a few days ago, some friends asked me to write an article about my discovery of the writer William Gibson. I wrote something but I understand it was not what they wanted, they sought a more personal vision.
public
So here what I wrote. Any idea what is missing or what to spare to make it more "inside"? I already I have a couple of ideas, but I would like comments. Thanks
was only in 2004, or maybe in 2005 I came to know that there was a writer named William Gibson, twenty years after the publication of "Neuromancer." I thought those days I knew a lot of science fiction, but had only read the stories of robots and the Foundation Asimov, Clarke almost everything and was beginning to discover the rebellious individualist Heinlein, and the profound humanity of Stapledon and Sturgeon. Little more than that.
"Burning Chrome" came to me one day as is a meeting with the genre books, hidden in the farthest corner of a bookstore and a bargain price. Tower was finishing off several titles in the collection "Authors" of the Minotaur. That day I also bought the "Myths Near Future "by another author, unknown to me, JG Ballard. I confess that I could with Ballard, I have not been able to. For me reading is very important to the atmosphere and fragmented memories of a former astronaut on a deserted beach, pursued by a mad doctor in a pedal airplane, I put down that much or more time in school, I began to read "The Stranger" by Camus.
Gibson, however, caught me.
The first story in the collection was "Johnny Mnemonic." I had seen that movie. He remembered especially that scene where Keanu Reeves gestures in the air as a virtual reality helmet shows objects dimensional on the Internet in 2020 reluctantly reacting to your movements, objects that represent telephone connections, databases, security systems, computer viruses. This scene, in my opinion, rescues the film. Seven years later I had a Déjà vu while others gaped at the gestural interface Tom Cruise used in "Minority Report." The funny thing is that this scene never happens in "Johnny Mnemonic" Gibson, is actually a short tribute to "Burning Chrome", the story that gives its title to the collection.
"Burning Chrome" I plunged into a phosphorescent and infinite grid lying in a dark universe, populated by complex entities continually changing shapes and colors (maybe because of my generation have the imprint of cyberspace neon drawn by the Disney studios in "Tron"). But better was what I was when we drew the head of the virtual world: people of flesh and blood, dirty, ambiguous, in the limit of legality, often meet in the dark and under a steady drizzle, half a block from where he was be replicating the animal market in Chinatown in "Blade Runner." I know. I was infected, my first version of cyberpunk film gave me. Do not know what would been the images in my head if it was not.
Back "Johnny Mnemonic", this is a text for his characters memorable. There is a cyborg dolphin addicted to methamphetamines last generation and a nondescript man who looked like Japanese tourists dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, which happens to be the most dangerous murderer, reflexes and senses amplified in operating rooms Chiba City , and whose weapon is an almost invisible monomolecular filament, able to slice the steel like butter. Virtually invincible, worthy adversary of Molly, the ultimate cyborg mercenary, martial arts and equipped with retractable steel blades under your nails and look inscrutable, forever hidden behind mirrored lenses surgically implanted.
I fell in love with Molly, a woman much closer to my imagination to the Trinity of Carrie-Anne Moss in "Matrix", a deadly weapon covered in black leather head to toe, that's Jane who served as bodyguards to Johnny Keanu, with her hair and painted eighties Madonna in "Desperately Seeking Susan" [Only these days I learned that Jane's character was created for the movie Johnny Mnemonic because at the time the rights belonged to Molly someone else] . But
the collection not only has stories of cyberpunk universe. Is "The Kind", a Kafka story, worthy representative of a genre that years later would be named "Slipstream", or "The Gernsback continuum," which seems an episode of "Twilight Zone" when I was in black and white a posthumous tribute to the great future-looking Art Deko imagined a generation in the first half of the twentieth century and definitely did not happen.
But my favorite story was always "remote regions." Existential anxiety, the primal terror before the vastness of space and the existence of such advanced civilizations and inscrutable that make us feel like tiny flies. It fascinates me because it has a martyr, Olga Tovyeski, Our Lady of the Singularity, patron saint of the Highway. I like that because it reminds me that humans have a tendency to create gods and supernatural explanations when faced with what is beyond our comprehension.
