Tag Archives: William Gibson

dystopias

When I went to put The Sheep Look Up back in the bookshelf, I saw a couple of other books there that might qualify as dystopias.

I need to say that I’ve been reading science fiction since I was about 12 years old. That’s more than 50 years, kids! I used to have a large collection but gave away many in my last couple of moves. In my opinion, the ones I have left are the best of the best. Certain authors are well represented: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Joe Haldeman from the 1950’s through 1970’s. Others have only one.

Alas, Babylon is the only book by Pat Frank in my collection. Actually, I can’t remember even reading anything else by him. It’s not really dystopian. It’s the story of a small community in Florida after a nuclear exchange. Just looking at the book spine today triggered a thought that that was similar to the Brunner stories.

The other one that seemed similar in my mind was the Larry Niven novel about a comet hitting the earth, Lucifer’s Hammer. That’s not really a dystopia either.

John Varley’s Titan trilogy would qualify as dystopian even though the bulk of the action takes place away from earth. In it, the madness of humans destroying their home planet drives the story.

Since the basic technique of science fiction is to imagine a future world and build a story around it, it shouldn’t be surprising that most are rather dark.

Younger authors that I like a lot have written about dystopias. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and the early William Gibson novels, beginning with Neuromancer, are clearly dystopian.

The more I write that word, the less I like it. Maybe I’ll do a list of the SF novels in my library – not that many, less than 50 – and do a quick description/review. Some are hopeful . . .

dreams

I want to document the extraordinary dream I had last night. I don’t usually remember my dreams but I can still – more than an hour after waking – remember this dream.

It was sort of like a Gibson-esque sojourn into cyberspace. I was moving in some kind of electronic environment and someone or something was looking for me. Someone or something that I wanted to remain hidden from. I had the ability to move amidst representations of data and manipulate it to some extent. It was all very abstract; I had no body. I remember thinking about the speed at which it was all happening and wondering what the speed was compared to the corporal world. I thought it was much, much faster.

I am also reminded of the character Gaby Plauget in the John Varley novel Demon. It’s too complicated to try to explain fully here. Read the whole Titan trilogy! Anyway, there’s a scene where Gaby is moving among what are clearly atomic particles where their movements can be clearly seen. In my case, I didn’t feel that I was sensing particles but images representative of data and I could manipulate that data.

Meaning? Who knows? It’s just so rare that I remember a dream I wanted to write it down. FWIW, I had a 16 hour day at Davies yesterday and didn’t take any sleeping pills before bed. I slept straight through from about 12:30 to 7:15 or so. That’s not bad.

Not really dreams but this is as good a place as any to mention the mini nightmares I get while driving these winter days. At night, driving City streets, it’s the worst. Usually it’s a bicycle rider appearing suddenly from behind a parked car or an intersection.