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Posts Tagged ‘william gibson’

Distinct Style

It’s beautiful here in Boston, and after spending all morning writing (something I think is going to be awesome & I can’t wait to share with y’all) and all afternoon editing (another awesome thing I can’t wait to share) I’m about to take a walk and enjoy the remains of the day.  And I don’t mean the Kazuo Ishigo novel.  Or the film for that matter.

On Sunday, with a glass of lightly cut Aberlour and some very nice chocolate, I burned through the end of the Fionavar Tapestry, which was AMAZING and over the top in all the right ways, like the rest of the trilogy.  This series has sold me on Guy Gavriel Kay.  Then, yesterday, jonesing for fiction, I grabbed a copy of Pattern Recognition—I’m a little behind on Gibson.  The contrast is intense, like when you sprint into surf and trip due to how it’s different moving your feet through water vs. air, only in reverse.  I’m constantly impressed by the range of writing styles, even between people working with exactly the same toolset.  Lines, and words, and grammar, remain mostly constant if you don’t want to get all experimental and oulipo about it (not that there’s anything wrong with that)—yet you won’t find two people who use them in exactly the same way.

Not sure if there’s a point to that outside of vive le difference (la difference?).  Writing’s awesome, and so is the weather, and I’m headed out from enjoying one to enjoying the other.

 

William Gibson at the Paris Review

William Gibson’s interview with the Paris Review is just about as thoughtful and complex a piece of work about writing novels – especially science fiction novels – as I’ve read.  I love his thoughts on tradecraft, and the following spot of self-awareness made me laugh out loud in the middle of my office:

GIBSON

Of course, for the characters themselves, cyberspace is nothing special—they use it for everything. But you don’t hear them say, Well, I’ve got to go into cyberspace to speak to my mother, or I’ve got to go to cyberspace to get the blueberry-pie recipe. That’s what it really is today—there are vicious thieves and artificial intelligence sharks and everything else out there, swimming in it, but we’re still talking to our mothers and exchanging blueberry-pie recipes and looking at porn and tweeting all the stuff we’re doing. Today I could write a version of Neuromancer where you’d see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldn’t be science fiction. With the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, and, of course, I didn’t know what it would be like.

INTERVIEWER

What was needed that you were missing?

GIBSON

I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have ­really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let’s go rob a Chinese corporation—cool!