TRP - Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture

[Mark Kohut]

William Gibson, who lived on the streets of Toronto when I went to
university there; who improvised
a hand-to-mouth living on those streets by learning he had an eye and feel
for cloth, for clothing and
could buy the best for the cheapest and take it uptown ---so to speak--and
resell for a bit more because
they could sell for more. Clothing arbitrage on foot.

One of his most recent novels is more about cloth and clothing than the
cyber world I overstate for effect.

(Warren Buffett learned of cheaper just-in coffee beans
down at the South Street pier from uptown 110th street where he was going
to Columbia business school and
he would ride the subway down and back a lot to make some money...)

On Thu, May 8, 2025 at 11:23 PM j e l <ssnomes at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003091189-34/thomas-pynchon-1937%E2%80%93-rob-latham
>
> ABSTRACT
>
> This chapter introduces US author Thomas Pynchon, who was prominently
> mentioned in the Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) by
> Bruce Sterling, outlining the literary and cultural influences that had
> helped form the cyberpunk ethos, from J.G. Ballard to Alvin and Heidi
> Toffler, the hacker underground to hip-hop music. Sterling reserved a
> “special admiration for a writer whose integration of technology and
> literature remains unsurpassed: Thomas Pynchon” (x). In a 1986 interview
> with Larry McCaffery, William Gibson referred to Pynchon as his “mythic
> hero,” whose work—especially the 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow—prompted his
> interest in “a certain mutant pop culture imagery” fused with “esoteric
> historical and scientific information.” Pynchon’s novels are units in an
> evolving mosaic, with characters and ideas recurring from book to book, and
> with an overarching focus on the tempos and trajectories of western
> technoscience as it comes to grasp and command the world. This focus helps
> to explain his popularity among the cyberpunks, and within the science
> fiction (sf) field more generally, but there is also a pronounced Gothic
> strain to his technocultural imaginings.
>
> --jel
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>