Hi This is my first post on this board. I was wondering whether the names Case and Cayce would be in some way related to the way cache may be mispronounced or pronounced in some countries. Does the term "cache" have any relevance to the way Mr. Gibson views the world, or even the sum of the interactions between people within large networks. If Cayce and her time are the precursor to Case's character and his time (the setting for Neuromancer), then is it possible to view the structure of all the books written so far in an order that might reflect how a computer actually stores information. Or how we humans actually view the past through the eyes of the present. Thanks
Honestly, I doubt WG even knows what a cache is, in computer terms. Are you talking about the more general meaning of a (usually hidden) place for storage, as in a weapons cache?
And welcome. The natives are reasonably friendly here.
Thanks for the welcome. This is wikipedia on cache
quote:
in computer science, a cache (pronounced cash) is a collection of data duplicating original values stored elsewhere or computed earlier, where the original data is expensive (usually in terms of access time) to fetch or compute relative to reading the cache. Once the data is stored in the cache, future use can be made by accessing the cached copy rather than refetching or recomputing the original data, so that the average access time is lower. Caches have proven extremely effective in many areas of computing because access patterns in typical computer applications have locality of reference. There are several sorts of locality, but we mainly mean that the same data are often used several times, with accesses that are close together in time, or that data near to each other are accessed close together in time. A cache is a block of memory for temporary storage of data likely to be used again. The CPU and hard drive frequently use a cache, as do web browsers. A simple definition of Cache would be: A temporary storage area where frequently accessed data can be stored for rapid access. A cache is made up of a pool of entries. Each entry has a datum, which is a copy of the datum in some backing store. Each entry also has a tag, which specifies the identity of the datum in the backing store of which the entry is a copy. When the cache client (a CPU, web browser, operating system) wishes to access a datum presumably in the backing store, it first checks the cache. If an entry can be found with a tag matching that of the desired datum, the datum in the entry is used instead. This situation is known as a cache hit. So, for example, a web browser program might check its local cache on disk to see if it has a local copy of the contents of a web page at a particular URL. In this example, the URL is the tag, and the contents of the web page is the datum. The percentage of accesses that result in cache hits is known as the hit rate or hit ratio of the cache. The alternative situation, when the cache is consulted and found not to contain a datum with the desired tag, is known as a cache miss. The datum fetched from the backing store during miss handling is usually inserted into the cache, ready for the next access.
Ahem. Yes. I know what a cache is. I meant William Gibson probably doesn't know what it means, and therefore is unlikely to have consciously been trying to send any sort of message by association of character names with that word.
Luckily for English Literature students everywhere, there is still the fallback option of claiming that the author doesn't really know what he is doing.
I don't think WG is trying to promote some overall metaphor in his books (Which isn't a bad thing, I hate authors that do that, they make me feel stupid).
Forgive me if I sound rude, but isn't it a bit of a stretch to get 'cache' from 'Case' or 'Cayce'? The way I understand it, they are supposed to be pronounced 'case' and 'casey' respectively. Neither of these sound particularly like 'cache' to me. It sounds like you're trying to shoehorn the details of the books into an idea you had, rather than interpreting anything from the books themselves.
Hi by the way. I guess I would be one of the less friendly natives.
Originally posted by alegria103: hi I think Cayce = "head case" - what, with all the phobias, mantras etc - this gal definitley is and I am only on page 56 cheerio
got to pg 220 last night - Cayce is SO NYC - or any other place where all-black attire - dark thoughts - lots of coffee to keep going etc... is de rigeur - is prolly true in north west leaden dreariness of Vancouver too - but - on perfect days those beauteous mountains and ocean vistas surpass all darkness
Originally posted by colin: Only by Cayce's mother and that guy with the Z-81s.
Hmm, perhpas my nasty scan reading habits have come back to haunt me. Does it say that people habitually mispronounce Cayce's name in the book?
I don't have the quote in front of me, obviously, but there is a point in the book where she mentions that Voytek is the only person aside from her mother who pronounces her name "properly." (Or as it was meant to be pronounced.) I'll look it up later.
It actually comes up a couple of times, and is pretty explicit about the "case" pronunciation:
quote:
Page 31, Math Grenades "My name is Voytek Biroshak." "Call me Ishmael," she says, walkin on. "A girl's name?" Eager and doglike beside her. Some species of weird nerd innocence that somehow she accepts. "No. It's Cayce." "Case?" "Actually," she finds herself explaining, "it should be pronounced 'Casey,' like the last name of the man my mother named me after. But I don't." "Who is Casey?" "Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach." "Why does she, your mother?" "Because she's a Virginian eccentric. Actually she's always refused to talk about it." Which is true.
Note, Cayce pronounces it "Case."
quote:
Page 80, Trans ... when she's finished she looks up to see Voytek staring at her. Prion is gone. "Casey," he says, remembering but getting it wrong.
In fact, Voytek is consistently written as addressing Cayce as "Casey".
Couldn't find the particular passage I was thinking of, though. Perhaps it was a figment of my imagination.
I meant William Gibson probably doesn't know what it means, and therefore is unlikely to have consciously been trying to send any sort of message by association of character names with that word.
