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terrikoI went to see William Gibson talk at the writer's festival this week, and I mostly just wanted to brag, so I guess I have to write about him. ;)
As the Internet no doubt can tell you, he's an interesting speaker, and I was surprised to find him less polished than other authors I've gone to see. And I don't mean that as a bad thing at all: in a lot of ways it made him feel more human. I've noticed that there's a whole subset of authors who feel that they are God's Gift to the Genre (miko usually uses Robert J. Sawyer as her prime example of this) and I'm always a little leery at the beginning of a talk as to whether this is going to be one of those but Gibson put me immediately at ease. Very candid, very honest, and pleasantly funny when talking about how he writes.
I particularly loved when he was talking about crowdsourcing details. He'd been looking for some information about where to find security cameras in some area (an airport maybe? I forget.) and got a pile of different responses to his twitter query. Of course, he says none of them agreed with each other, but then he points out that as a fiction writer, he doesn't have to worry about the accuracy of responses: he can choose the one that works best with his narrative and modify as necessary. I love this, because it's almost exactly my approach to using biology within artificial life algorithms: I don't really care if a model is rudimentary or even proven to be inaccurate in living organisms. If it's interesting and fits my code narrative, I can use it as a base for neat ideas anyhow. I guess artificial life is pretty much the speculative fiction of the code world. I mean, I basically spent a year wondering if email could be treated like proteins and whether we could develop immunity to bad emails. That's my master's thesis, but doesn't it sound a little like spec fic?
I've been out to a few other writer's festival events, including a very inspiring talk by the exceptional Jane Goodall, but William Gibson is the first author whose talk made me think, "wow, I should really get back to writing." I do a lot of writing, but very little creative writing nowadays, and he's the first to make me really yearn for it.
As the Internet no doubt can tell you, he's an interesting speaker, and I was surprised to find him less polished than other authors I've gone to see. And I don't mean that as a bad thing at all: in a lot of ways it made him feel more human. I've noticed that there's a whole subset of authors who feel that they are God's Gift to the Genre (
miko usually uses Robert J. Sawyer as her prime example of this) and I'm always a little leery at the beginning of a talk as to whether this is going to be one of those but Gibson put me immediately at ease. Very candid, very honest, and pleasantly funny when talking about how he writes.I particularly loved when he was talking about crowdsourcing details. He'd been looking for some information about where to find security cameras in some area (an airport maybe? I forget.) and got a pile of different responses to his twitter query. Of course, he says none of them agreed with each other, but then he points out that as a fiction writer, he doesn't have to worry about the accuracy of responses: he can choose the one that works best with his narrative and modify as necessary. I love this, because it's almost exactly my approach to using biology within artificial life algorithms: I don't really care if a model is rudimentary or even proven to be inaccurate in living organisms. If it's interesting and fits my code narrative, I can use it as a base for neat ideas anyhow. I guess artificial life is pretty much the speculative fiction of the code world. I mean, I basically spent a year wondering if email could be treated like proteins and whether we could develop immunity to bad emails. That's my master's thesis, but doesn't it sound a little like spec fic?
I've been out to a few other writer's festival events, including a very inspiring talk by the exceptional Jane Goodall, but William Gibson is the first author whose talk made me think, "wow, I should really get back to writing." I do a lot of writing, but very little creative writing nowadays, and he's the first to make me really yearn for it.
More than a little
Date: November 3rd, 2010 05:36 am (UTC)Actually, that sounds very similar to a major plotpoint in Peter Watts's "Rifters" trilogy. "Smart gels" are used as adaptive anti-malware filters to deal with an ecosystem of self-reproducing, evolving smart viruses that have all but taken over the internet.
Alex
Re: More than a little
Date: November 3rd, 2010 01:53 pm (UTC)Re: More than a little
Date: November 7th, 2010 07:26 am (UTC)Incidentally, the entire trilogy (along with the rest of Watts's work) are CC-licensed and available in a plentitude of formats on his website (rifters.com).