Distrust That Particular Flavor
William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, with his work ranging from his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, to his more recent contemporary bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly thirty years, though, Gibson has been sought out by widely varying publications for his insights into contemporary culture. Wired magazi...more
272 pages
Published
January 3rd 2012
by Putnam Adult
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William Gibson thinks a lot about the future, not so much in a predictive sense, but in terms of the impact of technological change—on culture in general and on individual human beings in particular. He sees patterns emerging everywhere, and many of his stories revolve around characters struggling to negotiate the leading-edge of some impending paradigm shift that nobody else sees coming. He’s one of the godfathers of cyberpunk, and one of my favorite science-fiction writers—he’s the mind behind...more
Someday I hope Gibson writes a more substantial nonfiction work. Meanwhile, this selection of magazine items is pretty good and will have to do. His insights are always worth listening to, IMO.
Some quotes:
But I’m not sure I really enjoy the music any more than I did before, on certifiably low-fi junk. The music, when it’s really there, is just there. You can hear it coming out of the dented speaker grille of a Datsun B210 with holes in the floor. Sometimes that’s the best way to hear it.
I knew...more
Some quotes:
But I’m not sure I really enjoy the music any more than I did before, on certifiably low-fi junk. The music, when it’s really there, is just there. You can hear it coming out of the dented speaker grille of a Datsun B210 with holes in the floor. Sometimes that’s the best way to hear it.
I knew...more
Gibson is widely known for his novels (which I haven't read!) but also has written a variety of pieces on different aspects of contemporary culture. He was born in the southern United States and moved to Canada as a young man. Having met and married a Canadian woman, he stayed and now lives in Vancouver. This comes up only briefly in the writings contained here.
This is a collection of articles, speeches, book reviews, and essays on culture, technology, urban life, and the relationships between o...more
This is a collection of articles, speeches, book reviews, and essays on culture, technology, urban life, and the relationships between o...more
A collection of Gibson's nonfiction pieces, products of an attempt at a form with which he professes discomfort, as if he is just pretending to do nonfiction. Some of them are more trenchant than others, and many are slight at best, but all of them exhibit a deep love of language and fascination for the telling detail, which are the qualities that make his fiction so hypnotic. We have here travel pieces, commentary on tech, several on Asia (the one on Singapore is particularly unnerving), and a...more
William Gibson is one of my default answers for "favorite living novelist" questions, and this collection of non-fiction shows about 50% of why that's so--all it's missing is a plot and some characters.
The pieces in this book are an eclectic mix of articles (both newspaper and magazine), introductions to books, speeches, and a blog post; the pieces not written for the book range from 1989 to 2010, but there's a definite focus to the book: the 1989 piece is an article for Rolling Stone about the...more
The pieces in this book are an eclectic mix of articles (both newspaper and magazine), introductions to books, speeches, and a blog post; the pieces not written for the book range from 1989 to 2010, but there's a definite focus to the book: the 1989 piece is an article for Rolling Stone about the...more
William Gibson's new book, which is basically a collection of articles from various magazines, anthology introductions, that kind of thing. Some are incredibly brief, a page or two at most; others are much longer. Appending each selection is a brief blurb about how Mr Gibson considers the article now, or some note about how or why it happened, or some pertinent anecdote. The end blurbs are all a bit interesting, just to see how he feels about things now, which is sometimes different, sometimes n...more
Even if he wasn't a real-deal writer of the fictions, William Gibson's non-fiction stuff would be still be must-read. Most of the essays in "Distrust..." have the feel of being a behind-the-scenes look at how he forms the ideas that go into his books, but they still hold up on their own (which is good, because many originally ran in Rolling Stone, Wired, etc.)
But a constant theme of emerges in his writing, that's twinned with his fiction writing; it's Gibson wrapping his wild brain around how d...more
But a constant theme of emerges in his writing, that's twinned with his fiction writing; it's Gibson wrapping his wild brain around how d...more
I like William Gibson's books. This was a series of nonfiction pieces where he waxed poetic on society, technology, other people's books, cities, Japan, etc. Had some interesting lines.
