GIBSON in NYC on January 7th.

He is being interviewed by a Times journalist, and may be signing books afterwards.

Just bought mine and got second row center, so still plenty of good seats left. Tickets by calling 1-888-NYT-1870. Also www.nytimes.com/alweekend

New Gibson Essay Coming Soon.

The Gibson essay banner has been up since June '05. It is a pity it has to go out in this way.

quote:

Also, does anybody know how to get a copy of "Memory Palace?" The source of those beautiful lines at the very end of No Maps: "Bells of clocktowers stitch the sleeper's dreams together ..." I know he himself doesn't have a copy, but somebody must.

I have a copy but was only given it on the condition that I did not distribute it without WG's permission.

I've written to him through his UK publisher, posted threads on here, and even tracked down what was definitely once his email address through a journalist I vaguely know who once interviewed him (and no, I definitely will not tell you what it is).

So far I've had no response. I still have the play and would still like to share it, but a promise is a promise, and so I won't pass it on without WG's permission.

http://cgi5.ebay.com/ws2/eBayISAPI.dll

Have a Gibson sighting of your own this weekend!

Architect's Gibson tickets for sale on Ebay

Remember to bring your camera!

yeah for real.

FP... ask mrG if Mata can share the play.

He seems to be listening to you!

Well, whoever goes to the lecture, please think of me when you see a gaping hole in the front row. I don't think anyone that goes has to be told that immediate and thorough accounts are expected down to whether his shoelaces are double-knotted. Have fun!

Darn! I was hoping that Spiff would have bought your tickets.

If anyone has a chance to have a word with him afterwards then please mention that I'm trying to get permission to share Memory Palace!

The Man himself and his mediated personality showed up in full force on Jan 7th here in Manhattan. Attire: All black except for a pair of kelly green socks. And he was wearing the Buzz Rickson's, of course.

He seemed a little bewildered by his prolix, babbling, gramatically clumsy interviewer, but still managed his usual casual profundity.

Highlights:

"the poverty of information in my childhood had something to do with my becoming a novelist. I'm not sure I would have become one if I'd had the internet."

"In the future, every inch of the world will be densely annotated, it will take a religious effort to ignore it."

"We always struggle to build a reasonable society around the rupture caused by technologically driven change."

And, for me, the real zinger was his response to my question:

Me: "Does science fiction now seem an inadequate tool, no longer the right bag of tricks to deal with the rate of change, the ratcheting up of the truth-is-stranger than fiction factor? Is it no longer a viable way to grapple with the present?"

Gibson: "Yes, I agree with that. Science Fiction was a part of the 'modern' project. There is no longer a long enough 'now' for us to extrapolate anything out of it."

He could've punched me in the face and had less of an effect.

I've always thought that science fiction at its best is as a form of satire, a vocabulary of ideas, a way of talking about the present.
I've never been one for the gadgets or the hard core extrapolation.

And here he goes and tells me that even the vitality of science fiction as a literature of ideas, a set of metaphors and games to explain the present, isn't really there anymore. That the party has moved on. I am all for the death of "genre," but not for the death of the particular intellectual vitality that used to be ghettoized within "genre."

Devastating.

If you are reading this, Mr. Gibson, please tell me I have misunderstood you.

Otherwise, it was a lovely talk.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: MisterUnderhill,

It's very heartening to read those snippets, I've been arguing in my thesis that many of those views have existed in various guises since Gibson began writing.

I'm guessing you recorded the discussion? Would it be possible for me to have a copy of it?

Mata,

I recorded the session in pen and paper analog, and did write down a little more than I put here, but just the major topics. Any exact quotations I'd have to reconstruct from memory. There were cameras recording the whole thing, though, so somebody has a copy. The people who hosted the lecture series will have probably have it for sale.

Another quotation, on his writing process, world building:

"It's like I have this team of elves, and they're constantly working in some back room on the world for my novels, and they don't let me in the room, or, when they finally do, I see they've constructed this really big, really weird thing. Something like the Spruce Goose, but inside out, and whatever the hell it is, it's always good."