I was addicted to William Gibson, a few days later I returned to the bookstore and got a second dose. On this occasion it was "Count Zero." Sometimes the things we were not presented in accordance with the established order. Without stopping to read the back, I went immediately to the index. Of eleven stories in "Burning Zero, Gibson offered me now 36 stories with such evocative titles as" The Names of the Dead "and" Kasual / Gothick. "
I started with the first story, "A Simple Operation Weapon." A spectacular attacks perpetrated in New Delhi with explosives destroys a hound Turner, a mercenary who specializes in human trafficking for multinationals, in a society where the brain drain has become a literal term. Your current employer can pay to rebuild technology, tissue regeneration, organ transplants, the black market. Turner, premiering testicles and green eyes, not reported for his next mission, it disappears from the map and takes refuge in a hut on the beach, away from the world. The story ends with his girlfriend in Mexico turns out to be a psychologist hired by the corporation for a very personalized therapy.
The title of the second story, "Marly" was the name of the protagonist. She is a specialist in art has come down by a notorious fraud perpetrated in their small gallery in Paris. A strange job interview in a simulated reality environment, the Park Güell, Barcelona and the bottom of the domes finished Sagrada Familia. A mysterious millionaire's required to find the creator of exquisite art installations.
In the third story, "Bobby Wilson last one." Bobby is not the same for "Burning Chrome", this is just a teenager who lives with her mother, but also a Hacker in a world where the brain is directly connected to the network. Bobby is killing Black Ice, a security program that tried to access any account and now it is destroying the nervous system. It saves a mysterious entity that inhabits the network, a presence.
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But they were stories, stories that promised much more and ended in a point. The fourth story I realized I was wrong. In "Making Card", Turner knows his team support for a new work, which had been mentioned in "A Gun for Easy Operation", help a scientist to defect from Maas Biolabs to go to work with rival Hosaka. "Count Zero" was a collection of short stories, was a novel, a complex and intricate story in which the lives of Turner, and Bobby Marly crossed through many adventures. How stupid I am! Luckily no one noticed. I had to stop, return to the first page. A novel is not addressed in the same way we read a collection of short stories.
Above all, he had reached half of the movie, "Count Zero" is the second novel in a trilogy, the trilogy of "Sprawl," which begins with "Neuromancer." That first novel, the most famous, did not reach the library, but several months later, so I had no choice but to read my "Count Zero" first. It is a traumatic experience read the trilogy in disarray. I remembered the time that passed by the Colombian television "Citizen Kane", I was one of the poor viewers who saw him for the first time. They spent the second roll before the first, so we learned the meaning of "Rosebud" before seeing the beginning of the tape.
I devoured the trilogy of "Sprawl" and there I met again with Molly, star of both "Neuromancer" and "Mona Lisa Fast." Then I devoured the trilogy of the bridge, in a world at the dawn of the miracle of nanotechnology, and later I've been reading his novels one after another century. Those that succeed in this, written after its author declared that "the future is already here, just not evenly distributed." Rereading
Gibson for writing this I realize that I had forgotten how demanding as a writer, you have to read it with open wikipedia. His frequent specific references are not exclusive of later novels, and from their stories of the '80s abound: The description of old and dilapidated appearance of the city under the giant geodesic by a comparison to the images of imprisonment of eighteenth-century engraver Giovanni Piranesi call or a reference to the work of American artist Joseph Cornell, with facilities of objects contained in boxes served as inspiration for the creations of unknown artist to look Marly in the "Count Zero."
I think I had the good fortune to be relatively contemporary Gibson to understand their images from a common reference. Perhaps readers born in this century are not so fortunate for them " sky above the port was the color of a TV screen tuned to a dead channel "might make them think about the blue sky of a perfect day, cloudless.
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