You are currently browsing the Node Magazine weblog archives for August, 2007.
August 30, 2007 by Node Magazine.
The Bat Segundo Show has an excellent, original [read = “not the same old questions”] interview [mp3] with William Gibson about his new novel Spook Country and a variety of other topics including:
Coats, blankets, and carapaces in Gibson’s fiction, textures, characters with shaved heads, on not having technological issues, the Apple Store, cell phones and the natural street state, obsolete technology and thrift shops, ZX81s, VR, sitting atop the technological anthill, the internal combustion engine, how to escape being handcuffed with a piece of a ball point pen, the origin of Blue Ant, color taxonomies, Belgians, locative art, rock ‘n roll novels from the 1960s, the downsides of sitting in a SFWA suite, Bobby Chombo, cigarettes, Cory Doctorow, GPS plausibilities, celebrity deaths, Philip K. Dick, Milgram and Dr. Stanley Milgrim, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, ghostly connections between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, tripartite plot structures, writing while not knowing what was in the suitcase, extra-terrestrial artifacts in Baghdad, how to confuse John Clute, the historical record being determined by Wikipedia and Google results, Google Maps and street view, lonelygirl15, YouTube, Japanese behavioral protocols, responding to Ed Park’s theory about the old man and Win being the same character, unreliable narrators, and Iain Sinclair.
[Thanks to Forbidden Planet and Memetic Engineer for the heads up]
Posted in SpookCountry novel | 1 Comment »
August 29, 2007 by Node Magazine.
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.
Posted in SpookCountry novel, nodeNews | 8 Comments »
August 29, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Locative art is one of the themes in William Gibson’s new novel Spook Country. Here are a few related links:
More to come…
Posted in SpookCountry novel, tech | 1 Comment »
August 29, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Check out this short video clip of William Gibson at Politics and Prose in Washington DC [courtesy of cordwainer]: http://youtube.com/watch?v=byvR7VbMGQE
Posted in SpookCountry novel | 1 Comment »
August 17, 2007 by Node Magazine.
I recently got an angry email from someone who asked that I not use their weblog to “promote your site. I’ve already heard more about it than I ever wanted to on the Gibson board.”
Wow! I must admit that I find this reaction baffling. Quite a few people have directed intense criticism about this project as if it had something to “promote” other than Gibson’s new novel apparently assuming that I have “Bigend-like” exploitation in mind.
There are no links here to anything other than reviews and some other fansites. The original intention was to create something interesting that would be of value to other Gibson fans. Inspired in part by by Anton Rauben Weiss’s William Gibson aleph site and Joe Clark’s PR-Otaku, I hoped to create a reference that would be of value to other fans. I also thought that othe fans who took the time to write blog entries about their enthusiasm for Gibson’s work would also find the site of interest.
Strangely, the most venomous criticism appears to be about the very IDEA of this blog [and its sister site the Node tumblog]. I haven’t really heard much criticism about the content itself. With that in mind, I will discontinue any attempts to directly “promote” anything on the Gibson discussion board or anywhere else and apologize for any trauma I may have inadvertantly triggered.
If you have something constructive to add, please pass it along here. I would love to know how I can make this resource better.
Posted in nodeNews | 4 Comments »
August 13, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Memetic Engineer has published his London CyberPunk tourist guide, an amazing “personal guide to some of the ‘CyberPunk‘ and other locations of interest to me in Central London.”
Posted in cyberpunk | 1 Comment »
August 12, 2007 by Node Magazine.
Wearing a black tee advertising The Brain Technologies and looking even skinnier than last time, Wiliam Gibson spoke from a tapestry-covered folding table upon an elevated floor to an overflowing, standing-room-only crowd during a beautiful Saturday afternoon at the Boulder Bookstore on the Pearl Street Mall.
Unlike the last time Mr Gibson visited Colorado during the Pattern Recognition tour, the crowd was more diverse, less dominant in black clothing with more women who seemed to have read the book rather than standing in for boyfriends unable to attend. Many of the questions following the reading from Chapter 1 of Spook Country focused on movie adaptations to which Mr. Gibson replied that he “could care less” given that “the final form of a novel is a novel. Any adaptation is a different form.”
In reply to a question about research re: trends and technology, Mr. Gibson said that he doesn’t read anything to which the general population doesn’t have accesss and that anyone who reads boingboing could catch up to him in a couple days.
Perhaps the most insightful comments concerned Gibson’s writing process which he described as starting with things and places before he even thinks about characters, ideas or themes. He spoke of a high-school composition teacher who published a few short stories but paid the bills by writing technical manuals for the military. The teacher required students to produce exhaustively detailed descriptions of mundane items such as the eraser of a pencil, a style in which Gibson says he enthusiastically immersed himself. Gibson felt that this “high rez” detail was missing from science fiction and was an area where he could make a difference.
Overall, Mr. Gibson seemed relaxed, pensive and enormously generous with his attention to fans and the curious. I especially appreciate his unrushed conversation with my 11-year old son commissioned as journalist for Node Magazine and asked his question with a digital recorder [video published on the Node tumblog]. He told me that he liked the blog and thought I must be crazy to do so much work cataloging every object and place in the novel. He also said that he would be careful to not tell anyone where the fake Node originates.
Posted in SpookCountry novel | 2 Comments »
August 7, 2007 by Node Magazine.
One of the themes in Spook Country is the use of iPods to smuggle data.
If you would like a complete transcript of the Node tumblog [minus the photos, maps and videos], email me at admin@nodemagazine.com. I will also give you the files that you can use to get the unecrypted files ready for immediate transfer to your iPod [which, even I must admit, is a bit scary].
Posted in nodeNews | 1 Comment »
August 7, 2007 by Node Magazine.
The Node tumblog is now complete with summaries, maps, links, videos and more related to all 84 chapters in William Gibson’s Spook Country [released today in the US].
Read more about the project here.
Posted in SpookCountry novel, nodeNews | 1 Comment »
August 6, 2007 by Node Magazine.
“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 www.nodemagazine.com.)” [seattle times]
Posted in SpookCountry novel, nodeNews | 1 Comment »
