William Gibson was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame this weekend. Took 'em bloody long enough. My generation is full of post-teen boys and girls whose minds were permanently warped by Neuromancer's opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel," and the subsequent razor-edged sadness that mixed Tom Waits melancholy with violence and a lashing of the 80s' fascination with all things Nippon. He'd written short fiction before that, but Neuromancer caught the moment when computers were starting to be imagined as glistening machines of possibility rather than slide rules in, at best, awkward android bodies, and he took it into the dystopian world with nothing but a faint pang. The oceans were screwed and the people wore plastic, but most of us wanted to visit that future and know those beautiful dysfunctional places.
I owe Gibson bigtime for introducing me to Joseph Cornell's work, but more for adding a gloss of slick strangeness to my adolescent mental landscape. These days the Sprawl seems like a wistful dream, in the face of warming seas and CO2 emissions, and his books' scope has narrowed too. But damn can that man write.
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2 comments:
Neuromancer was one of those books for me too. I remember feeling that atmosphere as if I'd walked into it. He described it so convincingly - like a tourist back from the future.
And there's a great story about Gibson walking out on "Blade Runner," because the synchrony of Scott's future with what he'd just submitted to his own publisher was too disconcerting.
The strangeness of fandom, she is fractal.
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