Why so hostile, subby?

Nice headline, Wilson.

TFA is a pile o'post modern crap. Just read the book, dammit, don't demispostconstruct (or whatever gobblygook is currently fashionable in literary criticism) with high-falutin', pointless jargon.

English lit types always get up my nose with the farking "intellectual" antics.

Would everyone in the thread that helped found and form an influential genre of science-fiction, even if it's time is passed, please raise their hand?

Thought so.

I started it, sort of 'meh'ed my way through the first quarter of it on a flight, then put it down and picked up something else.

I did the same with The Difference Engine.

Whlie I loved Neuromancer and All Tommorows Parties, I don't quite get the Gibson cult.

And I'm not 100% sure that if people feel the need to get scholarly/academic that he's where I'd start, either.

LowbrowDeluxe: Would everyone in the thread that helped found and form an influential genre of science-fiction, even if it's time is passed, please raise their hand?

*raises hand*
/Also, I invented the internets, but Al Gore stole the idea from me.

Mugato: LowbrowDeluxe: Would everyone in the thread that helped found and form an influential genre of science-fiction, even if it's time is passed, please raise their hand?

Thought so.

Oh excuse us. I guess no one can ever express an opinion on something unless we have the same accomplishments as those we're commenting on. Well, shut down the internets, there's no need for discourse anymore.

Ass.

While I think you are right and the author of the article is an idiot, I think that people should read the book, at least, before criticizing it, which I have a feeling that Smitty didn't do, though I could be wrong. It just reeks of flamebait to me.

doglover: Would it still be "antibuzz" if Gibson's book is "antigood?"

I'm not sure, but that comment sure didn't make me "antilaugh"

Mugato: My comment was directed at Gibson's pretentious insistence on coining cyber-phrases.

I too feel that this writer should stop manipulating...words...for a living. It pisses me off.

Neuromancer the 16 bit video game on the Commodore 64 was the only good thing that ever came about as a result of William Gibson.

The accompanying book was trash, Gibson is just a less ironic version of Kilgore Trout, but with a larger thesaurus. If none of his works had ever been written, some other community college lit major would have risen to fill the void.

40below: Submitter, formerly a fan, stopped reading Gibson one-third of the way through Idoru...

/ yeah, subby
// suck it, Bill

Wow. Iduro wasn't nearly as bad as some of his earlier stuff. I guess it depends on if you had a preference of setting...

I also hate to see fans turn on someone they like. What's the point? He didn't write the first thing you liked for you, and he didn't write this to piss you off.

Meh...

okay so i read the review, which didn't exactly review the book, and i'm thinking why is this book even worth anything if the concept the reviewer talks about could conceivably be applied to every book ever written?

Uh, what?

This whole review was based on the mere existence of this book and nothing else. I am all for concept art, since it's amusing as hell, but what is this game that we are playing at here? I haven't read such a pretentious, self-important piece of crap in ages, and I'm a pretty pretentious bastard, myself.

completely overhaul the way literary criticism is conducted

Which is by blurb.

Does that make the headline ironic?

LowbrowDeluxe: Would everyone in the thread that helped found and form an influential genre of science-fiction, even if it's time is passed, please raise their hand?

Thought so.

They postmodern/deconstruction literary crowd bashed Isaac Asimov and they love Gibson's Neuromancer. I read a whole bunch of literary criticism while trying to figure out just who it was that raved over the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica (whose Cylon storylines are based on weak warmed-over cyberpunk themes).

Fortunately, there seems to be a backlash gaining ground to return to self-contained, coherent stories because postmodernism only worked when it had rules to break and since a lot of people hopped onto that trend, it lost its "cutting edge" and "subversive nature" and leads to things like crappy third seasons.

40below: You've already joined the pileons previously because I know your user ID, don't get pissed because I've gotten around to one of your sacred cows rather than someone else's.

You might have misfarkyed me. I don't believe I've ever addressed you before or had reason to. I have plenty of opinions, but I don't have sacred cows. They tend to slow you down when you try to go places with them.

Dude, everything pisses me off these days. You catch more flies around here with venom than honey, and I try to be an equal-opportunity hater in 256 characters or less.

Is there a comments earned title you're vying for as well? :)

Lt_Athena: Fortunately, there seems to be a backlash gaining ground to return to self-contained, coherent stories because postmodernism only worked when it had rules to break and since a lot of people hopped onto that trend, it lost its "cutting edge" and "subversive nature" and leads to things like crappy third seasons.

Bart: Lis, everyone in town is acting like me, so why does it suck?
Lisa: It's simple, Bart. You've defined yourself as a rebel. And in the absence of a repressive milieu, your societal niche has been co-opted.
Bart: I see.

Lt_Athena:

That was a lot of words to say, "Anti-hipster-hipsters don't feel special unless they're making fun of something popular and trendy."

Ah. So it's now "post cool" to dismiss Gibson? I'll have to make note of that, so I can be "cool", too.

/ Gibson is brilliant, and I'm tired of the "hipster scene geek" denouncement of something known to be good simply because "it's time is up". A bad aspect of modern society - putting an expiration date on something that never had one before....

Oh, great, a book that you can't just farking read, you have to have the annotated chapters from the internet.

And Gibson didn't actually do anything but write a nonsensical book, then mail it to a fan and tell him to sort it out.

Class.

