lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
i love WOT.
as evidenced by my insane readthrough right now.
Oh, I'm not hating book 12 nearly as much as I did the first time through. Some of sanderson's characters are still irritating me, but nowhere near the level that they did on my first readthrough.
I found Virtual Light for 50 cents at the library, so I am rolling on with the William Gibson thing. I have Burning Chrome waiting for me at home, so I think that I might just pick up Zero History and All Tomorrow's Parties off of Amazon and then I will own the complete oeuvre.
Virtual Light is one of my favorite Gibsons and I think is massively underrated. The sheer ordinariness of the main character really spoke to me and felt in many ways much more authentic and fleshed out than the sexy criminals of his earlier work.
Virtual Light has my favourite opening after Neuromancer.
Giant first-chapter-entire spoiler follows:
The luminous flesh of giants
The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city’s middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.
Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down L C flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night’s barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.
The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.
Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.
He opens his eyes.
Mexico City is still there.
The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.
On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather gloves. Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high old ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.
Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.
He opens another of the little bottles.
Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of Soviet industrial cinema.
His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.
He drinks the vodka.
He watches television.
After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.
And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.
He’s thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.
An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink, reminding him of the gunship’s lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?
Trembling, he watches the thing pass.
“That car…” He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing the broad brown neck of the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall reproduction pottery offered on the hotel’s shopping channel.
“El coche” says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems to notice the courier for the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected ruby of a nightclub’s laser, then gone.
The driver is staring at him.
He tells the driver to return to the hotel.
He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of departure.
Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.
The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.
He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he knows of peace.
And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured since Prague.
Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn’t think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now, sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.
He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged hillscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation of both.
She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon road. The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake’s belly up her tensed thigh.
Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.
Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.
“Yes?”
“Confirming your reservation to San Francisco” someone says, either a woman or a machine. He touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and closes his eyes on the tenuous light sifting from the dark borders of the drapes.
Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.
He sleeps.
I love the Sprawl books, but it's the Bridge books that really impressed me. I especially love Idoru, not just because of the weeaboo. Like Espedair Street by Iain M Banks, the supergroup stuff just resonates with me. And Blackwell! Little Yamazaki!
Hmmm... in order of ridiculously brilliant prose:
Neuromancer
Idoru
Virtual Light
Pattern Recognition
Count Zero
All Tomorrow's Parties
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Spook Country
Zero History
I don't think the Blue Ant stuff was able to sustain a triad, even though Pattern Recognition is excellent. I am still optimistic about his next book, glad Zero History is done.
What's your order Jake?
Yeah, that opening segment is terrific - it's Gibson in classic form. What I really love about the book, though, are Rydell's first couple of chapters - the idle reminiscences of summer in Knoxville working for the construction company turning an old Safeway store into a block of condos, his abortive police career, and then the low-rent romance of working night security in LA, and the parade of odd duck coworkers you tend to have working a job like that. Ifthe plot hadn't intervened, honestly, I could have read a whole book of just that - little Raymond Carverish character sketches of blue-collar living in the near future.
Your list is just about right, I'd say, although I'd insert Burning Chrome (the short story collection) in the third spot there after Idoru. I love almost all of the stories in that book, even the ones that aren't set in the usual Gibson milieu. The last paragraph of the title story always gets me:
But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else didn’t need it, because she hasn’t come back. And sometimes late at night I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye.
I haven't read Zero History yet, and haven't really felt the urge to after Spook Country, which is a shame.
I didn't include Burning Chrome or other works of his coz I just wanted to stick to the novels.
Which book is it where Rydell goes to the Southern Gothic art gallery for a job? It's brilliant in that you can tell he's bewildered and appalled, in a relaxed and underconfident way, before he even says anything.
And that shop-owner, I forget his name, on the bridge. The one who has the riot gun stuck in his wall and a terrifying wife or two. He helps the autistic street-boy. Fucking brilliant characterisation.
I really liked the Sprawl. Neuromancer is one of my top 3 favorite books, with strong arguments for the top spot. Idoru was ok. I liked the guy with the tomahawk. I wasn't pulled in at all though.
I've read Count Zero, which seemed very similar to Neuromancer and which I liked mostly for the name. I've read some of his short stories, like the one where Molly is introduced, but I don't remember in what if any collection I read them.
Below are my detailed thoughts on Neuromancer from a previous post. Cool passage included.
Snow Crash is a really good book. It has one of the most amazing openings I've ever seen, in any medium. The end is kind of weird, but it is a damn good book. Cool characters, cool tech, cool action pieces, really interesting setting.