From spending the last six years of my life very heavily in the world of Gibson's novels I'd already come to the conclusion that he writes them in a very intuitive way; it would appear that, while there are conscious decisions being made, much of the imagery and thematic content develops from a subconscious interaction with the world and the media around him. His metaphor of elves sounds cuter than my analysis though!

About the 'death of science-fiction' thing, I think it's happening in the same sort of way that Francis Fukuyama predicted the death of history: the future isn't what it used to be, so instead of rocket ships we now realise that if they do come then it won't be while we're around to see it. We now know that the future is most likely going to involve pointless wars, new illnesses, pollution, rich people, poor people, stupidity, crime, violence, drugs, and occasional sex when we're lucky. In an interview with Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Gibson states that ‘I don't write the future, […] the world of Virtual Light and Idoru is not imaginary, not really the future, it is the present with all the knobs turned up to the highest setting,’ and I think that's precisely why he's saying that science fiction is dead; the process of turning the knobs up just doesn't make things stranger any more.

This doesn't mean that science fiction won't continue to exist, but it is likely to exist in the bubbles that it already survives in, such as Richard Morgan's cyberpunk novels and films like The Matrix, or The Island. These narratives are based on paradigms that exist already, leading back through the last few decades of science fiction. For some people The Matrix was an unthinkably massive head-trip, they genuinely hadn't thought of the idea that their reality might not be real, but this is an idea that has been common in science-fiction since Philip K. Dick, if not sooner. Like Fukuyama, who predicted that democracy was the final stage of cultural and political evolution and the downfall of the Soviet union represented the final big event before all global trade became defined by discussion and not arms, Gibson's opinion that science-fiction is dead reflects the genre having reached a point at which it appears impossible for anything to change. It's a classic of the creative world to claim that everything that can be done has already been done and in some respects he is right, once a genre reaches the point at which an author could easily get halfway through a narrative and write 'and then they pulled the plug out and he realised he was just a brain in a jar', the literary equivalent of juggling warheads, without moving outside of the genre then it signals that things have reached an end point.

Gibson is right, science-fiction has reached a dead end, but I'm not convinced that it is actually dead. Fukuyama has since said that he was wrong about the death of history, because be realised that a new model of democracy is emerging due to the internet, where a tech-savvy villager in deepest China can debate foreign policies with people in Washington. It turns out that history wasn't really dead, it was just waiting patiently for technology to let it move in a new direction, and we're not entirely sure where that will be yet. In the same way that Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is science-fiction, I think that Pattern Recognition is science-fiction. I don't think the genre is about the setting, I think it's about the way characters approach things. Cayce is still living in the future, it just happens to be that we are too. Yes, that's a tautology, but mathematics has learnt a lot from models such as the moebius loop and I think that science-fiction will too. Feminist writers in the 1970s probably also argued that science-fiction had reached its final point with novels such as The Handmaiden's Tale, but along came cyberpunk and changed the ground under their feet. Cyberpunk has been dead for a long time, if it ever really lived (how very Frankenstein), and the last two decades have existed as echoes of the time before it, but that doesn't mean that it will always be this way.

Or, to put it in the terms of Monty Python, it's not dead, it's just resting.

'Shame you didn't mention Memory Palace to him though. If anyone else goes to a signing, please point him in the direction of this thread or any of the others on this forum because I would really like to be able to make it public.

Is Memory Palace awesome? are there tons of computers?

For the man who wrote Idoru and Neuromancer, to say that literary "Science Fiction" isn't viable, science fiction in the tradition of Swift, Burroughs, Lem, and Ballard, that is harsh stuff to hear. I've never been one for the people who think of Gibson as a prognosticator, who are slack-jawed over his gadgets. I think his predictions were an accident of his acute satirical intuition, sort of like Swift getting it right by accident and then being called a scientific visionary, and probably hating people for it.

But then Mata quoted WmGibson:

‘I don't write the future, […] the world of Virtual Light and Idoru is not imaginary, not really the future, it is the present with all the knobs turned up to the highest setting,’

"and I [Mata] think that's precisely why he's saying that science fiction is dead; the process of turning the knobs up just doesn't make things stranger any more."

