Chronologically would probably make the most sense, although you could jump forward to the second (or third) trilogies and come back to the sprawl when you feel like it.

So: Count Zero if you want more sprawl.
Virtual Light if you want a nearer future (almost a slightly different right now, actually).
Pattern Recognition if you would like to go back to 2002 and see it from a Gibsonian perspective.

There's some damn fine short fiction collected in "Burning Chrome", lest we forget...

Ahem. Yes. Indeed, it might be nice to go to that next while your memories of Molly are still fresh. There's some nice background in there.

quote:

Originally posted by supersnazz: guerrilla nerd:
Discounting comics for a moment, my favorite novelist is in flux, but is generally somewhere in the Gaiman/Vonnegut/GRRM triad these days.

Vonnegut is definitely on my top list. I like Gaiman quite a bit but have never read Martin.

quote:

Originally posted by editengine:
Offhand I'd say that posting about story after finishing the first chapter to be a bit like talking about fucking when you just got her bra off.

When I get to your second chapter, baby, I'm gonna read it so hard, then I'm gonna lick my finger and turn the next page... I might stop and have a sandwich and then read it more on the train home... you like to read in public, with other people watching you... do you, baby...?

quote:

Originally posted by supersnazz:
Anyway. Just jabbering at this point. Good book. Looking forward to reading his later stuff. What should be next? Or should I just roll through them all chronologically?

For you? I'd recommend you dive into Pattern recognition.

I began Neuromancer - my first Gibson - on a tube journey today. I'm only up to page 40, so of course I, too, am posting before it makes any sense, but I just wanted to post that I was expecting it to be a new genre, and it doesn't feel like one at all so far. It feels like fairly standard (if well-written) hardboiled stuff, just in a different setting. I'm really enjoying it, but it doesn't feel like anything particularly new or different at this point.

(I used to read a lot of hard sci-fi, but haven't for quite a while.)

You did take into account that it was written 30 years ago? When it as all mostly space opera stuff.

To some extent, too, it *is* hardboiled/noir fiction transplanted. Which, at the time, was fairly revolutionary for SF. Gibson's pretty transparent about the influences ("crazed naturalism" being a stated influence), and there's a *lot* of scholarship from the 80s on about cyberpunk that trace the influence of Dashiell Hammett and others on cyberpunk SF writers.

Oh, yes, exactly - very Hammett-like. (Hammettesque? Hammetty?)

I did try and factor in how long ago it had been written, but it is hard to excise all the stuff you've read that has been written since.

I had the advantage of not having read a whole lot of what it has influenced. Most of my sci-fi reading over the years has been of the Herbert/Card/Niven vein. Well, that and Star Wars books :-p. And there was that junior high Crichton phase, but I got over it.

Granted one can't separate completely from the time-frame because a lot of the things he talked about became, well... real. But it helps to have not gotten into the Cyperpunk genre at all.

Oh, I hadn't got into cyberpunk at all (or at least nothing which proclaimed itself as such) - but I had read Hammett and Chandler and Mosley as well as quite a lot of regular and irregular sci-fi.

Yeah, I've not read any of the Hammett etc. world of fiction.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
There's some damn fine short fiction collected in "Burning Chrome", lest we forget...

hey, someone who's got it right-o
gotta be good if they made a movie out of a short story
so badly done, tho
stupid flick execs.. don't get the subject matter at all except on the most superficial level, not the deep, philosophical level of a true thinker

i'd love to do dogfight as a short flick

Enjoyable as it was, the thing I enjoyed most about Neuromancer was the imagery and style of the prose. I read about this revolutionary book for so long, and then when I finally read it... it wasn't anything too special. I quite liked Count Zero better, actually, and every bit of Gibson has altered my perception very slightly. But certainly the best - and by best, I mean, most fully grown and mature - stuff is the new stuff. The order I read them in was the Sprawl trilogy, then Idoru and All tomorrow's parties. Then the new stuff, and just the other day I picked up Burning Chrome (but so far I've only read Johnny Pneumonic.Arturo Perez-Reverte has been distracting me with his Captain Alatriste character). On his site I beleive Gibson has a suggested reading order. [ i just spent a few minutes looking and couldn't find it, though ]

The suggested reading order (which is just the chronological order of publication, if I'm not mistaken), is in the FAQ.

quote:

I began Neuromancer - my first Gibson - on a tube journey today. I'm only up to page 40, so of course I, too, am posting before it makes any sense, but I just wanted to post that I was expecting it to be a new genre, and it doesn't feel like one at all so far. It feels like fairly standard (if well-written) hardboiled stuff, just in a different setting. I'm really enjoying it, but it doesn't feel like anything particularly new or different at this point.

It must be read with history in mind. When it was written it was a real breakthrough in SciFi literature and it gave insights that were used in lots of posterior works of several artists (literature, theater, movies, etc).

In fact, it's like watching "Terminator 3" nowadays. The comparison may not be good for Terminator 3 is not an excellent movie, but it was a breakthrough in computer graphics animation. The same thing with Matrix Reloaded. Their effects and techniques were so much used that original impact is lost.

Anyways, Neuromancer is special. It survived time. We even don't care that many things that we have for granted (like mobiles and PDAs) just don't appear. The text still makes sense and is thrilling and we never have those "oh shit..." moments facing cheese paragraphs about "plastic androids", or "laser guns" or things that are so common in works of other acclaimed SciFi writers (Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Clark, Bradbury, et at).

You meant Terminator 2: Judgemnt Day right?

Or was there somehting special about Terminator 3 that I missed?

Yeah... Terminator 2: Judgment Day...

At that time it was an excellent business case for SGI...

Neuromancer changed everything. Pace was surely part of that. Masterful for a first novel. Masterful period. I'll concede that eating too much (or too little) of Zone's dex might interfere, but I find still find that pacing compelling enough to endanger oversleeping the next morning after twice annual rereads since publication. I'm somewhat of a fan.

I find Neuromancer's prose and pace as satisfying now as then. COunt Zero's prose ws steroidal. Very good, but I could feel him working hard to keep uo with his sudden reputation. Fine with me. Mona Lisa Overdrive introduced a new sophistication to his prose and charsacterization.

Virtual Light was satisfactory. By then, Gib was a brand name. Idoru I;m especially fond of, but I;m quite sure part of its allure was its location in the smack-dab middle of the Internet going mainstream but still being the Land of the Future as Now.

All TOmorrow's Parties was already saying goodbye to sci-fi and 'looking ahead to the present'. I especially liked the young watch savant and, for flash laugh thrills, the young Mr. Boomzilla.

PR and SC are fine. I still read Gib mostly for his prose, which is to me as prose can get without being pretentious. I liked the observations, yes, and the characters, particularly the secondaries in PR and Tito in SC.

First thing I read by Gib was Burning Chrome. Two or three read like other sophisticated sci-fi of then, and now, but the rest were decidedly in a world of their own.

I feel like I've finally 'processed' hat Gibson Means To Me', and am currently mostly looking back at older masters, particularly Joyce Cary of The Horse's Mouth trilogy, Ken Kesey, and John le Carre.

Current 'hot' literary authors that I;ve encountered put me off. Feels a lot like the ferment of 60s/70s literature, when the sense of 'new, bold, brash', and all that stuff tended to make the work suffer.