July 17, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with William Gibson, author of the books “Neuromancer” and “Spook Country,” about where we are headed in this post-internet age [via IT Conversations]
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June 12, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Cool i09 interview with William Gibson re: Godzilla, draft-dodging and the novel he has always wanted to write [thanks to grave_danger1969].
In Spook Country, old ideologies hang around and shape the initial phases of a longterm change that it will never be able to keep up with. The digital realm is inherently porous. These days we’re all coming to the attention of the authorities as a matter of course. But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention. It’s more difficult for authorities to keep their secrets. it’s working both ways. We live in the era of the leak, the document that doesn’t get wiped off the hard drive. That drive you thought was wiped shows up in a pawn shop in Vegas. It’s equally porous in both directions. But individuals have a better chance of applying transparency to their lives and transactions on the internet than states and corporations do. If we continue in this direction, I believe people in the future will wield unimaginable tools of forensic transparency — and they’ll aim them back at history. They’ll find out about what every major player did all the way back with tools we can’t imagine today. There will be no more lost cities.
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May 30, 2008 by Node Magazine.
The official word on the 2008 Book Tour to support the paperback version of Spook Country [williamgibsonboard]:
SEATTLE - TACOMA, WATuesday, June 36:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM PSTReading/Q&A/Signing UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE4326 University Way NESeattle, WA 98105206-633-6443www.bookstore.washington.edu_______________________________________________________________________PORTLAND, ORWednesday, June 46:15 PM arrival6:30 PM to 8:00 PM PSTReading/Q&A/Signing BARNES & NOBLE #226212000 SE 82nd AvePortland, OR 97266503-786-3464_______________________________________________________________________SAN FRANCISCO, CAMonday, June 96:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM PSTReading/Signing BORDERS BOOKS & MUSIC #57400 Post StreetSan Francisco, CA 94102415-399-1633_______________________________________________________________________SAN FRANCISCO, CATuesday, June 107:15 PM arrival7:30 PM to 8:30 PM PSTReading/Signing CAPITOLA BOOK CAFE1475 41st Ave.Capitola, CA 95010831-462-4415 http://www.capitolabookcafe.com/_______________________________________________________________________AUSTIN, TXWednesday, June 117:15 PM arrival7:30 PM to 8:30 PM CSTDiscussion/Signing BARNES & NOBLE #253610000 Research Blvd., #158Austin, TX 78759(512) 418-8985 _______________________________________________________________________DAYTON, OHThursday, June 126:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM ESTReading/Signing BOOKS & COMPANY @ The Greene4453 Walnut St.Beavercreek, OH 45440937-429-6302www.booksandco.com_______________________________________________________________________LEXINGTON, KYFriday, June 136:45 PM arrival7:00 PM Reading/Q&A/Signing JOSEPH-BETH 161 Lexington Green Circle, Ste. B1Lexington, KY 40503859-271-5330 _______________________________________________________________________PHILADELPHIA, PASaturday, June 141:45 PM arrival2:00 PM to 3:00 PM ESTReading/Q&A/Signing BARNES & NOBLE #26463535 US Route 1Princeton, NJ 05840609-897-9250_______________________________________________________________________NEW YORK, NYSunday, June 166:45 PM arrival7:00 PM to 8:00 PM ESTUpstairs at the Square with Martha Wainwright! BARNES & NOBLE #267533 East 17th StNew York, NY 10003212-253-0810 _______________________________________________________________________BOSTON, MATuesday, June 1712:45 PM arrival1:00 PM to 2:00 PM ESTReading/Signing BORDERS BOOKS & MUSIC #12010-24 School St.Boston, MA 02108617-557-7188
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May 25, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Gibson has a great eye for obscure, yet fashionable tech. If you read Pattern Recognition and wondered what it would be like to own a Curta mechanical calculator, check out Jan Meyer’s virtual Curta simulator [by way of Karlin Lillington].
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April 7, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Thanks to all the registered users and some great comments over the past few months. More posts to come soon, especially as we learn more about the Neuromancer movie.
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January 9, 2008 by Node Magazine.
Will Hayden Christensen [Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episodes 2-3] play Case, the protaganist in Joseph Kahn’s $70M movie adaption of William Gibson’s cyberpunk genre-inspiring Neuromancer? JoBlo says so.
