Just the facts, but far more complete than the other Johnny-come-lately "6 books and out" lists out there.
All lists are in real-world chronological order. The chronology of the "Sprawl" series is Johnny Mnemonic short story - New Rose Hotel short story - Burning Chrome short story - Neuromancer - Count Zero - Mona Lisa Overdrive. Other stories in Burning Chrome fit more or less tightly into the imagined future of the series. By the time Gibson wrote the Skinner's Room short story - virtual light - Idoru - All Tomorrow's Parties sequence set closer in time, the near future had turned out different from the "Sprawl" future.
There's a fascinating cyberpunk timeline at http://www.subsitu.com/cns/tl.htm that dovetails Gibson's work with the cyber, punk, and sf goings-on at the same time.
Also available as graphic novel, electronic book, videogame, and spoken word recording.
Also
SUBJECTS:
Rock musicians--Psychology--Fiction.
Virtual reality--Fiction.
Friendship--Fiction.
Psychological fiction. lcsh
All Tomorrow's Parties is the title of a Velvet Underground song.
The Bay Bridge from "Skinner's Room" and "virtual light", Laney from "Idoru" is living in the box city from "Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City", Chevette from "virtual light", Rydell from "virtual light" and "Idoru", the Idoru from "Idoru", even Gibson's watch collecting obsession from his wired article. Nothing wrong with leitmotif recycling, but Gibson's plot mojo was stolen by Dr. Evil when he wrote this. His descriptions of Laney surfing the interstices of data are unrewarding, it's as vague as Asimov's psychohistory and Frank Herbert's oracular melange. ONLY buy this if you have all of the Sprawl series and you loved virtual light and Idoru.
Gibson's first novel set in the present, out January 27, 2003. Sounds like the same concerns with over-mediated existence and fame as in Idoru. Bruce Sterling reviews it in Wired February 2003. Gibson said at a book reading he consciously set two challenges: set it in the present and avoid the ellipsis and jump-cuts, staying with one character throughout.
Count Zero was published as a serial before it was published as a novel, in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The January '86 issue has part one, the February issue has part two, and the March issue has part three. The January cover is devoted to the story, with art by Hisaki Yasuda.
Rolling Stone, June 15th 1989, "Technology for the Nineties" section
Photograph: head outlined by headphones, phone jack, circuits by William
Duke.
The Face 1991 ?? Future Tense section p.81-82
Spin , 1991 ?? p.60-61
Illustration (sun, chopper, homeless, VR helmet) by Karl Denham
Cyberspace: First Steps, 1991 Cambridge Massachusetts
Edited by Michael Benedikt
The MIT Press
ISBN 0-262-02327-X (hard)
ISBN 0-262-52177-6 (paperback)
cover: mysterious technological device on a grid.
Karl Reinsch notes that Academy Leader also appears in this collection, and writes
Gibson's intro talks about the similarities/differences between artboys and geeks, how he thought himself an artboy but people thought he was a geek, and how "Academy Leader" was an attempt to declare himself an artboy once and for all.
The intro to "Academy Leader", presumably written by the editors points out the allusions to William Burroughs and his cut-up techniques in the piece, along with the references to how Gibson coined the term "cyberspace".
Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
Edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan
2001 W.W.Norton & Company
ISBN: 0-393-04979-5 (hard)
ISBN: 0-393-32375-7 (paperback)
Companion website to the book: http://www.artmuseum.net/launch/w2vr.html
Stein Gjoen alerted me that Tom Maddox (another fine writer, and Gibson's partner on the two X-Files scripts) claims in a 1989 article at http://home.pacbell.net/tmaddox/virus23.html that Gibson wrote a story "The Nazi Lawn Dwarf Murders,"
Edited by: Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson
Semiotext(e) / New York
Ak Press / Edinburgh, Scotland
1989
ISBN: 0-93675643-8 (USA)
ISBN: 1-873176-81-3
Gibson Story - "Hippie Hat Brain Parasite" pp 109-112
A wild set of fringe SF stories. Gibson's brief story about paranoia and conspiracies
about aliens is different from his cyber work, but it fits right in.
The description of a cardboard city reappears in "All Tomorrow's Parties".
