Legendary author William Gibson appeared at the New York Public Library on April 19, and he read the first couple pages from his futuristic new novel, The Peripheral. Check out the first chapter, "The Gone Haptics." That amazing prose just sticks to your mind.
Further proof that reality has become a William Gibson novel
While musing on Twitter about an app that could generate a "wholly fictitious but believable Facebook persona," William Gibson received confirmation (or at least, an anecdote) that reality is at least as weird as working for Bigend in his most recent trilogy. Here's what artist Greg Borenstein told him:
How would the William Gibson of 1984 have described the Internet of…
William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and he's still predicting the myriad possibilities of our technological tomorrows, but how might Gibson have described our modern Internet at the time he was writing Neuromancer? Over at Something Awful, Zack Parsons' short parody of Gibson's writing style imagines how our…
A Dystopian Movie that Gives You the Glorious Weirdness that All the…
The publicity materials for the new Russian movie Generation P describe it as William Gibson meets William S. Burroughs. Which is a pretty bold claim. But with its strange drug trips, ancient conspiracies and computer-generated politicians, this weird satire of Yeltsin-era crony capitalism almost lives up to those two…
Fake William Gibson tweets authentically clever Gibson-inspired book…
Twitter novelty account Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) assures us that it contains "Synopses for William Gibson novels that are definitely 100% real, but only in a timeline with greater authenticity than this one." While some of the writer's pastiches of Gibson's futuristic global politics, explorations of…
The first Neuromancer poster is just pure cyberpunk awesome
Here it is, the fist "official" glimpse into Vincenzo Natali's vision of William Gibson's Neuromancer world. And it's just great. Sure it's not much to go on, but it's a gritty-looking finger, with an invitation to jack in. Sold.
"Unfilmable" Science Fiction and Fantasy Books That Somehow Got Filmed
Next week sees the release of Cloud Atlas, the movie version of one of the most famously unfilmable books of all time. But Cloud Atlas isn't the first supposedly unfilmable book to make it to the screen. There have been several classic novels that everybody thought couldn't be captured on film — until somebody did it.…
William Gibson: The Most Important Writer of the Past 30 Years?
Over at Scholars & Rogues, there's a great essay honoring William Gibson, and making the case that he's the most important author of the past three decades. The linchpin of the argument: Gibson not only transformed science fiction, he changed how we think about technology. Recognizing that science fiction was…
Is Bill and Ted the most realistic time travel movie of all time?
What are the dumbest tropes in time travel fiction? This week on the io9 show, we recount the temporal storylines that drive us nuts. And then we catch up with Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, who explains how time travel could happen in real life — and why Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure might be the most…
William Gibson: the Complete io9 Interview
What is the novel for? How do we deal with living in such a futuristic time, without getting future shock? Do novelists have a duty to provide optimism about science and the future? We sat down with William Gibson, for a half-hour discussion about writing and the role of science fiction in society. And here's what he…
