←back to thread

181 points ohjeez | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
Show context
netcoyote ◴[] No.41853848[source]
William Gibson: You are an adequate but drug-addled hacker, navigating dangerous, high-tech worlds where blurred realities, conspiracies, and corporate power struggles force you to uncover hidden truths, survive against powerful forces, and ultimately question the nature of identity, technology, and control.

Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch cereal.

replies(2): >>41854024 #>>41864107 #
1. atombender ◴[] No.41864107[source]
I think you're giving Gibson too much credit. It's more like: Mysterious person with unlimited resources hires scrappy set of hacker types to obtain a McGuffin, which usually someone else is also seeking out. They find the McGuffin. Mysterious backer reveals themselves in some way. The end.

That's the plot of every single novel. In Neuromancer: Case & co. is hired by Armitage. In Count Zero Turner is hired to rescue a scientist out of a biolab, although the McGuffin is the scientist's daughter; there is a second hire plot involving a mysterious millionaire hiring an art curator to look for an art piece. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, Mona is hired by a mysterious group for a gig that turns out to be a way to kidnap a McGuffin. Not much else happens. In Virtual Light, Rydell is hired to recover a McGuffin stolen by another character. In Pattern Recognition, Cayce is hired by a mysterious millionaire to trace an obscuree Internet video. In The Peripheral, the main character is hired by a mysterious group to remotely patrol a building. And so on.

It's like Gibson can't invent a plot where the plot isn't about work. And the person hiring the main character is always this shady and incredibly wealthy individual, so that the main character can be supported by all their resources.

Blurred realities and questions about identity doesn't sound like any Gibson book I've read. That sounds more like Philip K. Dick.