You should also read the anthology Mirrorshade, and Gibson's Sprawl books.
I somehow confused Neuromancer with Snow Crash. Not enough caffeine. That's my excuse.
Terrible to confuse those two books, Neuromancer is such a classic, and is worth reading for that alone. In writing Neuromancer, Gibson basically predicted what "cool" would be 25 years later, and fucking nailed it. Hacking was cool before anybody knew what hacking even was.
Having recently discovered that I can download a wide variety of books online, I have taken to quoting passages from books. Here is a passage that culminates in my favorite line in Neuromancer. You can't really appreciate it without reading the whole book of course, but its still pretty good.
*****Case (the former hacker, rebuilt) has been hired/kidnapped in order to break into something, for some reason, having to do with an illegal AI code-named Wintermute. Such AIs are extremely illegal, but Case doesn't really know what his purpose in the plot is*****
*
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop’s entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage’s blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man’s forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn’t act like a man who’d been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn’s examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. “I bet you’re stoned right now, asshole,” he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. “See ya lady,” he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
“Yeah?”
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
“Hello. Case.”
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
“Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.”
It was a chip voice.
“Don’t you want to talk, Case?”
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
Still finishing up Urth of the New Sun, while my late fee grows. I'll probably have to read both it and the Book of the New Sun again at some point, because a lot of the time I don't feel like I understand what is going on. Especially with all the time travel/relativity stuff. After that, Invisible Cities and the Science of Influence, which are also both a little late.
While being late with library books is of course lame and kind of selfish, I like paying money to the state/city for my reading instead of to a company. Oh hi there, Mr. McCarthy!
Invisible Cities is the most intimidatingly brilliant book I've ever read. It is absolutely beautiful.
Yeah, I looked at the first couple pages the other day and was intrigued or even seduced. If I ever get around to learning Italian this will be high on my list.
I'm playing that browser game Fallen London right now, and very occasionally, at its best moments, it almost reminds me of a mixture of Miéville and Invisible Citities.
I really liked the Sprawl. Neuromancer is one of my top 3 favorite books, with strong arguments for the top spot. Idoru was ok. I liked the guy with the tomahawk. I wasn't pulled in at all though.
I've read Count Zero, which seemed very similar to Neuromancer and which I liked mostly for the name. I've read some of his short stories, like the one where Molly is introduced, but I don't remember in what if any collection I read them.
Below are my detailed thoughts on Neuromancer from a previous post. Cool passage included.
Snow Crash is a really good book. It has one of the most amazing openings I've ever seen, in any medium. The end is kind of weird, but it is a damn good book. Cool characters, cool tech, cool action pieces, really interesting setting.
You should also read the anthology Mirrorshade, and Gibson's Sprawl books.
I somehow confused Neuromancer with Snow Crash. Not enough caffeine. That's my excuse.
Terrible to confuse those two books, Neuromancer is such a classic, and is worth reading for that alone. In writing Neuromancer, Gibson basically predicted what "cool" would be 25 years later, and fucking nailed it. Hacking was cool before anybody knew what hacking even was.
Having recently discovered that I can download a wide variety of books online, I have taken to quoting passages from books. Here is a passage that culminates in my favorite line in Neuromancer. You can't really appreciate it without reading the whole book of course, but its still pretty good.
*****Case (the former hacker, rebuilt) has been hired/kidnapped in order to break into something, for some reason, having to do with an illegal AI code-named Wintermute. Such AIs are extremely illegal, but Case doesn't really know what his purpose in the plot is*****
*
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop’s entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage’s blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man’s forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn’t act like a man who’d been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn’s examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. “I bet you’re stoned right now, asshole,” he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. “See ya lady,” he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
“Yeah?”
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
“Hello. Case.”
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
“Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.”
It was a chip voice.
“Don’t you want to talk, Case?”
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.
I love the Sprawl books, don't get me wrong, but the Bridge books feel a lot more grown-up than them. The main characters in the Sprawl - Molly and so on - are cool and sci-fi and wear leather. They fit within the tropes of SF and I think they're great characters. But the Sprawl characters are much more believably shit. It's the difference between characters you think are awesome and characters you can identify with. I want to be Case or Petal. I am actually quite a bit like Rydell or Yamazaki.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I really liked the Sprawl. Neuromancer is one of my top 3 favorite books, with strong arguments for the top spot. Idoru was ok. I liked the guy with the tomahawk. I wasn't pulled in at all though.
