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/lit/ - Literature

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7185653 No.7185653 [Reply] [Original]

How does /lit/ feel about William Gibson?
Quite the storyteller.

>> No.7185672

I have no opinion as I never read a single book written by him.

I saw a book of his at the store once, though, the Thalia store in Karlsruhe, hidden in the English section (which they moved downstairs later to expand, when Twilight got a really popular foreign language read among teenagers) and I really liked the design which almost made me buy it. But I was piss poor back then so I couldn't justify buying a book by its cover. Maybe I should do that now, though. You tell me.

>> No.7185681

I dropped Neuromancer half-way through because I couldn't handle the arbitrary word salad descriptions that made no sense most of the time.

>> No.7185686

>>7185681
Example?

>> No.7185697

He's good, yeah, but when I read comments like this one from Nick Land the other day:
>https://twitter.com/UF_blog/status/648699904240410624,
I take the impression I'm missing something. He's not particularly talented; he just had the right concept at the right time and pulled it off (narrowly) within the margins, or that's how it feels to me. Like he's canon but by accident.

>> No.7185700

>>7185686
>His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

>> No.7185707

>>7185700
If that doesn't make sense you just need to do more drugs. Or just go hang out in a big city more often.

>> No.7185709

>>7185697
What a shit tweet

I think you're right about Gibson's assessment, and I think Gibson knows this too - he even wrote something very similar in his essays ("Distrust That Particular Flavor") which I've recently read. What he writes about is more based on his youth, not "on the future", and it just happened to mesh with how reality progressed.

>> No.7185710

>>7185653
He created a cool slang, but he falls flat in the "timeless" category, his work was eaten by time. He is now basically an 80s b action movie with all the generic characters and a generic plot.

>> No.7185726

>>7185710
I feel like this isn't just an inherent flaw from Gibson, but one that exists in almost all science fiction literature. Eventually all but the most ambiguous sci-fi stories will seem outdated or silly.

>> No.7185728

>>7185726
This is true only if you haven't actually read almost any science fiction, especially speculative fiction which as a goal had exactly that- making sf timeless. And none of them are run over by time. Wolfe, Dick, Lem, Le Guin and many within the older sf such as Herbert.

>> No.7185734

>>7185700
There's only one sentence that goes where this goes in the whole book, and if you're truly stopped in your tracks by this yes to what that other anon said

>> No.7185745

>>7185734
Except the whole book is filled with similar descriptions, otherwise I wouldn't have put it down. It just does nothing for me, I can't form any kind of image in my head from Gibsons weird descriptions.

>> No.7185753

>>7185745
The only worthwhile thing in the book are descriptions and if you don't like strange images Gibson offers nothing to you.

>> No.7185765

>>7185753
I love the book but I kind of agree. I enjoy the plot too but that's cause at this point it reads like a kind of pastiche of what he was actually doing. Early Gibson prose has rarely disappointed me.
>>7185681
If you feel that way you might want to check out his Bridge Trilogy or The Peripheral. He calmed down a bit later on.

>> No.7185952

I thought Neuromancer was fun if also kind of deeply silly and stupid in a way that Gibson didn't seem quite aware of as he was writing. But part of that might be that Gibson's ideas seemed deadly serious at the time, and if I had read Neuromancer in the 80s it wouldn't have seemed so devoid of the necessary irony.

I think as both a writer of prose and a writer of ideas he's pretty good, if thin on characterization and sloppy with pacing and plot. I'm going to read Pattern Recognition sometime in the next few weeks, much more interested in that one than in the rest of the Neuromancer series.

>> No.7186951

On the contrary, I think he's a terrible storyteller who supports himself solely on style and maybe premise. But I have not read one of his books that felt satisfying. They're all kind of incomplete feeling, a little hollow, more ideas than fully developed stories. Though I've only read the first book of The Sprawl, The Bridge, and The Blue ant trilogies, never following any of them up.

I think he's okay, and I might give him another go sometime.

>>7185681
I loved his departures into total Cyberpunk abstraction. Like little prose poems. There was a really severe feel to everything in Neuromancer but the plot. The plot I found so pulpy and dumb. For all the scifi revisionism and cynicism, the plot was mostly just a dumb wish fulfillment adventure story.

>> No.7187107

>>7186951
The one plot point I did like, weirdly enough, was the dream-sequence. Whenever he stepped into a simulated environment is when everything came together.

>> No.7187178

Essays > short stories > early novels > later novels.

He's pretty neat, but not all that great. Pynchon apparently liked him enough to rip off Pattern Recognition, though.

>> No.7187201

>>7187178
Pinecone liked a lot of things that /lit/ would consider pleb as fuck.

>> No.7187215

>>7186951

>On the contrary, I think he's a terrible storyteller who supports himself solely on style and maybe premise.

Yeah. Exactly. He writes exactly how I like my noirs written - snappy dialogue, quick exposition, dark ambiance - but has no sense of stakes, drama, or characterization.

>> No.7187834

what the fuck is with gibson's twitter account

kind of makes you wish he had just disappeared after the 90s or something

>> No.7188045

>>7187215
Gibson's reveals the personality of his characters quite well.
They are memorable and varied.

>> No.7188328

>>7185653
I read Neuromancer, in french (cause i'm french) and in english, and didn't know what to think of it. Then i tried Burning chrome and i still don't really like it or understand what's with the word play.
I feel this guy was probably inspired by the worst of beat writers, and thought that musicality of tech words was all a book needed . But i'd rather read J.G.Ballard's Crash or High rise a 100 more times than his meaningless prose.

>> No.7188400

>>7185653
It takes me a long time figure out what the fuck is going on in most of his books but when I do I realize he's actually doing something and not just fucking around. But until that point I'm like this suck and I don't get it.

>> No.7188410

>>7188045
Memorable? Fuck no, they are about as memorable as random Ralph Lundgren movie characters.

>> No.7188425

>>7188045

Eh, neither Neuromancer or Count Zero had particularly memorable characters, and I suspect Mona Lisa Overdrive doesn't either. Not even the black people Gibson puts in for flavor are that distinctive. But that's ok, I'm not reading Gibson for his character writing.

>> No.7188894

>>7188328
>I feel this guy was probably inspired by the worst of beat writers
Well he was inspired by Burroughs.