William Gibson

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.

“The sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.” by skoczek

The Neurotyper

William Gibson talks about the now-famous typewriter on which he wrote Neuromancer, something that shouldn’t be taken as a “lotek eccentricity” as he puts it —

…in 1981 I didn’t know anyone who wrote on a computer. All the hotshit professionals had the IBM Selectric, which turned out to be the endpoint of typewriter evolution. Stephen King may have already had his Wang, which was the first I heard of anyone writing fiction on a new-fangled “word processor”. Me, I was writing on a Hermes 2000.

“The Neurotyper”

I haven’t taken the time to figure out why this is so, but reading certain writers makes me want to write. And sometimes, it’s a tossup on particular passages whether I’m going to make it all the way through without stopping in the middle to switch over to a text editor.

Case in point, a seemingly harmless tidbit from William Gibson. Knowing him, maybe there’s a subliminal message to write, write, wrriiittteee buried in the text via nanotech. ;) Here’s the first of four short paragraphs from this blog post a few days ago:

He saw the bottom of the bridge, high overhead, as the Zodiac ran under it. Brown was steering to the right now, where Milgrim saw more marinas, the city, a seaplane lifting out of the water, several large ships at varying distances, their hulls bisected with black and red paint, and beyond all this what he guessed was a port, giant orange arms craned in the distance, above a shoreline seemingly solid with the visual complexity of industry….

‘Pattern Recognition’: The Coolhunter

Critics of science fiction grouse that Gibson can’t get far while steering the same old postmodern spacecraft, and dismiss his inventiveness as mere bells and whistles. But some die-hard fans lament that he’s deserting the mother ship every time he tries something off the flight path of his first novel, Neuromancer (1984). All of which puts Gibson in the unenviable position of being able to displease many of the people much of the time.

Tolkien’s birthday

Happy eleventy-first birthday, Mr. Tolkien

Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Rings trilogy, died in 1973 at 81, but today he would have been 111, which means extremely magical things to devotees. Tolkien begins the Rings tale with a 111th birthday party for the character Bilbo Baggins, calling it an eleventy-first birthday … a very curious number and a very respectable age for a Hobbit.

Gibson’s latest novel

William Gibson’s Latest Novel

crumbz writes “It looks like the grand master of cyberpunk has a new novel coming out entitled Pattern Recognition. Apparently, reviewer copies have been making the rounds on ebay and the word on the street is that it is his best work in years. (Slashdot)

Doctors considered amputating Renberg’s hand

Toronto Maple Leafs forward Mikael Renberg’s left hand became so infected this week that doctors considered amputating it to save his life…’It could have been a lot worse, amputation to save my life, I guess,’ Renberg told the Toronto Star on Thursday. Renberg aggravated a blister on his hand while trying to tie his skates in Edmonton on Saturday. The hand became infected and landed him in a Vancouver hospital with a 104-degree fever.