Monday
There was coffee. Life would go on.
- William Gibson. The Winter Market.
In truth, the anthology Burning Chrome contains some very fine short stories. I tend to think that it is a shame that Gibson gave up publishing stories pretty much immediately after he published his first novel, however iconic that novel might have been.
Nah... Burning Chrome and erm... the one that features the Autonomic Pilot were good, but I'm not enthusiastic about the rest of them in there.
Stunning return to form in Pattern Recognition though after the previous three which were total and utter bilge.
Amazing really how Neuromancer, Count Zero (better than Neuromancer by my reckoning) and Mona Lisa Overdrive were just in a different world from the last three - the names of which I forget even though I own them all and have read them all multiple times.
Bilge, I say!
Posted by Lascaille at July 15, 2008 09:25 AM
Agreed Lascaille. The Bridge triology was awful*. All Tomorrow's Parties was utterly abysmal.
Like you I also think Count Zero better than Neuromancer. The Burning Chrome collection was very patchy but there's some good stuff in it. Dogfight (is that the one you're thinking of?) is excellent as is Winter Market that Michael quotes from. The latter is beautifully bleak and nihilistic.
For those looking for cyberpunk shorts I can recommend Bruce Sterling's A Good Old Fashioned Future.
*The only two really brilliant sequences are the "Franz Kafka" theme bar and Berry Rydell's job-interview at the shop selling Southern Gothic stuff. He's from Tennessee but the proprietor doen't think he is Faulkeneresque enough.
Posted by Nick M at July 15, 2008 01:48 PM
I'm probably going to get flamed for asking this, but why do so many libertarians (yes, Perry, I know that's not a completely accuracte word for this site....) seem to obsess over having an almost obscurantist love of science fiction?
Perhaps my question is a bit harsh, but I find it a much more common occurrence here than any other site I visit to have to google things I've never heard of, only to find they're references to some science fiction book I've never heard of.
Posted by Ted Schuerzinger at July 16, 2008 04:15 AM
Because Ted, the future's so bright we gotta wear shades.
Posted by Nick M at July 16, 2008 12:30 PM
What Nick M said.
Incidentally, Ted, I agree with you about all the interesting things I learn on this site. I always have Google running in another browser when I'm here.
And I'll bet there's not another site on all of Al Gore's Internet with a higher frequency of use of the word "risible"!
Posted by Laird at July 16, 2008 01:55 PM