Edited by David Garnett
Consulting Editor: Michael Moorcock
Volume 64, Number 222
White Wolf Publishing, Clarkston GA
Gibson Story - "Thirteen Views Of A Cardboard City" pp 338-349
ISBN: 1-56504-190-9
Mr. Fang points out that this story also appeared in The Year's Best SF vol. 3 (edited by David G. Hartwell and published in 1998 by HarperPrism)
Visionary San Francisco, 1990 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and
Prestel-Verlag, Munich
ISBN: 3-7913-1060-7 (hard)
0-918-47115-X (soft)
Cover: (sketch of Mission Bay development) by John Kriken, SOM
Published in Wired 1.4, Sept-Oct. 1993, p. 51-114
ISSN 1059-1028
link at http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Cyberpunk/William_Gibson/gibson_disney_death.article
Mr. Fang reports that William Gibson wrote the introduction to a book of John Shirley short stories called Heatseeker.
Auth/Ed: Stephen P. Brown and John Shirley
Year: 1989
ISBN: 0-910489-26-2
Pub: Scream/Press
Published by Eyeball Books. From their site:
An eloquent foreword by William Gibson sets the novel, and Shirley, into historical context.
Published by the now-defunct Cortext division of Hardwired.
ISBN: 1-888869-16-X
PS3569.T3876A89 1997
813'.54-dc21 97-14741
The Spring 1996 issue of SF Eye includes a WG review of The Acid House by Irvine Welsh.
An excerpt from Idoru is available in the issue #735, May 30, 1996, of Rolling Stone magazine.
Mr. Fang reports the Fall 1997 issue of SF Eye includes a William Gibson essay essay titled "Jack Womak and the Horned Heart of Neuropa."
An essay about collecting wristwatches on eBay that appeared in Wired 7.01
January 1999. The theme appears in All Tomorrow's Parties.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/ebay.html
An article in the Viridian issue of Whole Earth magazine Summer 2001, assembled by his collaborator Bruce Sterling.
This article on their Two Against Nature CD appeared on the Addicted to Noise site in their Issue 6.03 March 2000 , at http://www.addict.com/issues/6.03/html/hifi/Cover_Story/Gibson_Essay/
William Gibson wrote this brief article in Wired 9.09 September 2001. His fondness
for the place comes across, but the dozens of thumbnail pictures are more interesting
than the text.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.09/gibson.html
A post-9/11 article, originally published in the Canadian newspaper The National Post on September 20, 2001, entitled "Blasted Dreams in Mr. Buk's Window". Gibson refers to it and reprints it on his blog as "Mr. Buk's Window". The themes of dust and decay running through his work (The Finn's shop, the gomei in the Winter Market short story, Agrippa, etc.) slam into the mega-destruction and choking dust of the World Trade Center attack.
Writing that originally appeared in Forbes ASAP magazine supplement, available as part of his blog.
www.williamgibsonbooks.com was set up along with the publication of Pattern Recognition. It has forums, a useful set of links, and a blog where Gibson writes. The blog entries are of interest to any fan , and some like the Up the Line speech are spectacular. There's some law operating that each has to have the word "mediated" or "construct" in it.
Gibson spoke at the Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day, Los Angeles, May 17, 2003. He draws out the arc of recognizing patterns (as in his novel's title) from fire flickering on cave walls to painting to films to media to digital, how it's become a prosthetic memory and how digitization may affect it. Sensational stuff, the best thing he's written in years. The text is available as part of his blog at williamgibsonbooks
Interesting op-ed piece in the June 25, 2003 New York Times about Orwell's 1984 and how that surveillance society has turned into a total information society. "It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret."Abstract, full article available for purchase.
In HTML at http://www.astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/htmldocs/agrippa.html, but I think the ASCII at file://bush.cs.tamu.edu/pub/misc/erich/agrippa looks better.
Here are the details from http://www.euro.net/mark-space/bkAgrippa.html
William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh
AGRIPPA: A Book of the Dead
hardback: Kevin Begos Publishing Inc, US, 1992
art book, poem, metaphor, identity, death, apocalyptic
Visuals by Dennis Ashbaugh and text by William Gibson. Contains a floppy disc. This is a self-destructing book: images fade, disc crashes. Gibson's text is available on the net.
"A collaboration between author William Gibson, publisher Kevin Begos Jr, and artist Dennis Ashbaugh. This art-work contains engravings by Ashbaugh which appear or disappear in light and an on-disk semi-autobiographical poem by William Gibson which is unreadable after having been read once. Agrippa is notable because in many respects it blurs the lines about what art is, and adds fuel to the fire on issues of property rights and intellectual property. A highlight of 1992 was the release of Gibson's poem on to the net".[a review of this book by Peter Schwenger can be found in: Flame Wars edited by Mark Dery.]--Andy Hawks (in FutureCulture FAQ , on the Internet).