...But Sinclair's faux lovcraftian subtexts...finally lose traction in the way that all conspiracy theories do: the description of an underlying, literally occulted order is invariably less complex than the surface reality it supposedly informs. Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present mo...more
...But Sinclair's faux lovcraftian subtexts...finally lose traction in the way that all conspiracy theories do: the description of an underlying, literally occulted order is invariably less complex than the surface reality it supposedly informs. Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present mo...more
Jan 23, 2012
Jenelle
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
emotional nerds, boys I crush on
Shelves:
sci-fi,
semiotics-essays-theory
I haven't had such an immediate, pressing desire to read a book in a long time, but from that NY Times Review, I knew this book nestled perfectly into my life-as-sci-fi imagination, esp. travel-as-time-travel. This is a collection of Gibson's published "nonfiction" essays, although he admits early he's uncomfortable relating anything as pure nonfiction, and each essay is footnoted by his present-day critique. Somehow I haven't read a single thing by Gibson before, and I wonder if I had this woul...more
Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2012. 259pp)
Born in 1948, William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction writer. His debut Novel, Neuromancer (1984) effectively predicted the internet. He has also written for TIME, Wired, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He has been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Ditmar, Seiun, and Prix Aurora awards.
Science Fiction: A Future Truth
The future is always something that has amazed me. What’s c...more
Born in 1948, William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction writer. His debut Novel, Neuromancer (1984) effectively predicted the internet. He has also written for TIME, Wired, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He has been awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Ditmar, Seiun, and Prix Aurora awards.
Science Fiction: A Future Truth
The future is always something that has amazed me. What’s c...more
Oct 18, 2011
Roy Kenagy
marked it as to-read
http://avc.lu/nLyrGJ
AVC: Your first collection of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavor, comes out in January. Have you always wanted to write non-fiction?
WG: I’m a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don’t really feel qualified. I have the toolkit of a novelist, and no training as a journalist or science writer. But I’ve been surprised to realize how much of my fiction over the years has been steered by getting non-fiction assignments and agreeing to go meet someone or loo...more
AVC: Your first collection of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavor, comes out in January. Have you always wanted to write non-fiction?
WG: I’m a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don’t really feel qualified. I have the toolkit of a novelist, and no training as a journalist or science writer. But I’ve been surprised to realize how much of my fiction over the years has been steered by getting non-fiction assignments and agreeing to go meet someone or loo...more
With Necromancer William Gibson predicted the Internet and invented the term 'cyberspace' and for a long time he's had this mythical status as a technophobe author capable of technology prognostication. It must get very wearing. Gibson comes across as a genuine, intelligent and polite man, but one who is leery of making any wild claims or getting too caught up in predicting what 'connectedness' will eventually mean. I wished, at times, he'd taken more risks in his writing.
Much in this collectio
...more
William Gibson é uma curiosa escolha para guru cultural. Influente escritor de Ficção Científica, é conhecido do grande público por ter cunhado o termo ciberespaço no romance Neuromancer, seminal para o género cyberpunk. Sendo um daqueles escritores que tem o dedo no pulso da época contemporânea, evoluiu estilisticamente para reflectir na sua obra os aspectos menos visíveis e potencialmente arrepiantes do admirável mundo novo acelerado pelo digital que tanto nos deslumbra. É esta a faceta que mo...more
William Gibson has said more than once that science fiction possesses a unique toolkit for dealing with our science fictional present. He said that again when I asked why mainstream writers are turning increasingly to science fiction during a question and answer session held during his New York City literary event for this very book. He could have offered similar advice to journalists with respect to their narrative nonfiction and journalistic reporting; “Distrust That Particular Flavor” makes a...more
William Gibson is a sort of reluctant futurist. He wishes to write fiction, yet so much of it has, presumably against his wishes, turned out to be reality, or at lease a semblance of reality. He "creates" cyberspace on the page and shortly it exists, of a sort. Unlike many science fiction writers who attempt to predict the future, he seems to be a sort of future historian, seeing shadows of possibilities through a broken lens. Never an exact projection, but frighteningly close.