Yep, Mata, that's what I was afraid he was saying. So SF lives on in a genre bubble, with some good writers who can give us thrills, but that's it until the next revoltion comes out of some totally unexpected corner of the sky. The power of satire is somewhere else, then.

I'd love to continue this talk, but shouldn't it be moved to a new thread?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: MisterUnderhill,

quote:

Mata wrote:

For some people The Matrix was an unthinkably massive head-trip, they genuinely hadn't thought of the idea that their reality might not be real, but this is an idea that has been common in science-fiction since Philip K. Dick, if not sooner.

Or, rather earlier: try Plato's parable of the Cave (if all a person ever saw were shadows projected on a cave wall, they would believe those shadows were reality; this dramatizes our separation as subjects from the realm of "ideal objects"-- we are subjects in a cave separated from "real" reality).

Couldn't we also say that the difficulty might be that we're living science fiction? Pattern Recognitions magic is that it forces us to really see how strange our world has become; Gibson makes Apple Mac Cubes and iBooks feel as futuristic as Ono-Sendai cyberspace decks or Sandbenders artisan-made computers.

There's a thread (many of them) on this issue in both the Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer and other works section of the 'Board, of course. My previous version of this message says "come join us!" but I realized that the reason why Mata and MisterUnderhill are unfamiliar to me is because I spend a lot of time in the Random section. So, anyway.... hi! Nice to meet you!

Okay, I just cruised through the last page of this thread. First Mata, wonderful post, a lot of idea's I keep bumping into and really love, stated very eloquently(misspelling?). More importantly, is this "Memory Palace" a play Gibson wrote, or is that just me getting over excited? Man I hope it's not, even if I never get to see the damn thing.

And oddly enough, I also stumbled onto what at least was once his email address. would love to use it, but harassing a man I respect that much when he's already made his personal privacy views plain just seems very wrong.

Thanks for the kind feedback. I'm hoping to turn my thesis into a book someday, so maybe you'll enjoy reading the long versions of my views too!

In answer to the questions, Memory Palace is like an extended version of the scene in Mona Lisa Overdrive, ch. 36, p. 263 in the (slightly rubbish) Voyager edition:

quote:

In the hard wind of images, Angie watches the evolution of machine intelligence: stone circles, clocks, steam-driven looms, a clicking brass forest of pawls and escapements, vacuum caught in blown glass, electronic hearthglow through hairfine filaments, vast arrays of tubes and switches, decoding messages encrypted by other machines. . . . The fragile, short-lived tubes compact themselves, become transistors; circuits integrate, compact themselves into silicon. . . .

The play was an audio-visual performance piece. Huge screens projecting computer generated images and performers acted out the narrative in costumes on the stage. The theme is largely about the evolution of machines and this section of MLO is near-quoted at one point, which isn't surprising since this was produced around 1992, with MLO finished and The Difference Engine just done too. It was, and remained, a work in progress but did have one performance in Barcelona.

The play is slightly notorious among Gibson scholars because it is considered to be a lost work, even Gibson states in his blog that he doesn't have a copy of it.

Architect: it sort-of does have lots of computers in it, but mostly as a thematic representation of the wider ideal of technology at this point in its progression into life.

It's an interesting piece because it marks the turning point in the cycle of Gibson's two trilogies, the first where humans are becoming more digitised, and the second where the machines are becoming more human (broadly speaking). In Pattern Recognition there is little distinction between the two, Cayce dreams of imagery from emails and, while watching the Sept 11th attack, feels like it's something happening on television. The distinction between what is the dream-world of growing technology and the mechanisation of humanity has reached a balance point where the mind (which was always more important than the body) has become porous to technology. Our voices are extended to the stars through mobile phones, our thoughts zip constantly around the world by email, and country boundaries are becoming meaningless when compared to the influence that a talented individual can have with the internet and some well chosen words or code. Maybe its this lack of distinction between what is human and what is non-human (or inhuman) that has caused Gibson to say that science-fiction is dead: how much more science-fiction can you get when everyone in the Western world is now a cyborg?

So, Mr. Gibson, if you're reading this, please give me permission to put Memory Palace on the web!