Posted in cyberpunk, news | 3 Comments »
January 1, 2008 by Node Magazine.
This article recently hit my GoogleReader [the original is in Italian and the English translation follows]:
Node Magazine: the future (hypertext) literature
A new trend is emerging on the horizon of writing and could subvert the dynamics of publishing a radical and far more incisive than you predstavijo e-book. A launch, a group of fans inspired by the revolutionary movement in writers: William Gibson.
NodeMagazineL’uscita last awaited novel by William Gibson has been accompanied by a roll really. When the book had not yet entered the circuit of British and American libraries, a handful of tough fans, who have come in possession of a copy of reading Spook Country, had already begun to establish a network promotional totally unconventional. The material narrative of the novel has become the subject of a thorough and methodical analysis, which has resolved the design of a web-magazine that in the name refers to a magazine quoted by the same Gibson in its history. But if the Node of Spook Country Magazine is a publication dedicated to new frontiers of interactive, designed to explore the network of relationships between people, objects and places, the Node Magazine of real world has become an ambitious project to catalogue all touched the knowledge or even touched by the novel and its author, not only as it concerns the building or structure. It is no coincidence that the literary critic John Sutherland said that the project threatens to “overturn the habits of literary criticism.”
It all started when the creator of the project, still unnamed, has put his hands on a copy reading of the novel and decided to mobilize a volunteer to trace the entire network of references and shape the cloud of information related to book, without sparing nothing in the work found in the database network from search engines, from Google to Wikipedia. The architect of the project, masked behind the nickname patternBoy, conceived the Node Magazine as a “multi-blog pseudo-news from narrative Spook Country”, but at the time of its conception certainly did not envision himself to finish focus of the media. The intention of starting a text to a more detailed narrative of the birth from that work is not without precedent: in hypertext, the same thing had been accomplished precisely on the same last novel Gibson, Pattern Recognition ( The academy in Italy Dream), by another passionate hidden behind pseudonym. But if the work was at the party after the publication of the novel and had required about two years to reach its final form, in this case, the project started on February 7 this year, has brought forward the release of the novel and accompanied step by step dissemination to the general public, gaining official recognition of Gibson in person.
As noted by Sutherland, this can really serve as a way to fruition nuovaPynchon_Wiki critical texts. The potential offered by the multimedia platform blog reflect the complexity of references and levels of reading a book as Spook Country, allowing in this way to thrash out the plot of the references through the incremental cognitive mechanism that is the basis of. An operation metaletteraria and if we also want to mythopoetic, which not only facilitates the understanding of the text but to a certain extent it also complete iconography. And as experience shows similar mass standing for the last Pynchon, with a wiki dedicated to the monumental Against the Day, this is a strategy now more than promising.
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December 2, 2007 by Node Magazine.
William Gibson sat down for this short interview for Fast Forward [he mentions Node Magazine about half-way through as well].
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November 9, 2007 by Node Magazine.
From William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview [by Andrew Leonard]:
Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.
In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.
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October 30, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Arguably, NodeMagazine.com is the most self-referential website yet of the new millenium where nearly all of the content is an aggregate of outside references to itself [and its “sister site” the node tumblog]. For those of you not thoroughly annoyed by this, here is a chronological summary of the summaries about itself.
10.30.07: Skomorokh recently created a beautiful entry on Node Magazine to Wikipedia that shows an otaku-level of beauty as “a small token of apprecation” that is itself greatly appreciated.
08.05.07: “Someone’s already named a Web site after NODE, the nonexistent magazine in ‘Spook Country,’ ” [Gibson] said. “It’s sort of scary.” — Chris Watson, Bookends: William Gibson explores the science fiction of the here-and-now in his new novel [Santa Cruz Sentinel]
08.06.07: Here is another quote about NodeMagazine.com and the Node tumblog from the man himself:
Someone has a website going where every single thing mentioned in Spook Country has a blog entry and usually an illustration so, every reference, someone has taken it, researched it and written a sort of little Wikipedia entry for it and all in the format of a website that pretends to be from a magazine called Node, which is an imaginary magazine, within Spook Country, and which turns out to be imaginary in the context of the narrative.