I've read Count Zero, which seemed very similar to Neuromancer and which I liked mostly for the name. I've read some of his short stories, like the one where Molly is introduced, but I don't remember in what if any collection I read them.
Below are my detailed thoughts on Neuromancer from a previous post. Cool passage included.
Snow Crash is a really good book. It has one of the most amazing openings I've ever seen, in any medium. The end is kind of weird, but it is a damn good book. Cool characters, cool tech, cool action pieces, really interesting setting.
You should also read the anthology Mirrorshade, and Gibson's Sprawl books.
I somehow confused Neuromancer with Snow Crash. Not enough caffeine. That's my excuse.
Terrible to confuse those two books, Neuromancer is such a classic, and is worth reading for that alone. In writing Neuromancer, Gibson basically predicted what "cool" would be 25 years later, and fucking nailed it. Hacking was cool before anybody knew what hacking even was.
Having recently discovered that I can download a wide variety of books online, I have taken to quoting passages from books. Here is a passage that culminates in my favorite line in Neuromancer. You can't really appreciate it without reading the whole book of course, but its still pretty good.
*****Case (the former hacker, rebuilt) has been hired/kidnapped in order to break into something, for some reason, having to do with an illegal AI code-named Wintermute. Such AIs are extremely illegal, but Case doesn't really know what his purpose in the plot is*****
*
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop’s entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage’s blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man’s forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn’t act like a man who’d been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn’s examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. “I bet you’re stoned right now, asshole,” he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. “See ya lady,” he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
“Yeah?”
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
“Hello. Case.”
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
“Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.”
It was a chip voice.
“Don’t you want to talk, Case?”
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.
I love the Sprawl books, don't get me wrong, but the Bridge books feel a lot more grown-up than them. The main characters in the Sprawl - Molly and so on - are cool and sci-fi and wear leather. They fit within the tropes of SF and I think they're great characters. But the Sprawl characters are much more believably shit. It's the difference between characters you think are awesome and characters you can identify with. I want to be Case or Petal. I am actually quite a bit like Rydell or Yamazaki.
This about sums its up, right here. ^^^
Which isn't to say cool doesn't have its place, because it absolutely does, and Case and Molly and co. being sexy and glamorous doesn't stop Gibson giving them personalities and depth. And in a way, I don't know if I'd enjoy books like Pattern Recognition or Virtual Light as much if I hadn't read Neuromancer and Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive first, because it almost seems like the conceit of his later novels has been to take more-or-less ordinary people and put them up against the same kind of crazy action-movie odds that his Sprawl characters faced and see how these people survive.
Oh, and to answer your question, I think the bit with the gallery was in Virtual Light, right after he gets fired from the security job. That was a pretty withering little chapter and I wonder, every time I read it, if Gibson wasn't describing a few gallery openings he's actually been to.
I really liked the Sprawl. Neuromancer is one of my top 3 favorite books, with strong arguments for the top spot. Idoru was ok. I liked the guy with the tomahawk. I wasn't pulled in at all though.
I've read Count Zero, which seemed very similar to Neuromancer and which I liked mostly for the name. I've read some of his short stories, like the one where Molly is introduced, but I don't remember in what if any collection I read them.
Below are my detailed thoughts on Neuromancer from a previous post. Cool passage included.
Snow Crash is a really good book. It has one of the most amazing openings I've ever seen, in any medium. The end is kind of weird, but it is a damn good book. Cool characters, cool tech, cool action pieces, really interesting setting.
You should also read the anthology Mirrorshade, and Gibson's Sprawl books.
I somehow confused Neuromancer with Snow Crash. Not enough caffeine. That's my excuse.
Terrible to confuse those two books, Neuromancer is such a classic, and is worth reading for that alone. In writing Neuromancer, Gibson basically predicted what "cool" would be 25 years later, and fucking nailed it. Hacking was cool before anybody knew what hacking even was.
Having recently discovered that I can download a wide variety of books online, I have taken to quoting passages from books. Here is a passage that culminates in my favorite line in Neuromancer. You can't really appreciate it without reading the whole book of course, but its still pretty good.
*****Case (the former hacker, rebuilt) has been hired/kidnapped in order to break into something, for some reason, having to do with an illegal AI code-named Wintermute. Such AIs are extremely illegal, but Case doesn't really know what his purpose in the plot is*****
*
The four of them were booked on a THY flight out of Yesilkoy airport. Transfer at Paris to the JAL shuttle. Case sat in the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton and watched Riviera browse bogus Byzantine fragments in the glass-walled gift-shop. Armitage, his trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, stood in the shop’s entrance.
Riviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn.
Three smiling Japanese tourists bustled into the shop, nodding politely to Armitage. Armitage crossed the floor of the shop too quickly, too obviously, to stand beside Riviera. Riviera turned and smiled. He was very beautiful; Case assumed the features were the work of a Chiba surgeon. A subtle job, nothing like Armitage’s blandly handsome blend of pop faces. The man’s forehead was high and smooth, gray eyes calm and distant. His nose, which might have been too nicely sculpted, seemed to have been broken and clumsily reset. The suggestion of brutality offset the delicacy of his jaw and the quickness of his smile. His teeth were small, even, and very white. Case watched the white hands play over the imitation fragments of sculpture.
Riviera didn’t act like a man who’d been attacked the night before, drugged with a toxin-flechette, abducted, subjected to the Finn’s examination, and pressured by Armitage into joining their team.
Case checked his watch. Molly was due back from her drug run. He looked up at Riviera again. “I bet you’re stoned right now, asshole,” he said to the Hilton lobby. A graying Italian matron in a white leather tuxedo jacket lowered her Porsche glasses to stare at him. He smiled broadly, stood, and shouldered his bag. He needed cigarettes for the flight. He wondered if there was a smoking section on the JAL shuttle. “See ya lady,” he said to the woman, who promptly slid the sunglasses back up her nose and turned away.
There were cigarettes in the gift shop, but he didn’t relish talking with Armitage or Riviera. He left the lobby and located a vending console in a narrow alcove, at the end of a rank of pay phones.
He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
“Yeah?”
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
“Hello. Case.”
A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.
“Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.”
It was a chip voice.
“Don’t you want to talk, Case?”
He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.
I love the Sprawl books, don't get me wrong, but the Bridge books feel a lot more grown-up than them. The main characters in the Sprawl - Molly and so on - are cool and sci-fi and wear leather. They fit within the tropes of SF and I think they're great characters. But the Sprawl characters are much more believably shit. It's the difference between characters you think are awesome and characters you can identify with. I want to be Case or Petal. I am actually quite a bit like Rydell or Yamazaki.
This about sums its up, right here. ^^^
Which isn't to say cool doesn't have its place, because it absolutely does, and Case and Molly and co. being sexy and glamorous doesn't stop Gibson giving them personalities and depth. And in a way, I don't know if I'd enjoy books like Pattern Recognition or Virtual Light as much if I hadn't read Neuromancer and Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive first, because it almost seems like the conceit of his later novels has been to take more-or-less ordinary people and put them up against the same kind of crazy action-movie odds that his Sprawl characters faced and see how these people survive.
I agree that the Bridge trilogy does this well, but you see it in the latter two books of the Sprawl trilogy too. What I like best about Count Zero and Mona Lise Overdrive is how much more bizarre his protagonists get. I mean it's not like Case and Molly are normal people, but they fit into archetypes that we're comfortable with. Neuromancer is a much more expansive illustration of a world but I'm more drawn to the details of the latter two books in the trilogy because it's made that much less glamorous.
He does this even better in Pattern Recognition, which is probably my favorite Gibson book because of the way it makes things we take for granted seem hauntingly strange. You have him predicting the arrival of viral media before anyone knew what the word "viral" meant let alone tried to market it. You have a character who is hyper-allergic to branding on her clothing before sponsored links on your Facebook page became the nuisance of our age. You have the first exploration of what the internet can really do to change the world (enable normal people to coordinate their efforts on things of little to no importance) without it being blown out of proportion like hacking was in Neuromancer.
If his earlier works make the strange seem familiar, as the saying goes, the Blue Ant trilogy (and Pattern Recognition, in particular) does an excellent job of making the familiar seem utterly strange.
(Because the edit function always breaks this is now a second post instead!)
What's best about the Blue Ant trilogy is how Gibson tries to make sense of the strange paradigms that arise out of the incorporation of technology into our everyday lives, and how humans aren't really capable of grasping all the potential of it at first blush. What happens when the price of information dissemination drops essentially to zero? What if the counterbalance to the high-tech corporate nation-state envisioned in Neuromancer is a high-tech citizenry? What if Big Brother isn't a government trying to control your life, but an advertiser trying to control your wallet? These aren't high stakes action plots like in the Sprawl trilogy, but I find myself thinking a lot more deeply about the role of technology in my life after reading Pattern Recognition than I do after reading Count Zero.
