William Gibson, greatest of the sci fi writers?

[D_Davis]

I find the mention of Bradbury much more sensible than evoking Dick. One thing in common: they transcended SF to become free-standing mainstream literature.

So does Dick (who also wrote and published "mainstream" fiction), and so do most science fiction authors worth reading. I have a hard time calling many of my favorite authors, "science fiction" authors, but it's really no big deal. At least I know exactly where to go in the book store to look for their stuff.

I really don't understand why you such a hard time with the comparisons between Dick and Gibson. It doesn't make any sense to me. It almost feels like you see this as disparaging to Gibson. Like somehow being compared to Dick is a bad thing. I mean, I can understand if Gibson was constantly being compared to someone like Robert Jordon or something.

Dick was, and this really is a fact, part of the genesis of the CP movement. He was not a "CP" author because this term had not even been coined yet for most of his career and he focused on more things. However, many of the themes of identity, and the situations he created evolved into and influenced those popular in the CP genre.

Dick's "cyber-world" was found in the heads of his characters, an internal place, while most of the "true" CP authors focused on an external "cyber-world." There are vast similarities, and many CP authors credit Dick's visions of the future as being a paramount influence to their own.

Is it any wonder that the Philip K. Dick award is often given to works found in the cyber-punk genre? Do authors complain when they receive such an award?

Dick helped to create the milieu that Gibson and other subsequent authors work in. Saying so doesn't lessen Gibson's own mark, it only points out a logical evolution and genealogy of genre conventions.

Dick, Gibson...they're both good. There doesn't have to be an either-or thing going on here. Yes Gibson has his own voice, and yes Dick helped to establish some of the CP conventions. I think the literary world would be better off if more people read both.

 

[lin robinson]

Dick helped to create the milieu that Gibson and other subsequent authors work in.

I find that REALLY, REALLY hard to buy. It looks to me like Gibson forged his own audience out of skatepunks and such. Bladerunner fans, more than Dick fans. (So much of Dick's "cyberpunk" reputation, I would say, should actually be credited to Ridley Scott...there's not much of that in the book) He's more highly regarded outside the SF ghetto than within it. As we've seen a little bit of here.

 

[D_Davis]

I find that REALLY, REALLY hard to buy. It looks to me like Gibson forged his own audience out of skatepunks and such. Bladerunner fans, more than Dick fans. (So much of Dick's "cyberpunk" reputation, I would say, should actually be credited to Ridley Scott...there's not much of that in the book) He's more highly regarded outside the SF ghetto than within it. As we've seen a little bit of here.

Dick was not a cyberpunk author. He simply helped to create the worlds and themes that would eventually become represented more fully by the cyberpunk genre.

He helped to create the groundwork. That's all.

Many of his novels feature man-machine interfaces, questions of identity, "souls" (ghosts) being transfered through machinery, sentient computers, sprawling cities, mankind versus our own creations, and so on.

I am having the hardest time grasping why this is so hard for you to see, or to accept.

Recognizing this in no way belittles Gibson.

I am not saying this to disparage him, or to find fault with your favorite author. It's just a simple observation, and one that most readers and critics acknowledge.

Why does the Philip K. Dick award often go to a work of cyberpunk? Is this just a really strange coincidence? Is the award flawed? Should cyberpunk authors reject the PKD award?

For God's sakes man, Gibson won a PKD award for Neuromancer. So did Bruce Bethke, the man who coined the term "cyberpunk."

 

[Gav]

Yeah, Jeff Noon is a great author...

I'm Sparticus!

I mean yes I agree.

Does anyone know why he appears to have stopped writing?

 

[Tillane]

Does anyone know why he appears to have stopped writing?

Working on other projects, I believe. After finishing Falling Out Of Cars, he supposedly started work on a play and was also involved in writing/editing a script for a film called Divine Shadows - the latter of which seems to have gone the way of the dodo and is no longer listed on IMDB. Beyond that, not sure.

 

[lin robinson]

I am having the hardest time grasping why this is so hard for you to see, or to accept.

Recognizing this in no way belittles Gibson.

I am not saying this to disparage him,

Gee between our mutual inability to grasp, we're pathetic, huh?

I am not taking your remarks as disparaging, and am not downrating Dick. I just don't see much connection. All the "cyberpunk elements" you mention were around long before Dick. I remember being gassed by a story in a pulp mag in six grade where a pilot jacked into his space ship and essentially became the conscious controlling it as long as the jack was in his head. This would have been about 1962. Ghosts in Machines....well, everybody thinks SF guys are ilLITerate, but my guess is a lot of them read Koestler. (Which came out in 1967, by the way. The phrase is from a philosophy text from the forties) There was cyber around long before being a punk was cool.

Again, the punk image of Bladerunner...the red mohawks and clothes and grime...were in the MOVIE, not the book.

As far as awards, I never assume that winners of Edgar or Verne awards have a lot of resemblance to Poe or ol' Jules.

As a lit prof once told me to throw cold water on some fevered thesis I was spouting: "Questions of influence are very hard to nail down." I would question the "influence" of Bradbury on Gibson as well...except in the sense that I think he made an impression on all of us. There is very little in common between the lush prose of "Martian Chronicles' and Gibson' sleek, lapidary style.

I'm hot to check out this Noon guy.

 

[D_Davis]

We'll just have to agree to see things differently.

 

[Gav]

I'm hot to check out this Noon guy.

