Comments for No more science fiction for William Gibson at http://sffmedia.com , comment 1 to 2 out of 2 comments http://sffmedia.com Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:20:08 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://sffmedia.com/books/science-fiction-books/204-no-more-science-fiction-for-william-gibson.html#comment-215 If you were looking for another Neuromancer, I am not surprised that Spook Country failed to live up to your expectations. I really liked the old William Gibson, but I like the new William Gibson more. Actually, I think I like Pattern Recognition and Spook Country more than I like any other recent literature of any kind. In defense of Gibson, please consider this: part of what made those early books amazing is that he was not pulling them out of some kind of distant fantasized world, centuries or light years separated from our current reality, but taking a careful look at the present and projecting it forward into an amazing and strange but still plausible near future. In my opinion, his early novels haven't really aged that well. The stories are still very good, but the universes in which they take place were really just insightful and creative projections into the near-future of the time they were written. Now, some of the predictions have turned out to be accurate and are therefore now mundane, and some no longer seem plausible because we have sort of passed them by. A few, of course, are still mind-bending, but these novels will probably not be all that interesting in 20 years except because of the impact they had on the genre. Now, in our world of summer 2008, the rate of technological progress and general change has increased to the extent that Gibson no longer feels like he knows enough about the present to make a plausible and also creative and entertaining prediction about the 20-years-hence future. I don't fault him in the slightest. The last two novels are still projections, they are just projections about what could happen now, or next month, or next year. It is only a little bit about the technology; mostly it is about weird social changes and the societal hiccups they might cause, with damn good human stories laid on top. If you want to claim that it isn't science fiction because it doesn't have hero stories with space pirates and ray guns or even maverick hackers jacking into the matrix, that's fine with me, but what Gibson is writing is still [i]speculative[/i] fiction, and it is very good. - Alan Heckman Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:35:45 +0100 http://sffmedia.com/books/science-fiction-books/204-no-more-science-fiction-for-william-gibson.html#comment-213 How will the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision granting habeus corpus to enemy combatants affect the political climate of the sagging hyperpower, the U.S., in the coming years? Especially when you pair it with the rise of the "culture war", a war whose weapons are xenophobia and conformity, and an economic downturn? Oh, you don't know? That sounds like politico-economic science fiction. (1984) As an increasing number of countries around the world pass laws that limit the distribution of technology and information, how will those countries respond as the technology available simply passes them by and invents and revolutionizes our daily lives so effortlessly that portable, powerful computing is not noteworthy any longer? Don't know that either? Sounds like a particularly consumer-oriented techy sci-fi. (Neuromancer, Snow Crash) Gibson's novels are science fiction about society and the mind, not about space and imagined technologies. - D. Hayes Sat, 14 Jun 2008 06:43:22 +0100