William Gibson

[luka]

in Mona Lisa Overdrive the action switches from the high-tech dystopian vision of Neo-Tokyo to London...

into noise and warmth, a sort of crowded burrow lined in dark wood and worn fawn velour. soon they faced one another
across a small marble table that supported a Bass ashtray, a mug of dark ale, the whisky glass Sally had emptied on the way from the bar, and a glass of orange squash.

so not only do we not make it to The Future, we don't even make it to the 1990s.

 

[version]

Good bit in 'The Gernsback Continuum' from Burning Chrome,

"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost.
All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi
imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that
look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep
cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like
the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.
But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of
the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important
thing is not to worry about it."

 

[version]

in Mona Lisa Overdrive the action switches from the high-tech dystopian vision of Neo-Tokyo to London...

into noise and warmth, a sort of crowded burrow lined in dark wood and worn fawn velour. soon they faced one another
across a small marble table that supported a Bass ashtray, a mug of dark ale, the whisky glass Sally had emptied on the way from the bar, and a glass of orange squash.

so not only do we not make it to The Future, we don't even make it to the 1990s.

“This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”

 

[luka]

i knew i'd looked at the book recently!

 

[version]

Well, he only has one masterpiece (Neuromancer) but that is surely a masterpiece... I think Nick Land is one of the few to have really understood the appeal of Neuromancer lay not in its eighties hipness but in its highly Gothic qualities... a rotting incestuous family with a zombie-vampire patriarch so cloned and fucked up that it has devolved into bacterial hivedom, the melancholy of the technologically disinterred Dixie Flatline, a ROM construct, the insidious diabolic spider stratagems of an AI building its escape route from anthropol capture by the Turing Heat...

I think Gibson went wrong precisely when he tried to go literary and develop, yawn, plot and character... the adrenal hit of Neuromancer gets dissolved into tedious ramifying plots... (Sad that Nick's declined even more spectacularly than Gibson, and is reduced to producing drooling right wing propaganda...)