Reading this colle...more
Reading this colle...more
Grande, aunque no deja de ser una recopilación de artículos que han ido apareciendo en todo tipo de publicaciones a lo largo de las dos últimas décadas.
Siempre me ha gustado la forma de pensar que tiene Gibson, ya me encandiló hace un par de años cuando vi por primera vez "No Maps for These Territories". La manera que tiene de desgranar el presente y el futuro más próximo es algo que no he visto en otros. No es académico de nada, y lo sabe, ni siquiera se puede decir que sea un tío demasiado af...more
Siempre me ha gustado la forma de pensar que tiene Gibson, ya me encandiló hace un par de años cuando vi por primera vez "No Maps for These Territories". La manera que tiene de desgranar el presente y el futuro más próximo es algo que no he visto en otros. No es académico de nada, y lo sabe, ni siquiera se puede decir que sea un tío demasiado af...more
There is simply no way to describe what William Gibson is trying to achieve with his books. What is he trying to say? Slowly meaning trickles in through osmosis...His voice is unique and mesmerising. This book is a collection of essays and other non-fiction work he has written over the years and it tantalisingly sheds some light on this enigma. The prose here is again wonderful, using unfamiliar or unexpected concepts to shed light on other concepts in a completely new way. Rather than trying to...more
This is a book of William Gibson essays of varying interest to me, mostly involving his thoughts on technology but also some discussion of films, the idea of cyborgs, the internet as a "collective prosthetic memory", and a little bit about his life, how he came into science fiction and science fiction as it relates to science and society. He brings up some thought-provoking ideas and more than a few turns of phrase that either made me smile, smirk, or laugh aloud. The way he has in his fiction o...more
William Gibson thinks very highly of himself, Angela told me as we listened to this audiobook on a drive in the suburbs. I think what she actually said was, "this guy is super into himself".
You can definitely get that impression from this collection, although the conclusion would be unjustified. The articles are more or less supposed to be about him- his experiences, his thoughts, his vision. So to make a judgment as such seems unwarranted when the non-fiction you are reading is supposed to be...more
You can definitely get that impression from this collection, although the conclusion would be unjustified. The articles are more or less supposed to be about him- his experiences, his thoughts, his vision. So to make a judgment as such seems unwarranted when the non-fiction you are reading is supposed to be...more
I think very highly of William Gibson. I've been vastly entertained by three of his novels and can't wait to get my hands on more of his fiction. But this collection of non-fiction pieces, written over a span of several decades, is a disappointment, likely to be of interest only to diehard Gibson fans.
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing here to change my impression that Gibson is smart, and a fundamentally nice guy. But pieces like the 1993 essay about his impressions of Singapore for "Wired", o...more
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing here to change my impression that Gibson is smart, and a fundamentally nice guy. But pieces like the 1993 essay about his impressions of Singapore for "Wired", o...more
I was amazingly entertained by theses boo, despite picking it up after a collarbone operation. The day I came home I was reading some other book trying to sleep and I was nor getting to sleep, neither getting distracted from the pain and discomfort. I decided to switch to this book, I haven't done it earlier, because I know how the author feels about nonfiction, and I was pretty sure I had read most of the essays. But I was immersed in a lovely world of details and transpositions, that got me th...more
I waffled for a long time on this one (between 2 and 3 stars). I had read Disneyland With The Death Penalty (Gibson's travel piece about Singapore) a while back, so when I heard there was a collection of his nonfiction out, I picked it up.
