So far there's a sort of gothic sci-fi collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, a collection of short stories, Burning Chrome, and a collection of essays and magazine articles and suchlike, Distrust That Particular Flavour. They're the peripherals to the main works, which come in three loose trilogies. They don't have to be read in any particular order, each makes sense on a stand alone basis, it's more that each group of three are set in similar worlds, and some of the characters are common to the books.
These are my copies. Apart from the last three, they've all been read more than once, and it shows.
The Sprawl Trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Set in a future city and it's suburbs, based on Tokyo, computer jockeys plug themselves in and ride their way through corporations' security 'ice' while hi-tec chemically-enhanced ninja assassins watch their backs. There's an evil empire / Tyrell Corporation in there running almost everything, and I think these are the books that included the first use of the word 'cyberspace'.
The Bridge Trilogy: Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties. A rag-tag conglomerate of people live on a bridge (precedent, the old London Bridge, probably among others) in an ad hoc assembly of shipping crates, and other large containers. I think this pre-dates metal box shopping centres, nurseries and hotels by some years. Sort of lower-tech sci-fi writing, even if one of the books includes a music biz star with a virtual girlfriend.
The Blue Ant Trilogy: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History. So near-future set, they're virtually in the present. Holograms are projected by artists, we saw some when we visited Bath a couple of years ago, rare clothes are collected by the ultra-rich, and there's much lower-key scrapes and action going on. These I've only read the once.
For someone who coined the word 'cyberspace' and who's writing depends on the ubiquity of interconnected computers, Gibson isn't a digital-life fan. His main use of the things is, apparently, eBay shopping for low-cost but interesting collectable watches. Recently he's pretty well exploded on Twitter, and he's blogged about how that saps the time he should be spending writing.
The Peripheral was, apparently, about a third complete in April 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment