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William Gibson

William Gibson Books

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Neuromancer

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Agency

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Count Zero

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Burning Chrome

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Idoru

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Zero History

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Spook Country

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Virtual Light

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Related Quotes

“She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in… She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working, sitting up in Lanette's, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you could feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow. It's called money, Lanette said. It's called money. You just slip it in.”

MoneyBrainCyberpunk
Book:Mona Lisa Overdrive
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“There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.”

InspirationalThoughtsThe Difference Engine
Author:William Gibson
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“Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas.... Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another.”

FashionSoldiersNinjaMallWannabeGear QueerMitty
Book:Zero History
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“Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said.”

CapitalismScience FictionMultinationalsSentienceCyberpunk ScifiFbCambridge AnalyticaPost IndustrialData WarsSentient Capital
Book:Burning Chrome
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“As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area. Lowbeer did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan.”

LondonTime TravelCyberpunkKleptocracyRussian MafiaViolent Non State Actor
Book:Agency
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“Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. Voodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?”

ReligionVoodou
Book:Count Zero
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“Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.”

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Author:William Gibson
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“We’ve sourced something field-expedient,” Ash began, “from what little’s available there…She’s a surprisingly advanced product of the early militarization of machine intelligence…They saw it as cloning complexly specific skill sets.” █ Netherton nodded, hoping his eyes weren’t visibly glazing. █ “There were, for instance, individuals adroit at managing what were termed competitive control areas…complexly volatile environments, where you might easily lose prized field operators.”

Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningSpecial OperationsStateless NationViolent Non State Actor
Book:Agency
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“The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed. A gull cried, "Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you." Neuromancer”

Neuromancer
Author:William Gibson
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“Gomi. Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century's systematic dumping. Gomi, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, carefully plowed under. London's relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generation of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it. Gomi in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. The apparent lack of planning alone was enough to dizzy her, running so entirely opposite the value her own culture placed on efficient land use. Her tax ride from the airport had already shown her decay, whole blocks in ruins, unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash. And faces staring as the armoed hover made its way through the streets.”

CyberpunkNeuromancerSprawl
Book:Mona Lisa Overdrive
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“He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder. He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight. "Hey, bro," said a directionless voice. "It's Case, man. Remember?" "Miami, joeboy, quick study." "What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?" "Nothin'." "Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?" "You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?" "Ca--your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?" "Good question." "Remember me being here, a second ago?" "No." "Know how a ROM personality construct works?" "Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct." "So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential real-time memory?" "Guess so," said the construct. "Okay, Dix,. You are a ROM construct. Got me?" "If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?" "Case." "Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study.”

NeuromancerMccoy PauleyDixie Flatline
Book:Neuromancer
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“The bartender pursed his lips and nodded when she showed him one of her bills, so she told him to get her a shot of bourbon and a beer on the side, which was what Eddy always got if he was paying for it himself. If somebody else was paying, he'd order mixed drinks the bartender didn't know how to make, then spend a lot of time explaining exactly how you made the thing. Then he'd drink it and bitch about how it wasn't as good as the ones they made in L.A. or Singapore or some other place she knew he'd never been.”

CyberpunkNeuromancer
Book:Mona Lisa Overdrive
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“The City, Netherton had heard Lowbeer say, explaining the "klept" to Flynne, had long been, and well prior to the jackpot, a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same.”

OligarchyPost ApocalypticCyberpunkCity Of LondonDemocracy FailsBanking Elite
Book:Agency
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“Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's Rainbow (1973) several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into Pynchon early on- I remember seeing a New York Times review of V. when it first came out- I was just a kid- and thinking, Boy, that sounds like some really weird shit!”

Pynchon
Author:William Gibson
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“No," said Blackwell, "she won't, because that would be a violation of the very personal terms I will have established in our conversation. That's the key word here, Laney, 'personal.' 'Up close, and.' We will not meet, we will not carve out this deep and meaningful and bloody unforgettable episode of mutual face-time as representatives of our respective faceless corporations. Not at all. It's one-on-one time for your Kathy and I, and it may well prove to be as intimate, and I may hope enlightening, as any she ever had. Because I will bring a new certainty into her life, and we all need certainties. They help build character. And I will leave your Kathy with the deepest possible conviction that if she crosses me, she will die-but only after she's been made to desire that, absolutely." And Black-well's smile, then, giving Laney the full benefit of his dental prosthesis, was hideous. "Now how was it exactly you were supposed to contact her, to give her your decision?”

Life PhilosophyCertaintiesGibsonIdoru
Book:Idoru
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“Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

EyeRunningDesireDarkImagineWeekColorBabyMouthsUniversalElectionSizeExtremesWideRagePresidentialVotingLive ByCoveredSweatPotatoesMutePresidential ElectionInfantileHippo
Book:Idoru
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