Neuromancer
WILLIAM GIBSON
Not since Star Wars has one science-fiction film so firmly planted its footprints on every other film that has come after it. Which is ironic considering how openly The Matrix wears its influences and foundational texts on its sleeves.
Yes, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Paul Virilio run through that film like unleashed viruses; yes, its decidedly Eastern tinge has as much to do with Hong Kong's de facto wiremaster Yuen Woo Ping as it does with the glossy anime thematics that have been forming off the Eastern seabord like a tsunami for the last twenty years; and yes, Keanu Reeves gave another William Gibson-penned vehicle -- the awful Johnny Mnemonic -- his droning absence.
But
now it's pretty easy to see it: Gibson's seminal cross-genre masterpiece
about a neurally neutered hacker who is wired into something entirely
different than everyone else has entered the popular consciousness to
the point that it has become yet another household product. After all,
where do you think they got the term "matrix" from anyway? That's
right, from the same book that invented the term "cyberspace."
For a crash course on the past, present and future, read this book. It
changed literature, film, philosophy, technoculture -- culture itself.
It will change you.
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by Scott Thill
Everyone who reads fiction probably already knows that William Gibson has a way with words; they might not, however, know that sometimes his words have a way with him.
They issue out of his mouth in a stream, often in disassociated or irrupted strings, as if he's not ready or sure how to say them. But Gibson's nevertheless compelled to lend the gravity of dense and allusive language to his opinions, because documentary director Mark Neale asks the revered author to comment on everything from religion and catastrophe to technoculture and accelerated neural networking. It's heady philosophical monologue (often disguised or offered by Neale as dialogue), but it's still a series fascinating spiels, especially considering it comes from a mild-mannered dude from Vancouver whose is simply interested in "being there" rather than unendingly enduring theoretical and hypothetical visions of the future...MORE
