Pynchon-Gibson Connection

[J.D. P. Lafrance]

   I was recently rereading William Gibson's excellent novel, Neuromance awhile
ago and began to notice similarities between his work and Pynchon's. I did a
little digging and found out that Pynchon has had a profound influence on
Gibon's work. For example, the famous opening of Neuromancer:

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." 

This is a strong echo of a passage from The Crying of Lot 49:

"Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the dead eye of the T.V. tube..."

   I began looking through some old interviews with Gibson and found some
interesting things. He sees Pynchon as "almost the start of a certain mutant
breed of SF - the cyberpunk thing, the SF that mixes surrealism and pop culture
imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information."
   Gibson even goes so far as to cite his famous "Cyberspace" as
Pynchon-influenced. One day, Gibson noticed some kids playing video games in an
arcade and realized how, almost hypnotized they were by the whole experience.
"It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop
with photons coming off the screens into the kid's eyes, neurons moving through
their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game." Interesting stuff
indeed.

bfn,
JDL