'Aliens have taken the place of angels' - NP: Gibson

[David Gentle]

> For some reason, the official site's down right now,
> but that's the appropriate link above.  But, yeah,
> Snow Crash at least did indeed suck ...
>
> --- Joel Katz <mittelwerk at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> that's bull.  alan moore doesn't pander, and he's
>> writing fucking comicbooks. 'pattern recognition'
>> was almost poignant at times, it wanted so hard to
>> be a 'real' novel.  and as for stephenson, c'mon,
>> he's basically a fantasy novelist in dsguise, he
>> wants to be writing about trolls and shit.
But...I liked Snow Crash a lot. It's a breezy pop satire.
"Jack the sound barrier, bring the noise".
Also stephenson's view of the internet was a great deal more plausable than
most other peoples, though he makes two big mistakes of scale 
(underestimated
the power of graphics chips and overestimated the development of network
speed).
As to Gibson, I don't think I'm the first person to reallise that the
opening line of Neuromancer suffered a radical change of meaning as
technology caught up with it.
"The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead
channel" used to be a great esthetic frame for the novel but now that a
detuned tv goes blue it's meaning ceased to match. In the future (perhaps
even now) it'l be one of those things that will have to be explained.
I think that he's never been that interested in mindfuck endings and the big
issues that we may well face in the near future (particularly the whole mind
machine interface business). He's always been more interested in product
names and disposable crap (Braun biosenser etc.) than the newest tech. He's
also the reason I (and possibly others) picked up on P. Not sure why I point 
that out.
Anyway.

Da5id Gentle

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