William Gibson

A few months ago I got the idea to create a reading queue based on anniversary. There were quite a few great books celebrating more or less significant birthdays in 2009.

Continuing the idea, here’s a list of possibilities to choose from for 2010, with the ordinal in parentheses. The list is skewed to 20th Century lit since I didn’t go farther back in my searching except for certain authors — there will be scads of additional selections available if you feel like looking around.

• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (30th) - Douglas Adams
• I, Robot (60th) - Isaac Asimov
• The Handmaid’s Tale (25th) - Margaret Atwood
• Martian Chronicles (60th) - Ray Bradbury
• Ender’s Game (25th) - Orson Scott Card
• The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (10th) - Michael Chabon
• Farewell, My Lovely (70th) - Raymond Chandler
• The Sign of Four (120th) - Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Name of the Rose (30th) - Umberto Eco
• LA Confidential (20th) - James Ellroy
• Good Omens (20th) - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• Love in the Time of Cholera (25th) - Gabriel García Márquez
• The Difference Engine (20th) - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
• The Marble Faun (150th) - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (70th) - Ernest Hemingway
• Rhinoceros (50th) - Eugene Ionesco
• The Cider House Rules (25th) - John Irving
• Immortality (20th) - Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird (50th) - Harper Lee
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (50th) - Walter M. Miller
• Devil in a Blue Dress (20th) - Walter Mosley
• Ringworld (40th) - Larry Niven
• The Violent Bear It Away (50th) - Flannery O’Connor
• Skinny Legs and All (20th) - Tom Robbins
• Still Life with Woodpecker (30th) - Tom Robbins
• Contact (25th) - Carl Sagan
• Green Eggs and Ham (50th) - Dr. Seuss
• The Bachelors (50th) - Muriel Spark
• The Ballad of Peckham Road (50th) - Muriel Spark
• Cryptonomicon (10th) - Neal Stephenson
• Zeitgeist (10th) - Bruce Sterling
• The Artificial Kid (30th) - Bruce Sterling
• The Snake’s Pass (120th) - Bram Stoker
• A Confederacy of Dunces (30th) - John Kennedy Toole
• The Accidental Tourist (25th) - Anne Tyler
• Hocus Pocus (20th) - Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sleeper Awakes (100th) - H.G. Wells
• The Age of Innocence (90th) - Edith Wharton
• Jeeves in the Offing (50th) - P.G. Wodehouse
• Le Bête Humaine (120th) - Emile Zola
• Nana (130th) - Emile Zola

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Jack Kerouac
• Milan Kundera
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ursula K Le Guin
• James Joyce
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O’Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

“You’re breaking my heart, Ratz.” He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.

— From Neuromancer by William Gibson

A poignant experience on two fronts — via BoingBoing and Slashdot, William Gibson’s 1992 “Agrippa (a book of the dead)”, an electronic poem that came on a 3.5” Mac floppy and which, once it had been read, would encrypt itself into illegibility. Much to love about the concept (see Wikipedia for more info).

The researchers who captured the original Mac experience posted a video of it. Their website is currently slashdotted, boingboinged, and dugg into oblivion, so check out the currently vaporized post and video in a few days.

Meanwhile, you can read the poem at Gibson’s site. His introduction:

“AGRIPPA, A Book of the Dead” is a longish poem written in 1992 for a multi-unit artwork to be designed by artist Dennis Ashbaugh and “published” by art-guy Kevin Begos. Ashbaugh’s design eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself. Today, there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don’t have one myself. Meanwhile, though, the text escaped to cyberspace and a life of its own, which I found a pleasant enough outcome. But the free-range cyberspace versions are subject to bit-rot, it seems, so we’ve decided to offer it here with the correct line-breaks, etc.

“Agrippa” is the name of the particular model of Eastman Kodak photograph album my father kept his snapshots in.

On a semi-related note, check out the fun “Dr. Gunn’s Organic History Supplement for The Difference Engine”, a dictionary of terms for the Gibson and Sterling novel.

It’s always weird to see the mainstream press picking up on a subculture. Kind of like when your parents drop the latest slang: it doesn’t quite feel right. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see Steampunk get some respectful publicity.

The LA Times blog Jacket Copy had a post Saturday from Nick Owchar, the inevitably titled “Working up a head of steam”.

Steampunk is another entry point into the Victorian era by way of a wormhole: a subculture movement that is the result of an “intersection of technology and romance,” as it was reported in some East Coast newspaper this week. Philip Pullman’s alternate version of the world—with zeppelins, golden compasses and anbaric-powered gadgets—in “His Dark Materials” taps into it; so do the stories of Jules Verne and the movie “Brazil”; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s “The Difference Engine” anticipated it.[…]

According to Owchar, there’s a new Steampunk anthology from Tachyon that looks interesting.

The “some East Coast newspaper” referred to is the NY Times and its more sedately titled article “Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds”, which does more tracing of how Steampunk has been embraced by various groups for various purposes, but all in good, artistically spiffy fun:

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.