Or for the text of Agrippa plus interviews by Marisa Golini and by Darren Wershler-Henry at: gopher://english.hss.cmu.edu:70/0F-2%3A1598%3AGibson
From the exhbition book:
William Gibson appears in a scene in Virtual Reality, where he says (roughly) "I invented cyberspace". That's my recollection, anyway. Erich Schneider , maintainer of the alt.cyberpunk faq, remembers Gibson's cameo being at a "New Realism"/"Syntheotics" meeting:
Paige: This is William Gibson, Harry.Karl Reinsch informed me that Gibson wrote "Where The Holograms Go" for the "Wild Palms reader" on pages 122-123. He says it looks like a short story but the back cover calls it a set of song lyrics.?
Harry: Oh, yeah ... _Neuromancer_, right?
Paige: He invented the word "cyberspace".
Gibson: And they'll never let me forget it.
Edited by Roger Trilling and Stuart Swezey.
"A Thomas Dunne book."
St. Martin's Press, New York, N.Y. c1993.
ISBN NUMBER: 0312090838 : $14.95
ISBN 0-262-52177-6 (paperback)
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~joker/misc/aliens3.html is the complete ASCII version
It's also available formatted, but with gaps, at http://www.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/cyber/gibson/alien3.html
At one point Malcolm McLaren had rights to Burning Chrome
The plot is quite different than that of the short story, but some core ideas remain. Because of overlapping rights, the Molly Millions character does not appear in the film.
Sony has an OK site for the movie, at http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/movies/Mnemonic/intro.html and http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/06jonmnu.html. There's a Cyberspace demo download, but it only works on Windows 3.1 with WinG.
(this is lifted from http://www.euro.net/mark-space/bkJohnnyMnemonicScreenplay.html)
Illustrated with photos from the film.
"And his only allies are a cybernetic dolphin and a sexy streetfighter with a hardwired taste for violence...
"In 1984, William Gibson's Neuromancer -- winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K.Dick Awards -- introduced the concept of cyberspace to the world -- and revolutionized the way we look at the future. Rolling Stone labeled him 'science fiction's hottest author' -- and in the years since, his incomparably inventive body of work has made his name synonymous with 'visionary'. Now for the first time, Gibson's corrupt, computer-driven future is brought to the screen in Johnny Mnemonic -- based on a story previously published in Gibson's highly praised collection, Burning Chrome .
"This book, illustrated with exclusive photographs, contains the full text of William Gibson's exciting original screenplay -- and the short story that inspired it".
The British version of the Johnny Mnemonic book also has scenes from the movie.
Gibson's New Rose Hotel short story was originally optioned by Malcolm
McLaren (of Sex Pistols and Buffalo Gals fame) at some point and was in
development for years. Abel Ferrara (director of Bad Lieutenant) made a low-budget
version of it starring Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken (details at the IMDB);
the screenplay is by Christ Zois.
Fox has a detailed write-up with links
A comfortable statement of Gibson's traditional themes: an AI released onto the net (from Neuromancer) and human consciousness melded with the net (from Mona Lisa Overdrive). Nice dialog, a vulnerable hacker girl (why do they always have Darryl Hannah Blade Runner replicant eye makeup?)
It feels about 70 minutes long, but it's shoehorned into 48 or so minutes of TV.
Fox says "A murder inside the high-tech world of a virtual reality game leads Scully to battle a deadly digital character in order to save Mulder's life."
I say the promotional posters for the company "First Person Shooter" are a hoot, but the "They're trapped in the computer and we can't shut it off" is wayyy tired. It's just an excuse to explore the relationship between Scully and Mulder (again Gibson has Scully rescuing Mulder instead of vice-versa), and satirize the gender issues in violent games and sexy avatars. id software's own Graeme Devine slammed the presentation of the game business in his .plan file.
The February 1999 Wired 7.02 has a piece on director Chris Cunningham announcing that Seven Arts will release a movie of Neuromancer in 2000. There was lots of details at www.neuromancer.org , but by June 2000 the site is unreachable.
Lech mentions that Gibson appears on the the (Not) Yellow Magic Orchestra's
album "Technodon" from 1993. Gibson penned the lyric for the third track,
"Floating Away" (or perhaps he - or Y.M.O. for that matter - puzzled together
earlier pieces). Anyhow, he's the one reading it. The album's available from
Toshiba EMI. The group's former label has the rights to the name "Yellow Magic
Orchestra".