08.06.07: “Along the way, Gibson, 59, keeps the reader Googling, trying to match his uncanny grasp of historical and contemporary culture, from the gods of the Santeria religion to “piggybacking” on wireless networks. (A couple of Web sites named after Node, a fictitious “Spook Country” magazine, track these references — go to http://node.tumblr.com/ or http://nodemagazine.com.)” [seattle times]
08.29.07: Thanks to my friend Memetic Engineer for posting this report on a recent William Gibson book signing in the UK to his excellent blog SpookCountry.co.uk:
William Gibson mentioned Node website at least twice during his reading, talk and signing session at the TUC conference centre in London:
- The very first question the moderator asked about was the impact of the annotations in the Node magazine node.tumblr.com. - William Gibson seemed to be positive about them, but noted that the previous PR-otaku site for Pattern Recognition took about a year to appear after publication, whilst this project, to which I have added my own annotations here on this blog happened even before the official book publication date.
- When asked about the impact of “micro-celebrity” and “Web 2.0″ technology, William Gibson again cited his meeting with patternboy who made an impact from a small town in Colorado, with the help of international contributors.
09.01.07: This is so spooky, I can’t help but laugh!
Immediately after reading an article on conspiracy theories about Denver International Airport [or “Kansas” as many of us in the Denver area like to call it], I found Node idea, an article by John Suthlerland for Guardian UK about the William Gibson’s “theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice” floating on a “critical cloud” of fan-promoted literary criticism combating professional neglect and “antibuzz”:
Node-man, a Gibson fan, has duly set up a website with the devotional URL node.tumblr.com. Node-man also got a very early copy of Spook Country. The fan is unidentified: Gibson knows who he is, and says he lives in small-town USA and wants, apparently, to stay anonymous.
Apparently patternboy is now all grown up and hiding underground after mobilising “a volunteer army of fellow enthusiasts” [that would be you, Memetic Engineer] to create a “Google aura” for promoting Spook Country.
What the unknown Node-maestro has done is poles apart, both from this, and from the usual website-based ‘everybody pitch in’ mess. He’s channelled the raw material supplied by his volunteers into a sign-posted route through Spook Country. It opens the way, I believe, to a new kind of critical commentary on texts. One can see, easily enough, how it could be extended to Paradise Lost, or Hamlet.
09.06.07: Now romancer by Dennis Lim, Salon
Someone is essentially doing a hypertext version of “Spook Country” at Node magazine, with chapter summaries and various annotations and illustrations.
Gibson: Yeah, I’ve seen that. The amount of effort involved is a bit scary. The entries I’ve looked at have been remarkably accurate. Oscar Wilde said mirrors and cats are both inherently unhealthy to pay too much attention to, and I think that sort of Web site is in that category for me.
09.06.07: Bruce Sterling calls this interview by Joel Garreau for the Washington Post, the one of the best William Gibson interviews ever:
“It’s curious. When I published ‘Pattern Recognition’ ” — his previous book, which was also set in the recent past and achieved mainstream success — “within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were compiling Googled references to every term and every place in the book. It has photographs of just about every locale in the book — a massive site that was compiled by volunteer effort. But it took a couple of years to come together.
With ‘Spook Country,’ the same thing was up on the Web before the book was published.” Somebody got an advance reader copy, and instantly put up a site for his fictional Node magazine. [thanks to Infocult for another reference]
Plus, if you just can’t get enough, there is the story by Michael Janairo about the story by Professor Sutherland about this site and the node tumblog.
09.08.07: Kevin Broome logs this summary of William Gibson at the CBC Book Club [scheduled to air Saturday September 15, between 8 and 9 a.m. and then available as a podcast on CBC Words At Large on Wednesday September 19].
He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different times zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I.
And this from Steppin’ Locust on the William Gibson message board:
Seek: NODE online – encyclopedia of Spook Country’s details and marginalia – visual concordance to each googleable reference in the novel - Google is there the way your memory is there – your brain is going to grow into google
We volunteer to become parts of vast distributed intelligences that are fantastically smarter than we are.
09.20.07: “One Guardian writer observed that [William Gibson’s Spook Country] could change the field of literary criticism. He notes how one fan has created a website, named after a magazine described in the book, to annotate the contents of Spook Country and anything that is written anywhere about it so chances are this very post and any of your comments may end up being referenced there.” — Captain Xerox, Fan site annotates contents of Gibson’s new book Spook Country [The Website at the End of the Universe]
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