Go read this New Yorker profile of William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk
1Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21003074/new-yorker-magazine-profile-william-gibson-cyberpunk-burning-chrome-short-story
Reported today in The Verge.
Go read this New Yorker profile of William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk
Nearly four decades ago, William Gibson published a short story called Burning Chrome in Omni magazine, and with it, he birthed cyberpunk. (It also coined the term "cyberspace" in its third sentence.) The story prefigured Neuromancer, Gibson's first novel and most enduring achievement. Burning Chrome taught its readers how to think about the "colorless nonspace" between our screens. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman - the ideas editor of the magazine's website - spends a lot of time with the author for a profile, and he elegantly lays out the roots of his fiction in a long, textured piece.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Rothman finds that, for Gibson, writing plausible futures begins with a deep engagement with the present. His trilogies - he tends to write novels in threes - are all responding to the world he finds himself living in.
"With each set of three books, I've commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day," he explained. "I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is." He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. "It isn't an intellectual process, and it's not prescient -it's about what I can bring myself to believe."
Some other fascinating details: Gibson loves techwear, the functional, futuristic, quasi-military clothing you see everywhere from Tokyo to San Francisco. He and his wife, Deborah, have a large cat named Biggles. He has some real expertise in watches.
What's most striking about Rothman's profile, though, is the way it delineates Gibson's ongoing attachment to (and relationship with) the zeitgeist. I found it particularly instructive whe