I don't know of any other author who takes on the implications of the technology we take for granted in our everyday lives; the imminent future is never as cool as the real future.
My friend keeps pushing me to read Infinite Jest, but there's something about David Foster Wallace...I dunno. I've read a lot of his articles and he was clearly a genius, but he's just got that whole "pretentious" label and everything. Also, quite the undertaking. My friend is also a huge Dave Eggers/Jonathan Franzen fan, and I feel like I'll not really enjoy this book just like I haven't much liked their work. I think I'll stick to Joe Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss for now, haha.
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My friend keeps pushing me to read Infinite Jest, but there's something about David Foster Wallace...I dunno. I've read a lot of his articles and he was clearly a genius, but he's just got that whole "pretentious" label and everything. Also, quite the undertaking. My friend is also a huge Dave Eggers/Jonathan Franzen fan, and I feel like I'll not really enjoy this book just like I haven't much liked their work. I think I'll stick to Joe Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss for now, haha.
If you're after an enjoyable read stay the hell away from Infinite Jest. Its a fantastic book, but at its core its a miserable book full of ruined characters doing awful things.
Calvino is one of the greatest of all writers, and I'm sad for the people who need to read him in a non-latin-language translation.
The translations are excellent, and smugging about reading works in the correct language is not.
I figure I could take a bear.
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Mike Danger"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered Userregular
I polished off The Stress of Her Regard today - it was solid, but I feel like I'm starting to get a sense of how Powers's plots are constructed and it's a little depressing. It was surprisingly creepy, though - probably the second scariest of his books after Declare.
I also loved Wise Man's Fear. Most of the criticisms of it seem to be that Kvothe is good at everything and that 'nothing happens'. Kvothe was good at everything in Name of the Wind, too, and the book is, literally, a legendary hero boasting about his life, so I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise. And I felt like just as much stuff happened as in the first book, in terms of events/page-count density. So I dunno what people's problem with it is. It's not the best book I've ever read or anything, but it's still up there in the ranks of the best high fantasy novels I've ever read.
Speaking of all this Gibson, I just picked up Mona Lisa Overdrive at a used book store for one dollar. Hard cover!
So I guess I'll be reading in, and I can round out my Sprawl Trilogy.
Only thing I got that beats this is a mint condition original first edition of The Spy Who came in from the Cold I bought for 2 bucks.
As a side question to fantasy fans: I absolutely love fantasy books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Would the Gormengahast books be something that is enjoyable along a similar vein?
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
As a side question to fantasy fans: I absolutely love fantasy books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Would the Gormengahast books be something that is enjoyable along a similar vein?
What was it about Strange and Norrell that you liked? I'm not really sure with which vein you're seeking similarity. The Temeraire series is basically the Napoleonic Wars, only with dragons, so it's a semi-historical fiction thing. Stylistically, it reminded me of the Harold Shea stories by de Camp and Pratt (though it's been 25+ years since I last read those, so it may have reminded me of them for no good reason).
As a side question to fantasy fans: I absolutely love fantasy books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Would the Gormengahast books be something that is enjoyable along a similar vein?
What was it about Strange and Norrell that you liked? I'm not really sure with which vein you're seeking similarity. The Temeraire series is basically the Napoleonic Wars, only with dragons, so it's a semi-historical fiction thing. Stylistically, it reminded me of the Harold Shea stories by de Camp and Pratt (though it's been 25+ years since I last read those, so it may have reminded me of them for no good reason).
I liked everything about Strange and Norrell. The setting, the writing style, the way magic was presented. I liked the English fustiness of it, the Shakespearean quality, the darkly mysterious aspects, the treatment of elves as scary, wild things, the sense of melancholy.
I've heard people either alternately describe Gormenghast as melancholic and Shakespearean, etc., or as a story where a guy endlessly describes a castle and nothing happens.
I've also heard of the Temeraire books, but they sound like Horatio Hornblower meets Dragonheart (that Connery film) meets Pern which isn't really something I'd care for if that's the case.
I've also heard of the Temeraire books, but they sound like Horatio Hornblower meets Dragonheart (that Connery film) meets Pern which isn't really something I'd care for if that's the case.
