helped Case ne gotiate a freefall corridor into the core of a smaller torus. He'd lost track of Armitage and Riviera in the wake of a second wave of SAS vertigo. `Here,' Molly said, shoving his legs into a narrow hatchway overhead. `Grab the rungs. Make like you're climbing backward, right? You're going toward the hull, that's like you're climbing down into gravity. Got it?'
Case's stomach churned.
`You be fine, mon,' Aerol said, his grin bracketed with gold incisors.

>> No.14012516

Somehow, the end of the tunnel had become its bottom. Case embraced the weak gravity like a drowning man finding a pocket of air.
`Up,' Molly said, `you gonna kiss it next?' Case lay flat on the deck, on his stomach, arms spread. Something struck him on the shoulder. He rolled over and saw a fat bundle of elastic cable. `Gotta play house,' she said. `You help me string this up.' He looked around the wide, featureless space and noticed steel rings welded on every surface, seemingly at ran dom.
When they'd strung the cables, according to some complex scheme of Molly's, they hung them with battered sheets of yellow plastic. As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. Case heaved at one of the yellow sheets; the thing was light but still awkward. Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.

>> No.14012520

`Good,' Armitage said, gliding loose-kneed through the hatch and nodding at the maze of sheets. Riviera followed, less certain in the partial gravity.
`Where were you when it needed doing?' Case asked Ri viera.
The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek. `In the head,' Riviera said, and smiled.
Case laughed.
`Good,' Riviera said, `you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I'm no good with my hands.' He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
`Just the harmless clown, right, Riviera?' Molly stepped between them.
`Yo,' Aerol said, from the hatch, `you wan' come wi' me, cowboy mon.'
`It's your deck,' Armitage said, `and the other gear. Help him get it in from the cargo bay.'
`You ver' pale, mon,' Aerol said, as they were guiding the foam-bundled Hosaka terminal along the central corridor. `Maybe you wan' eat somethin'.'
Case's mouth flooded with saliva; he shook his head.

>> No.14012523

Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in it. He would brief them on Freeside and the Villa Straylight. It was unclear what Riviera was sup posed to be doing, but Case didn't feel like asking. A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He'd found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. `Hey, Ri viera.' The ring continued to revolve. He'd gone back and told Armitage. `He's stoned,' Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her fletcher. `Leave him be.'
Armitage seemed to think that zero-g would affect Case's ability to operate in the matrix. `Don't sweat it,' Case argued, `I jack in and I'm not here. It's all the same.'
`Your adrenaline levels are higher,' Armitage said. `You've still got SAS. You won't have time for it to wear off. You're going to learn to work with it.'
`So I do the run from here?'
`No. Practice, Case. Now. Up in the corridor...'

>> No.14012604

>>14010302
that Donbass warlord who writes techno militaristic pro russian scifi. Although it is probably illegal to buy his books in the US and A.

>> No.14012761
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14012761

>>14012604
Fyodor Berezin
>During the War in Donbass he served as the Deputy Minister of Defence of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) for a period in 2014.[3][4]
>In November 2014, he led an armed seizure of the Donetsk branch of the Writer's Union of Ukraine, declaring the establishment of a new union of writers of the DPR.[5]
Take that, Writers Union of Ukraine!

>> No.14012762

>>14010294
>male cum

>> No.14013225

60s and 70s was peak sci fi

>> No.14013232

>>14009963
No, read Lem. He's the best sci-fi author.

>> No.14013234

No. Gibson has ADHD in Neuromancer.

>> No.14013239
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14013239

>>14012761
>mfw i will never take control of my writer's union in an armed coup

>> No.14013959

>>14012604
>>14012761
wat lmao. hes not fucking around. will give it a try i hope hes not just a russian clancy

>> No.14013963

>>14009963
Read Dune

>> No.14013967

>>14012604
>illegal to buy books
Reminds me of certain totalitarian regime.

>> No.14014009

>>14009963
Its a book only a teenager would like because of cyberpunk origins. In reality its shallow and boring. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was miles better.
Today neuromancer reads like fan fiction novel.

>> No.14014030

>>14012474
It's in the book

>> No.14014737

>>14010294


“Jesus,” Case said, “what kinda creepjoint you running here? Man can’t have a drink.”
- Neuromancer


Well, K. E. is such an atomic salesman if he runs out of Octopus Kits he is subject, by sheer charge, to sell an M.D. Can Do to a barber shop and some citizen wakes up with his piles cut out.... "
'Jesus, Homer, what kinda creep joint you running here? I been gang fucked.'
- Burroughs, "Naked Lunch"

digging the Burroughs riffs.

>> No.14014747

>>14012474
how do you even read books with your eyeballs rolled so far back in their sockets in disdain? don't you ever get bored with staring at the top of your own skull?

>> No.14014748

>>14009963
Why didn't you enjoyed it? I find it quite decent

>> No.14014796

Gibson apperntly never even owned a computer when he wrote it.

>> No.14014942

>>14014737
Cyberpunk writers of the 80s are all over into the beat generation, almost into copy, but with less drugs, less suicides and better press.

From Rudy Rucker:
>At one point I got interested in pushing the cyberpunk/Beat analogy as hard I could, and I wrote an essay suggesting these correspondences: William Gibson ~ Jack Kerouac, Bruce Sterling ~ Allen Ginsberg, Rudy Rucker ~ William Burroughs, John Shirley ~ Gregory Corso. Gibson writes like an angel and has best-seller status. Sterling is deeply interested in politics and in changing the world. Rucker, the oldest, has a scientific streak and an antic sense of humor. Shirley speaks and writes without the interference of socially-prescribed mental filters. All of us have an implacable and unrelenting desire to shatter the limits of consensus reality.

>> No.14014969

>>14014796
shh... dont disturb the slumber of the filtered plebs.

>> No.14015132

>>14012604
>>14012761
Didn't Pelevin also fight in Donbas and brag about killing ukrop?

>> No.14015600

>>14009963
That is the gayest cover I have ever seen
I would never even consider reading such a pretentious looking book

>> No.14015914

>>14009963
Fuck no. This book was shit and boring as fuck, don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

>> No.14017027

>>14011735
Go for it.

>> No.14017171

>>14009963
Pretty sure I'm in the minority, but I preferred Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Johnny Mnemonic>CZ>MLO>NM>New Rose Hotel

>> No.14017219

>>14015600
The cover is one of the things that attracted me to it. What's wrong with it, in your opinion?

>> No.14017445

>>14010714
Not this, don’t listen

>> No.14017472

>>14009963
>Should I just stop reading science fiction if I didn't enjoy this?

Not science fiction in general, no. But you should stop reading William Gibson, yes. Somebody once said William Gibson had one good book in him and he wrote it 7 times - I agree with that assessment.

>> No.14017744

>>14010714
he's the best sci fi author because he actually writes fantasy instead