Start with Vurt.

I wouldn't say Noon was Cyberpunk per se...

 

[lin robinson]

By the way, when people I know who like Dick (as it were) discuss him, the term "cyberpunk" doesn't come up. What DO come up are words like "tweaker" "meth-monster" "amped" "paranoid" and "perceptual".

I'd say a major importance of his work is that unlike the externalization of the perception=paranoia=identity issues in "cyber" investigations like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, he deals with them directly in the human mind.

One way of saying that might be something like "drugs and cybernetics might produce similar effects, but they do so heading in opposite directions".

 

[D_Davis]

By the way, when people I know who like Dick (as it were) discuss him, the term "cyberpunk" doesn't come up. What DO come up are words like "tweaker" "meth-monster" "amped" "paranoid" and "perceptual".

I'd say a major importance of his work is that unlike the externalization of the perception=paranoia=identity issues in "cyber" investigations like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, he deals with them directly in the human mind.

One way of saying that might be something like "drugs and cybernetics might produce similar effects, but they do so heading in opposite directions".

Wow - we agree on something!

I said something similar a few posts up:

Dick's "cyber-world" was found in the heads of his characters, an internal place, while most of the "true" CP authors focused on an external "cyber-world." There are vast similarities, and many CP authors credit Dick's visions of the future as being a paramount influence to their own.

 

[Connavar]

Hehe i have read atleast 5-6 really cyberpunks books and i have never seen actual Punks in them


I dont think they are a must in subgenre

The thing that cyberpunk like about Bladerunner is from the books. The world,flying cars,androids,video phones,Noirish tone etc


Just my two pieces. Dont act like the director created Bladerunner. 99% is from Dick's mind no matter how toned down and hollywood like the movie is.

 

[D_Davis]

The "punk" in cyberpunk has nothing to do with punk rockers. It has to do with the attitude behind the punk-rock scene.

A cyber-punk is a person who uses computers to take down the man just as a punk rocker uses music. It's all about the attitude.

I think the Shadowrun RPG had more to do with the whole mohawk punker thing in the genre than any of the previous books did. Then, the whole fashion thing was just incorporated.

 

[lin robinson]

Well, I have a hard time seeing a difference between "punk rockers" and the "punk rock scene". And a REALLY hard time seeing much more going on there than fashion.

****, punkers were the first "nation" without even having a manifesto.

 

[D_Davis]

Well, I have a hard time seeing a difference between "punk rockers" and the "punk rock scene". And a REALLY hard time seeing much more going on there than fashion.

****, punkers were the first "nation" without even having a manifesto.

The key word in my post was "attitude." There is an ethos behind the punk-rock scene, an ethos that the punker subscribes to, that goes far beyond the fashion. This is what the "punk" in "cyberpunk" stands for. It is not the fashion, but the attitude and the ethos.

 

[lin robinson]

And you see the attitude of punk rockers reflected in the work of either Gibson or Dick?

 

[gil]

Jeff Noon is currently co-operating with my pal William Shaw on 217 Babel Street .

 

[D_Davis]

And you see the attitude of punk rockers reflected in the work of either Gibson or Dick?

Of course. It's not the same ethos, but a similar one.

The "punk" in cyber punk has nothing to do with punk rock, or punk rockers. It simply evokes a similar ethos that the punk scene subscribes to.

Before the punk scene was defined by its fashion (and many argue that once it was defined by its fashion is was totally dead) it was defined by its ethos - it stood for something. It wanted to destroy the establishment, it wanted to take down authority and shake things up.

Cyberpunk is similar, both in the themes found in the stories and in the way its authors approached science fiction. Cyberpunk authors were doing things differently, they were writing with new and exciting syntax, prose and jargon. They broke away from the older ways and the established conventions. They had an "attitude" towards the establishment, and so too did the characters in their books.

These authors and their stories and characters share an ethos with the punk rock music scene. It uses the word "punk" to conjure images of standing up to the man, not of some fashion or a particular style of music.

Look at it like this. Another name for the pre-new wave is the Jazz era of science fiction. This has nothing to do with jazz music, but it has everything to do with what jazz music represented at the time. The same can be said for cyberpunk.

 

[lin robinson]

Punks don't stand up to anybody. There was never any of that going on, just screaming **** YOU at the world. This political analysis of punk is an afterthought, and as inaccurate as people who think the Sixties was all about politics when actually most of it was about getting high. By the time people started marching and registering, it was over. Believe me.

Like I said, punk was a visual medium, no manifesto. It's hard for me to think of ANYONE in the books we are talking about that has that attitude. The books themselves generally speak not to screeching at the machine, but realization that the machine goes on forever and most of these people are just trying to get out of its way or make a safe nest inside it.

There is none of this political outrage that you think charactrizes punks in the dogged lives many of Dick and Gibson characters lead. Much of that is almost closer to the beats, actually.

For that matter, who says the word "punk" in this context is Punk as in the rock/mode movement? There are older definitions of the word.

By the way, your idea that people thought of themselves as "punks" before the rock scene made the term subscribable is an odd one.

 

[D_Davis]

It's like you and I are from different planets.

I need to quit posting in this thread, it's wiggin' me out!

 

[lin robinson]

What's way weirder than "cyberpunk" is "steampunk". Now THERE'S a cognitive clash. My guess would be it came from "The Difference Engine": steam technology and Vicky ambiance, writer associated with the mirrorshades thing, ergo.