Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with williamgibson

More William Gibson please

Cool Papa Bell — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:38:54 -0800

Book like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Near-future, near-science fiction, non-fantasy, non-artsy-fartsy, delving into technological culture. Stipulations: I hate Pynchon and DeLillo. I've already read everything by Neal Stephenson.

By Bruce Sterling, I've read only Heavy Weather and liked it, but didn't rave about it. Is his other work comparable?

Who will be the next JG Ballard

MrMerlot — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:54:19 -0800

JG Ballard was often said to offer a prophetic vision of the future. But now he's dead. Who will take over from him? HG Wells. George Orwell. JG Ballard. William Gibson. Each wrote prophetic works of speculative fiction. With the exception of Gibson the rest are dead. Who among contemporary authors can offer the equivelant visions of the future?

Is Cory Doctorow Worth a damn?

humannaire — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:45:46 -0800

Who to read besides Coupland, Stephenson, Gibson, and Sterling? I need an informational intake of this sort of highly-regarded (speculative? cyber?) fiction on a regular basis, or else I become irritable.

One other thing, I prefer contemporary writers who have produced notable work post-'01.

I'm afraid you can't name him after me, Dave.

cosmicbandito — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:46:27 -0800

Help me name my new PC. My home network is full of machines named after William Gibson characters. I just built myself a new desktop and I want to name it in accordance with the existing theme.

I currently have the following machines:
Neuromancer (laptop)
Wintermute (my current desktop)
Sensenet (the router)
MollyMillions (daughter's desktop)

Tell me which character from the Sprawl trilogy I should name this new machine after and why.

Case is a shiny black mid-tower with a chrome bubble on the front. It looks just like this

Thanks Hivemind! You're the greatest!

How much money will I get for publishing a novel

delmoi — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 16:06:29 -0800

Suppose I were able to write a publishable novel. How much money would I get, as a first-time author as soon as it was picked up? How much would I make over all? Assume This an action sci-fi/cyberpunk type book (think William Gibson). I'm just wondering how much money I could expect to make assuming that the book did get picked up. I realize that different genres have different prices. If you know the values for more then one genre I'd be interested in hearing those too.

Like William Gibson

andrew cooke — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 10:26:29 -0800

i'm reading gibson's pattern recognition. i'd like something the same, but better. more inside. comparing pattern recognition with cryptonomicon, i find gibson's comments on culture and technology more perceptive, and his writing rather less clunky. but i'd like to go further still. gibson finds it necessary to explain "steganography" (stephenson felt the same about "256" - in snow crash, iirc - so again gibson is at least an improvement), which bugs me. he also seems to be heading towards a thriller/action plot line - i'm more interested in how people live in the modern world, not how they beat the bad guys.

so i'm looking for something that's well written (good characters, a properly planned plot - no indestructible superhero central characters that suddenly become mortal after 300 pages, hint hint - and convincing dialogue, for example), along with an interest in modern culture and technology, but from an author that doesn't feel the need for fight sequences or those conversations in which one character carefully explains to another what the preceding long word meant.

thanks....