. . .That sounds awesome
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
I also loved Wise Man's Fear. Most of the criticisms of it seem to be that Kvothe is good at everything and that 'nothing happens'. Kvothe was good at everything in Name of the Wind, too, and the book is, literally, a legendary hero boasting about his life, so I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise. And I felt like just as much stuff happened as in the first book, in terms of events/page-count density. So I dunno what people's problem with it is. It's not the best book I've ever read or anything, but it's still up there in the ranks of the best high fantasy novels I've ever read.
In the first book, Kvothe was good at a lot of things but had significant flaws, but in the second book I felt like the impact of the flaws were reduced and Kvothe is way to lucky in general. The other thing that bugs me is that the present day Kvothe doesn't seem like someone who would boast about his past which then leads me to believe that he's telling the truth but the story is just to ridiculous to be believable. Also while I do agree that stuff happens I wish the story would focus a little more on the mythical beings, the Chandrin if that's spelled correctly.
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
I've also heard of the Temeraire books, but they sound like Horatio Hornblower meets Dragonheart (that Connery film) meets Pern which isn't really something I'd care for if that's the case.
. . .That sounds awesome
A fairly accurate description. Except with more heart and less tackiness, I'd say.
As a side question to fantasy fans: I absolutely love fantasy books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Would the Gormengahast books be something that is enjoyable along a similar vein?
What was it about Strange and Norrell that you liked? I'm not really sure with which vein you're seeking similarity. The Temeraire series is basically the Napoleonic Wars, only with dragons, so it's a semi-historical fiction thing. Stylistically, it reminded me of the Harold Shea stories by de Camp and Pratt (though it's been 25+ years since I last read those, so it may have reminded me of them for no good reason).
I've also heard of the Temeraire books, but they sound like Horatio Hornblower meets Dragonheart (that Connery film) meets Pern which isn't really something I'd care for if that's the case.
. . .That sounds awesome
A fairly accurate description. Except with more heart and less tackiness, I'd say.
so awesome.
and seriously easy reading.
seriously.
i read the first 5 books in like 2 weeks. I could not stop reading them.
Quarter of the way through the fourth book of the Malazan series, I am really starting to realize just how true this comment is: "Once you finish the series, you can read it again and understand everything now."
Anyone know how the Temeraire audiobooks are? I was going to give the first one a shot, but if the audiobook is good I'll grab that instead
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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Mister-QuestionableNot actually a mister.The DesertRegistered Usernew member
I am about kinda-sorta half way into The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. It's just absolutely breath taking and I really, really like Chandler's writing style. Why am I reading this? Well I'm in love with the 1930s'-40s' detective era, that and I'm an aspiring detective.
Calvino is one of the greatest of all writers, and I'm sad for the people who need to read him in a non-latin-language translation.
The translations are excellent, and smugging about reading works in the correct language is not.
Well, even the best translations are translations. Some books suffer less for it, some suffer more. Sometimes, all it matters is the narrative, the accurate description of what's going on. Sometimes a decent translator can smooth over some shitty writing, like I did once or twice out of desperation. But some other books suffer a bit (or a lot). And some don't even precisely suffer, but are changed (and therefore you have two great but not quite identical works)... And then it's interesting to read both versions. Then there's stuff like Finnegan's Wake, a radical instance of that latter case. You cannot translate Finnegan's Wake at all. You're actually writing another book, in your language, based on FW. It might be even better than the original, who knows? But it's not the same book.
Also, fantasy books and games have a curious problem for translators... The whole "how to translate composite names like Dragonmaw into something that doesn't sound stupid in your language" issue.
I had a ball translating all the names in Skulduggery Pleasant and The Chronicles of the Black Company. Silly little things like the two protagonists of each book, Skulduggery Pleasant and Croaker, gave me hours of thinking and researching. I'm pretty fucking proud of my solutions, Ardiloso Cortês and Chagas.
Finally, I'm sad for myself not being able to read Russian, or Farsi, or Japanese. If I ever got a Wish spell or a genie's bottle, the first thing I'd ask was "I wanna be able to read, speak, listen and write all languages". There's no smugness involved. Also, you can always learn latin languages, they're not that hard for English native speakers, and once you learn Portuguese, Spanish or Italian, the other three are easy. Even French too. Learning languages is always a good thing.
Oh, and I translated the first two Temeraire books. They're pretty awesome, not "chessy Gary Stu dude winning all wars from 1750 to 1900", and the relationship between the dragon and the captain is precious. The books are pretty character-driven.
I'm still not convinced by Temeraire. It sounds like a solid Hornblower with Dragons, but I'm not convinced that it's for me. Mind you, if you want a decent historical adventure tale in the period, with a (deeply) unreliable narrator, you might like the Flashman series. Apparently they borrowed the style for the 'Ciaphas Cain' 40k books, as an example.