Louis A. Bustamante who maintains a Deborah Harry site, told me that also in 1993, Gibson co-wrote "Dog Star Girl" with Chris Stein on Deborah Harry's "Debravation" album, Chrysalis UK CD Album (0946 3 26033 2 6). Here are the lyrics:
Maybe it's just a twist of light tonight, but the city's so bright,
this whole town's in focus.
He'd always call me "Baby Strange."
He's hold my head and pray for rain.
Oh Johnny, let me be your dog star girl.
Let me curl inside.
The fire's just right.
The fire's just right in focus.
But, then he said, "Like, anything goes, baby."
But I don't know.
I just don't know.
Do you?
And how'd I ever get to this dead man's town where the rain, where
the rain falls down, where the rain falls down forever?
And then he said, "So much for you, so much for me," but I don't see.
No, I don't see.
Do you?
And how'd I ever get to this dead man's town where the rain, where
the rain falls down, where the rain falls down forever?
Forever.
Forever.
Forever.
Forever.
(Deborah/Debbie Harry earlier made the Koo Koo album with an H.R. Giger SF-esque cover, written, arranged, performed, and produced by the legendary disco R&B powerhouse CHIC, for whom I maintain a similarly complete discography. Small world.)
A 12 minute preview of this show will be screened in Hong Kong in April 2000 under the title "Speed"
Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
It also says "For info, address: Byron Preiss, Visual Publications,
Inc., 24 West 25 Street, New York, NY 10010.
adapted and illustrated by Gavin Lonergan
appeared in Freeflight #5 and #6, Dec/Jan 95 and Apr/May 95, published
by Thinkblots.
Here's the announcement of it on alt.cyberpunk:
From alt.cyberpunk.28400 March 1995
Message-ID: <D1xD95.BI1@iceonline.com>
From: patricks@icebox.iceonline.com (Patrick Sauriol)
Subject: MISC: Gibson story adapted to comic books
There's going to be an adaptation of the William Gibson short story
'Hinterlands' (from his compliation "Burning Chrome") in graphic format. The
work will appear in a independent comic book called "Freeflight", issues #5
coming out this month) and concluding in #6 (in March).
The story is twenty pages in length, broken up into two segments to fit into
the anthology format. The work was adapted by Vancouver artist Gavin
Longeran, and has a Moebius-look to it. Gibson was involved in the adaptation
process directly, between breaks and faxing while working on his adaptation of
'Johnny Mnemonic'. As well, there's a computer-generated cover image
depicting the alien seashell from the story.
Anyone interested in getting a copy can just cruise down to their local
comic shop at the end of the month and ask for it.
Interplay, 1988?,
distributed by Mediagenic for Apple II, Commodore C64, and Amiga computers.
Interplay's site still has the cheats for the game, but the originals are no
longer available. Hacked versions of all three are floating around on the Internet,
and theApple ][ and C64 games are playable on a PC using freeware/shareware
emulators. Supposedly the C64 version is the best, with better graphics
. **I'll pay money for a physical copy of the original
game. $$
Mentioned in Omni magazine, 1988?, Games section article.
"A real Neuromancer game, however, would probably kill or main you or maybe give you a mild shock if you lost," Gibson quips. "It amuses me that Neuromancer is now a product that you can actually play." Gibson, however, doesn't play computer games. In fact, when he wrote the novel he didn't even own a personal computer. "Maybe that's why I was able to bring a sense of wonder to computing," he says.
It was published by Time Warner AudioBooks http://pathfinder.com/twep/twab/,
but it is no longer listed in their catalog.
Call 310/205-7451 to order.
From http://www.voyagerco.com/CD/gh/p.eb.html
Gibson's occasional writing partner Tom Maddox wrote "Cobra, She Said" for Fantasy Review in April, 1986, he has a copy at http://home.pacbell.net/tmaddox/cobra.html.
In addition to all the book reports and ruminations on the Net, there is a book of "criticism and interpretation"
William Gibson by Lance Olsen
From the Library of Congress Index
SUBJECTS:
Gibson, William, 1948- --Criticism and interpretation.
Science fiction, American--History and criticism.
SERIES TITLES (Indexed under SERI option):
Starmont reader's guide, 0272-7330 ; 58
NOTES:
Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-119) and index.
. San Bernardino, Calif. : Borgo Press, c1992.
ISBN: 1557421994 (hc)Also, there is an online essay,
155742198
Go to the excellent "William Gibson Links" page at http://www.student.uwa.edu.au/student/tamaleav/gib_p.html. There is another detailed list of interviews at http://www-user.cibola.net/~michaela/gibson/etc.htm Here's an older incomplete set.
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