//I hate postmodernism.
///Since when did "resolution" and "coherency" become so bad?
////Former English lit major. Former, because we had to read Margaret Atwood, then talk about it like it made sense. *shudder*

arollo: Oh, great, a book that you can't just farking read, you have to have the annotated chapters from the internet.

And Gibson didn't actually do anything but write a nonsensical book, then mail it to a fan and tell him to sort it out.


Uh.. did you actually read the book?

I'm sure this thread is long dead, but I just wanted to use this opportunity to cast my vote for "Gibson is an overrated idiot". Some of his stuff was decent, most pretty dull, and some downright bad. I thought about writing a paper bashing Idoru, but figured some obsessive jerk like the writer of the article would put out a hit on me.

And yet, despite his lackluster prose, there are a whole bunch of literary critics who do nothing aside from lie in the middle of their offices, writhing around on the floor while rubbing copies of Neuromancer all over themselves and trying desperately to make up new words that they can use to confuse people.

Because if nobody can understand it, obviously it's clever.

Fortunately, there are a lot of critics who think the incomprehensible Gibson fanatics are a bunch of idiots.

I read and enjoyed Spook Country. I definitely preferred his "cyber punk" stuff, but I liked Spook Country better than Pattern Recognition (which I still thought was decent).

From TFA: "any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text"

This isn't something I'd never specifically thought about before in these terms, but funnily enough I did find myself looking up 'Systema' on Wikipedia after reading Spook Country. It's not really necessary to understand exactly what Systema is to follow the book, but this novel was the first time I had heard the term and I was curious to learn more about it. Another conecept from this story than I'm guessing would mystify many readers is the way Gibson references the Loa of Voodoo culture. I just happened to have a class in school which discussed Voodoo and so his references made some sense to me, but I expect the average reader would either have to google it or just generate their own impression of what the heck he's going on about.

The strength of Gibson's writing is that he can make reference to foreign concepts without giving the reader a "dummies guide" introduction to it, and still entertain his audience. At the same time, some readers may find themselves intrigued enough to do some cursory research and wind up learning something new.

The fan site referenced in TFA is unlike anything I've seen before. I'm not sure what to make of it. It feels to me a bit like listening to the director commentary of a DVD.

paulseta: In the works of Gibson, a predominant concept is the distinction between destruction and creation. Several discourses concerning structural neocultural theory exist. Baudrillard promotes the use of semantic nationalism to challenge hierarchy. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a structural neocultural
theory that includes culture as a reality. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson analyses capitalist theory; in Mona Lisa Overdrive, although, Gibson denies capitalist materialism. Marx's analysis of dialectic narrative implies that language is elitist, but only if sexuality is equal to narrativity. An abundance of deconstructions concerning the absurdity of subcultural class may be found. In a sense, the primary theme of Reicher's critique of Sartreist absurdity
is the collapse, and eventually the stasis, of structuralist consciousness. It could be said that Sargeant states that we have to choose between capitalist materialism and capitalist theory. Lyotard uses the term 'structural neocultural theory' to denote the role of the participant as reader. Thus, if capitalist theory holds, the works of Gibson are modernistic. In a sense, the subject is contextualised into a capitalist theory that includes culture as a paradox.

This makes a sort of sense. Should I be scared?

/getting a Masters in literary criticism, actually
//why? I like it when my brain bleeds

So, all post- and trans- ness aside, I loved the book, cuz I read it.

The man can string some words together, that's all I'm gonna say. There are passages in that novel that made me proud to think that someone out there was still doing beautiful things with language.

I also think the fan site is interesting because Gibson is right about the "google aura". In essence, writers today do not write in a vacum. There is a level of interaction with the fan base that would have been impossible or very difficult not to many years ago. You can throw in obscure concepts because people can go look it up, a la the Voodun and Systema references.

But more importantly, fans can become involved in this other layer of the novel.

I mean, imagine not fan-fic but something of quality in multiple mediums, that you discover when you jump online to look up something in the book itself. Now what sort of things can happen when you have an author who is aware of this process and can facilitate and encourage it by releasing bits of the novel as it is being written or asking fans for certain things in blogs or such?

Interesting.

Psycho_Inductive: I mean, imagine not fan-fic but something of quality in multiple mediums, that you discover when you jump online to look up something in the book itself. Now what sort of things can happen when you have an author who is aware of this process and can facilitate and encourage it by releasing bits of the novel as it is being written or asking fans for certain things in blogs or such?

it's a neat gimmick but it's only going to appeal to people with a lot of time on their hands. it also smacks of a certain amount of smugness coupled with laziness, which i guess never goes out of style.

I'm thinking most of the "critics" haven't read the book...

Its CLEARLY book two of another trilogy. And Gibson's last five works have all taken some time to "sink in". The "bridge" trilogy was also sort of fragmented and strange... until you completed all three books.

Pattern Recognition didn't make a whole lot of sense when it first came out either, but the evolution of the YouTube world we were in the middle of has revealed that the book was relevant all along. I suspect the same is true of Spook Country...

/Yes, I read it the weekend after it was released.
//No, I didn't think it needed "annotation" from the web...

Not new with Gibson or the reviewer. There's already a whole series of pre-teen girly books that have an Internet "club" where you can learn more about the heroines' pets, clothes, diets and shopping habits.

/Sorry, can't remember the name
//had that part of my brain surgically removed