catalog

Well-known member
are you talking about tom mccarthy? i picke dup that tintin book but put it down shortly after cos i realised i didn't know enough about tintin or care about him. but did he write some LRB essays? Lee Rourke who i like bigs him up.
 

version

Well-known member
I bought the essay collection, Remainder, C and Satin Island and I've finished the former and about a quarter of the way through the latter. If I like them enough, I'll grab Men in Space and that Tintin book at some point. He's done the intro for that new edition of The Recognitions too.
 

luka

Well-known member
I got Count Zero in the post today. Your favourite. Fuckin' voodoo magic, man.

Might read it again.

"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the colour of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tyres. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallised hexogene and flaked TNT."
 

luka

Well-known member
slamhound.... Awful, but in a good honest way. I like the exoticism as well New Delhi, pick up a travel guide, pick a famous street, Chandni Chook, fine, use that.

You get it in the Avengers movies, a random scene, a street in Seoul plays host to a massive battle for no reason , next thing you know you're in a Lagos street market, watermelons rolling across the road, mangos flying everywhere
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I like the exoticism as well New Delhi
tbf, every city is described like that, very much including the Sprawl, and the various space locations (including the infamous Rasta space station)

everything is always a string of elliptical references

"Case at seventeen, a street boy with hooded eyes, silent combat in the rose glow of dawn on a rooftop beneath looming geodesics"

I read an interview with Gibson a long time where he said in the best science fiction casual, throwaway references imply a lot

specifically he took this throwaway line from Escape From New York "You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad" and built it out into a key part of Neuromancer
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
occasionally his descriptions do take on a Bret Easton Ellis vibe

long lists of places and objects, also playing on an 1980s paradigm albeit a 1980s image of the 2050s
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah I think he can use that name (slamhound) without endorsing it... he doesn't think it's cool (necessarily) but the people he's writing about do.
 

luka

Well-known member
I like it. Neuromancer was supposedly influenced by Ciry of Quartz I think but Planet of Slums feels very cyberpunk too. Free enterprise without the state unlegislated markets pedicab drivers etc
 

luka

Well-known member
Gibson is too daggy to get Ballards cool hard surfaces though. I think he'd like to
 

luka

Well-known member
cool hard surfaces. like a product. or a weapon. or bulletproof glass. surgical detatchment.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Neuromancer was supposedly influenced by Ciry of Quartz
City of Quartz came out 6 years later so that can't be right, but if that were not the case that would totally make sense

Ecology of Fear as well, and yeah Planet of Slums

the Sprawl Trilogy is very 4th World

"a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques"

replace "sound" with "culture" and you have Gibson's worldbuilding exact

Blade Runner the obvious big influence - the mishmash of Cityspeak, mashup of cultures, retro/future aesthetic
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
also like all 80s SF they both project Japan to a global superpower in 50 years

zaibatsu, sararimen, all organized under the umbrella of the yakuza
 
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