Pynchon-Gibson Connection

[corey l lynn]

If I'm correct you can get a copy of that interview on the Mississippi Review Home 
page. To tell the truth I don't have the address but that's what makes those Yahoo 
guys so rich.
On Mon, 18 Mar 96 23:04:01 EST J.D._P._Lafrance at ridley.on.ca (J.D. P. Lafrance) 
writes:
>>    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
>> 
>>