Brain With 200 Legs/ William Gibson Interview This map was researched and created by 96 high school seniors in 24 hours (well, 48, really, but a bunch of people didn't find out right away). Mr. Gibson, can we complete the circle by asking you a few questions in a Skype call? We won't take much time and we'll be extremely interesting/ed. If you're even a little curious, please email our teacher, David Preston, at dpreston.learning@gmail.com
Haphazard- happening or done in a way that has not been planned Trawling- to search for something through a large amount of information or many possibilities Predecessors- somebody who held a position or job before somebody else Arpanet- a wide area computer network of the late 1960s linking U.S. government, academic, business, and military sites Elegiacally- expressing sorrow or regret Congeal- to become thick and solid, or cause a liquid to thicken and solidify Nuked- to attack somebody or something with nuclear weapons secular - not controlled by a religious body or concerned with religious or spiritual matters separatist- to explore an area in order to gather information, especially about the strength and positioning of enemy forces portmanteau- an old type of large leather suitcase, especially one that opened out into two compartments neologisms- a recently coined word or phrase, or a recently extended meaning of an existing word or phrase edutainment- television programs, computer software, or other media content intended both to entertain and educate users psychedelic- relating to, caused by, or describing drugs that generate hallucinations, atypical psychic states, or states that resemble psychiatric disorders quotidian- of the most ordinary everyday kind extrapolate- to use known facts as the starting point from which to draw inferences or conclusions about something unknown slag- fused glassy material that is produced when a metal is separated from its ore during smelting dystopian- an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it possibly can be hedonic- concerned with pleasure
Authors Mentioned
J.G Ballard
Phillip K Dick, Alfred Bester
Novels of Gibson
Neuromancer (1984)
Count Zero (1986), Sequels, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
Nueromancer is responsible for launching cyberpunk.It is about a man traveling tthrough cyperspace trying to unravel secrets for those who pay him unitl he comes across the wrong group of people.
Bridge Series
Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), New node
Vocabulary:
"A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged."
manifesto: A public declaration of policy and aims, esp. one issued before an election by a political party or candidate.
How do you begin a novel?
“I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed”
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” Opening sentence of Neuromancer
"I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it."
E.M. Forster: "writer who is in control of the characters hasn't even begun the work yet"
Edits his novels as he goes along. He starts by one sentence at a time, he lets his mind flow. Every day he will re-read what he wrote the previous day, making the last things he writes the least edited.
the dissident influence?
Midcentury mainstream sci-fi
New node
What’s wrong with cyberpunk?
“Gibson said it in a short story somewhere. Cyberpunk is the stuff that has EDGE written all over it. You know, not edge, it’s written EDGE. All capital letters. Now ask me how I’d define EDGE. Well, EDGE is not about definitions. To the contrary, things so well known that they provide an exact definition can’t be EDGE. They probably once were but now they ain’t. SO DON’T TRY TO DEFINE IT!!!” –Thomas Eicher
Introduction
Setting
Vancouver, British Columbia
Gibson the man
Born in Wytheville, Virginia, Small town where everyone was really into "who your kin were", but WG wasn't, Feeling of being "controlled" by the small-town atmosphere sparked his interest in books/movies/"foreign material"
Cyberspace
Cyberpunk
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/definition.html
Fast-paced science fiction involving futuristic computer-based societies, “noir prophet” of the cyberpunk subgenre
A science Fiction featuring extensive human interaction with super computers and a punk ambiance
WG on notes: "I take the position that if I can forget it, it couldn’t have been very good."
Are your notes useful? Do they have value when you go back to them?
We might be Victorians.
we live in state of technoshock
emerging technologies are changing our lives
broadcast TV changed his generation: "We know that broadcast television did something—did everything—to us, and that now we aren’t the same,"
"The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it "
allusion: Bleak House by Charles Dickens
steampunk: industry = exciting + confusing
Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Do you revise?
yes/go thru manuscript every day from the beginning
Synonyms for rerevisions....Synonyms: alteration, difference, modification, redoing, refashioning, remaking, remodeling, revamping, review, revise, change, reworking, variation
I do, though that might consist of only a few small changes. I’ve done that since my earliest attempts at short stories. It would be really frustrating for me not to be able to do that. I would feel as though I were flying blind.
How did you come up with the title?
I believed that this could be induced at a number of levels in a text—at the microlevel with neologisms and portmanteaus, or using a familiar word in completely unfamiliar ways. There are a number of well-known techniques for doing this— all of the classic surrealist techniques, for instance, especially the game called exquisite corpse, where you pass a folded piece of paper around the room and write a line of poetry or a single word and fold it again and then the next person blindly adds to it.
Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis) or rotating corpse, is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed, This is what we are doing, trying to add on to what is already here to come to an understanding of what this means.
You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction. - William S. Gibson
Predictions for the internet that have already begun to happen. We cannot predict as fast as it develops. http://sixrevisions.com/web-technology/6-predictions-for-the-future-of-the-internet/
Do you think fiction should be predictive?
No, I don’t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we’ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.No, I don’t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we’ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.
Futurism vs. Science Fiction interview with Karl Schroeder. http://io9.com/5382767/karl-schroeder-talks-about-futurism-vs-science-fiction