Working on Mary Gentle's Ash at the moment, which starts off as a 15th century story about a mercenary company, framed in correspondence for a historical text, before becoming...something else. Sex, violence, brutality, strong women, filth, battles, harsh language, and some...deep oddness. What's not to love?
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as evidenced by my insane readthrough right now.
Oh, I'm not hating book 12 nearly as much as I did the first time through. Some of sanderson's characters are still irritating me, but nowhere near the level that they did on my first readthrough.
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I didn't include Burning Chrome or other works of his coz I just wanted to stick to the novels.
Which book is it where Rydell goes to the Southern Gothic art gallery for a job? It's brilliant in that you can tell he's bewildered and appalled, in a relaxed and underconfident way, before he even says anything.
And that shop-owner, I forget his name, on the bridge. The one who has the riot gun stuck in his wall and a terrifying wife or two. He helps the autistic street-boy. Fucking brilliant characterisation.
I could just go on and on about The Bridge books.
I've read Count Zero, which seemed very similar to Neuromancer and which I liked mostly for the name. I've read some of his short stories, like the one where Molly is introduced, but I don't remember in what if any collection I read them.
Below are my detailed thoughts on Neuromancer from a previous post. Cool passage included.
While being late with library books is of course lame and kind of selfish, I like paying money to the state/city for my reading instead of to a company. Oh hi there, Mr. McCarthy!
Yeah, I looked at the first couple pages the other day and was intrigued or even seduced. If I ever get around to learning Italian this will be high on my list.
I'm playing that browser game Fallen London right now, and very occasionally, at its best moments, it almost reminds me of a mixture of Miéville and Invisible Citities.
I love the Sprawl books, don't get me wrong, but the Bridge books feel a lot more grown-up than them. The main characters in the Sprawl - Molly and so on - are cool and sci-fi and wear leather. They fit within the tropes of SF and I think they're great characters. But the Sprawl characters are much more believably shit. It's the difference between characters you think are awesome and characters you can identify with. I want to be Case or Petal. I am actually quite a bit like Rydell or Yamazaki.
This about sums its up, right here. ^^^
Which isn't to say cool doesn't have its place, because it absolutely does, and Case and Molly and co. being sexy and glamorous doesn't stop Gibson giving them personalities and depth. And in a way, I don't know if I'd enjoy books like Pattern Recognition or Virtual Light as much if I hadn't read Neuromancer and Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive first, because it almost seems like the conceit of his later novels has been to take more-or-less ordinary people and put them up against the same kind of crazy action-movie odds that his Sprawl characters faced and see how these people survive.
Oh, and to answer your question, I think the bit with the gallery was in Virtual Light, right after he gets fired from the security job. That was a pretty withering little chapter and I wonder, every time I read it, if Gibson wasn't describing a few gallery openings he's actually been to.
I agree that the Bridge trilogy does this well, but you see it in the latter two books of the Sprawl trilogy too. What I like best about Count Zero and Mona Lise Overdrive is how much more bizarre his protagonists get. I mean it's not like Case and Molly are normal people, but they fit into archetypes that we're comfortable with. Neuromancer is a much more expansive illustration of a world but I'm more drawn to the details of the latter two books in the trilogy because it's made that much less glamorous.
He does this even better in Pattern Recognition, which is probably my favorite Gibson book because of the way it makes things we take for granted seem hauntingly strange. You have him predicting the arrival of viral media before anyone knew what the word "viral" meant let alone tried to market it. You have a character who is hyper-allergic to branding on her clothing before sponsored links on your Facebook page became the nuisance of our age. You have the first exploration of what the internet can really do to change the world (enable normal people to coordinate their efforts on things of little to no importance) without it being blown out of proportion like hacking was in Neuromancer.
If his earlier works make the strange seem familiar, as the saying goes, the Blue Ant trilogy (and Pattern Recognition, in particular) does an excellent job of making the familiar seem utterly strange.
What's best about the Blue Ant trilogy is how Gibson tries to make sense of the strange paradigms that arise out of the incorporation of technology into our everyday lives, and how humans aren't really capable of grasping all the potential of it at first blush. What happens when the price of information dissemination drops essentially to zero? What if the counterbalance to the high-tech corporate nation-state envisioned in Neuromancer is a high-tech citizenry? What if Big Brother isn't a government trying to control your life, but an advertiser trying to control your wallet? These aren't high stakes action plots like in the Sprawl trilogy, but I find myself thinking a lot more deeply about the role of technology in my life after reading Pattern Recognition than I do after reading Count Zero.