Unfortunately, a lot of it feels really same-y: there are two pieces about Japan/Tokyo that feel really similar, and two about film/radio/the Internet that feel really similar as well. There are a few album reviews that he did (cool!), and a few introductions t...more
Unfortunately, a lot of it feels really same-y: there are two pieces about Japan/Tokyo that feel really similar, and two about film/radio/the Internet that feel really similar as well. There are a few album reviews that he did (cool!), and a few introductions t...more
I initially conceived of my enjoyment of these essays as an extended exercise in reading from my father's point of view. The subject matter of the book could be generally described as "the future," though it's retrospective nature means that it is a lot about the past as well. Although I think my dad will love this book when I give him the audio recording for a birthday gift, by the end, I was really excited by the ways the book was making me think about my own big ideas. My dad taught me to lov...more
I like to say that I will read anything that William Gibson writes, but that's not exactly true as I've long overlooked The Difference Engine, co-written with Bruce Sterling (marking it down for this year). That said, this collection of Gibson's talks, essays, articles, and reviews is a fast but fun read for William Gibson fans. The best pieces in here are the long ones, specifically the two wired articles.
The first is "Disneyland with the Death Penalty," a 1993 piece about Singapore in which G...more
The first is "Disneyland with the Death Penalty," a 1993 piece about Singapore in which G...more
A nice collection of essays and non-fiction writing from William Gibson, whose fiction I've particularly liked in the past (at least most of the time). Likewise this book has some real winners and only a few misses. I found it to be a good book to pick up on occasion, for a chapter at a time or so. I really enjoyed the title-inspiring essay, "Time Machine Cuba", (available here: http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/ess...). In it he criticizes a pretension of some science fiction writers to underes...more
Picked this one up because of the essay on Singapore titled 'Disneyland with the Death Penalty'. A by now typical but slightly dated western characterization of the country as clean, efficient and dreadfully boring. The article was written in the 90s, which for Singapore might as well be another era given the rapid change since then - the easing of censorship and control being acknowledged by the author in a postscript. Looking back, I'm not sure that opening the floodgates to foreign media, ide...more
Feb 20, 2012
Everitt
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Japanophiles, Anglophiles, Gibson's Fans
I'm giving this a 3.5/5. Ordinarily I would have given it a strong 4/5 but most of the essays are available for free online, so unless you want the convenience of a single collection you would do well to just search the archives of Wired Magazine, The Observer, Time, Forbes ASAP or Gibson's website.
I haven't read a lot of Gibson but what I have read is very good and he is one of those authors I always mean to read more of, but there always seems to be some other book I'm obliged to read in the w...more
I haven't read a lot of Gibson but what I have read is very good and he is one of those authors I always mean to read more of, but there always seems to be some other book I'm obliged to read in the w...more
Surprisingly hard to put down. I read this in the span of a day. In retrospect, it's actually kind of hard for me to remember too many individual characters from Gibson's novels, and this collection does a great job of highlighting why that is. He has a knack for describing cities, technologies, and cultural movements in a very convincing and interesting way (the characters are often just sort of there for the ride). His point about us not being more freaked out about the fact that we can view a...more
Gibson has a tendency to repeat himself quite a bit in this collection of short nonfiction work spanning the period 1993-2011 (the drinking game for this book would have you take a shot every time he describes something as 'Borgesian'), but since we probably won't see a new novel for a few years, this isn't a bad way to tide over. Gibson's main thesis is that cultural change is ultimately driven by the advance of technology, and through that he tackles subjects such as the future of film making...more
William Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor utilizes, ahem, prodigious white/grey space. While the pages number 254, approximately 75 of these are white/gray dividers between articles/speeches/book introductions. So assume the text runs maybe 150 small pages. Does that mean Mr. Gibson and Co. are trying to pull a fast one on completist readers? I don't think so. While Distrust That Particular Flavor is short and far from cohesive, the gathering of the author's best non-fiction in one compac...more
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William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, having coined the term cyberspace in 1982 and popularized it in his first novel, Neuromancer(1984), which has sold more than 6.5 million copies wor...more
More about William Gibson...
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, having coined the term cyberspace in 1982 and popularized it in his first novel, Neuromancer(1984), which has sold more than 6.5 million copies wor...more
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Jan 10, 2013 05:32pm