I don't know of any other author who takes on the implications of the technology we take for granted in our everyday lives; the imminent future is never as cool as the real future.
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However, A Dance With Dragons has been enjoyable so far.
If you're after an enjoyable read stay the hell away from Infinite Jest. Its a fantastic book, but at its core its a miserable book full of ruined characters doing awful things.
Yeah, well. You'll uh....never be able to fully understand Kierkegaard. So nyah!
But in all seriousness, I really would love to learn Italian at some point.
The translations are excellent, and smugging about reading works in the correct language is not.
Really? I loved Wise Man's Fear.
So I guess I'll be reading in, and I can round out my Sprawl Trilogy.
Only thing I got that beats this is a mint condition original first edition of The Spy Who came in from the Cold I bought for 2 bucks.
As a side question to fantasy fans: I absolutely love fantasy books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Would the Gormengahast books be something that is enjoyable along a similar vein?
What was it about Strange and Norrell that you liked? I'm not really sure with which vein you're seeking similarity. The Temeraire series is basically the Napoleonic Wars, only with dragons, so it's a semi-historical fiction thing. Stylistically, it reminded me of the Harold Shea stories by de Camp and Pratt (though it's been 25+ years since I last read those, so it may have reminded me of them for no good reason).
Jonathan Strange reminded me a lot of Little Big.
And I fully recommend Gormenghast. It's diminishing returns from there, but the first novel is amazing.
I've heard people either alternately describe Gormenghast as melancholic and Shakespearean, etc., or as a story where a guy endlessly describes a castle and nothing happens.
I've also heard of the Temeraire books, but they sound like Horatio Hornblower meets Dragonheart (that Connery film) meets Pern which isn't really something I'd care for if that's the case.
. . .That sounds awesome
In the first book, Kvothe was good at a lot of things but had significant flaws, but in the second book I felt like the impact of the flaws were reduced and Kvothe is way to lucky in general. The other thing that bugs me is that the present day Kvothe doesn't seem like someone who would boast about his past which then leads me to believe that he's telling the truth but the story is just to ridiculous to be believable. Also while I do agree that stuff happens I wish the story would focus a little more on the mythical beings, the Chandrin if that's spelled correctly.
A fairly accurate description. Except with more heart and less tackiness, I'd say.
:^:
so awesome.
and seriously easy reading.
seriously.
i read the first 5 books in like 2 weeks. I could not stop reading them.
i still need to get her latest though..
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Well, even the best translations are translations. Some books suffer less for it, some suffer more. Sometimes, all it matters is the narrative, the accurate description of what's going on. Sometimes a decent translator can smooth over some shitty writing, like I did once or twice out of desperation. But some other books suffer a bit (or a lot). And some don't even precisely suffer, but are changed (and therefore you have two great but not quite identical works)... And then it's interesting to read both versions. Then there's stuff like Finnegan's Wake, a radical instance of that latter case. You cannot translate Finnegan's Wake at all. You're actually writing another book, in your language, based on FW. It might be even better than the original, who knows? But it's not the same book.
Also, fantasy books and games have a curious problem for translators... The whole "how to translate composite names like Dragonmaw into something that doesn't sound stupid in your language" issue.
I had a ball translating all the names in Skulduggery Pleasant and The Chronicles of the Black Company. Silly little things like the two protagonists of each book, Skulduggery Pleasant and Croaker, gave me hours of thinking and researching. I'm pretty fucking proud of my solutions, Ardiloso Cortês and Chagas.
Finally, I'm sad for myself not being able to read Russian, or Farsi, or Japanese. If I ever got a Wish spell or a genie's bottle, the first thing I'd ask was "I wanna be able to read, speak, listen and write all languages". There's no smugness involved. Also, you can always learn latin languages, they're not that hard for English native speakers, and once you learn Portuguese, Spanish or Italian, the other three are easy. Even French too. Learning languages is always a good thing.
Working on Mary Gentle's Ash at the moment, which starts off as a 15th century story about a mercenary company, framed in correspondence for a historical text, before becoming...something else. Sex, violence, brutality, strong women, filth, battles, harsh language, and some...deep oddness. What's not to love?
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Yeah, me too. I've always preferred my fictional dragons more The-Worm-of-Thrace-Who-Makes-Things-Worse than Let's-Go-On-An-Adventure!