William Gibson - Cyberpunk - BBC Late Show © 1991

SF writer William Gibson
interview + reading from his own work
BBC Late Show ©1991

[@Adriipht6969]

I'm 100% convinced Keanu used WIlliam Gibsons voice as a reference for Johnny Silverhand. It sounds so similar

[@JD.78]

Nothing instills the sense of retro-futurism than a copy of Neuromancer sitting beside a Walkman. If you know, you know...

[@SoonGone]

Is this a reference to something?

[@05Rudey]

He wrote Neuromancer while I was still using a Vic-20, long before the public really knew about a thing called the internet, yet Gibson visualised not only the Internet, but a very likely future of the virtual-reality equivalent of the Internet, which was a big thing in the 90's, but the technology just wasn't there and sort of died and faded out of popularity. VR became popular again, imo when Oculus Rift where making waves in the tech community 2010(ish). He is a visionary.

[@LindsayKay]

Probably a big part of why the novel worked so well - one had to use imagination! The reality of much of this tech in the 20th/21st century is kind of a downer. The engineer in me is torn and wants secretly to go Luddite at times.

[@Y2Kr4SHM4N]

That’s why I got into VR. Sure, I played VR titles on the amiga at games expos, but in the 2010s, I was totally thinking Neuromancer.

[@wolfgangschmid7812]

i remember being a young kid in the 90’s and the closest i saw to VR was a very short lived thing at 6 flags. even if it didn’t crash all the time, it wasn’t worth the line at all

[@eyeseer1]

Tron lightly predated what Gibson wrote in 1984 and what The Matrix emphasizes in 1999. A futurist window for 1984.

[@loganriling4888]

@@eyeseer1 is tron considered "cyberpunk" material?

[@LindsayKay]

Burning Chrome hit me like a ketamine brick when I was a teen. Late nights writing code and listening to industrial music, then that came along, phew.

[@tylerperkinson1677]

What years, and what industrial? Sounds like the life I should have lived. Was there any Skinny Puppy in there?

[@joshcraft197]

Sounds dreamy af

[@MLB9000]

Gibson invented 1.5 new genres, not bad considering most writers don’t even invent any.

[@thomasjardine2108]

1.5?

[@MLB9000]

Cyberpunk 1, and 0.5 of Steampunk @@thomasjardine2108

[@thomasjardine2108]

@@MLB9000 I'm not sure he did anything along the lines of Steampunk

[@MLB9000]

@@thomasjardine2108 From wikipedia: "Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre steampunk."

[@Ikkei-4444]

Listening to William gibson readings of neuromancer gives me the same feeling/rush/awe of seeing a gorgeous car or a stunning woman, it throws me into a trance and takes my breath away and I’m just dumbfounded

[@Sephor69]

What if it is kind of primordial instinct of our brain giving us clues that we in a simulation trying to wake up

[@dirkdiggler.]

This guy fucks his car

[@marypoppins1853]

Gayest statement ever

[@totalpartykill999]

interesting.

[@yegenek]

Can you believe he is 43 years old here?

[@ToABrighterFuture]

And he still has hair!

[@JordanREALLYreally]

And not gray!

[@richarddeese1991]

Thanks. This series of videos has certainly been an unusual & entertaining look into the origins of cyberspace & the cyberpunk aesthetic. There have clearly been many, many stories involving computers, long before they were a common & central part of our personal lives. What's most fascinating to me is how, just when that was actually happening in the late 70s & early 80s - but long before anything like the internet ever began to take shape - we started telling ourselves new stories altogether. There seemed to be a very unconscious fear & loneliness - or the anticipation of such - in us, of becoming lost in a purely technological & computerized landscape. And right then, we saw stories emerge wherein writers of books, movies, etc., helped us deal with that, by envisioning just such a world. The protagonists of these tales did, indeed, find themselves in breathtaking vistas entirely wrought in ones & zeros - the digital bits of a computer dreamworld made real. It may have been exactly the right therapeutic regimen we needed, to prepare us for the blossoming age of the human / computer interface. I find it nothing short of amazing that a few people had the vision to look ahead and see some of the issues we would face, and the courage to show it to us before we were engulfed by it. So thank you to all those who gave us a little taste - and a warning - of things to come. tavi.

[@KlausBahnhof]

Nice to hear Kraftwerk's Technopop on this.

[@sofiagisondi5543]

GOD THE PERFECT CROSS OVER

[@wesesheskhnemtuhit]

Gibson and Sterling are giants! It's fun there's also Timothy Leary throwing in his 5 cents.

[@mheiseus]

A true prophet of sci-fi up there with Jules Verne

[@SanFran51]

"Tell me more about this Cyberspace..... do you think it will catch on?"

[@johnnykobra7256]

It's not like I use drugs......my body has just grown a major drug defecency.

[@seanturner1197]

It just hit me; Hal Emmerich, aka Otacon and his Dad, Huey, bear a strong resemblance to William Gibson. Did Kojima also read Neuromancer?

[@will-love-lvx]

Oh I would say he did.

[@anurag3619]

Absolutely he did. Necromancer is the CyberBible

[@seanturner1197]

@@anurag3619 I knew it. I wonder if William Gibson is doing alright. It seems like neauromancer was just a one hit. I hope he's doing okay.

[@3ertin]

Cyberspace, Microsoft, Yonderboy, the Matrix

[@eyeseer1]

Quantum computers, Bots, data mining, identity theft, Memes, Google goggles, catfishing.

[@scr3wage]

Angel Biotech... where are you now

[@numberfive2848]

"The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise was quoted extensively in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The parallel with Babbage's computing machines is made explicit, as allowing plausibility to the theory that transmutation of species could be pre-programmed." ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage )

[@Peace2051]

This is amazingly prescient considering that it was made a third of a century ago!

[@JohnTLyon]

Punk is outlaw. Dangerous. Anarchic. Gotta love it!

[@Asterisk_OS]

Thanks for uploading this.

[@danielbergstrom3526]

Beautiful, Archaic, Nostalgic - but still in the future. Weird...

[@JohnTLyon]

The Difference Engine... Is this the birth of steampunk?

[@razumijinatreides4691]

There are steampunk novels and short stories before 1990. Tim Powers' "The gates of Anubis" is from the 80's I believe and KW Jeter coined the term in those years.

[@darthmemeious9526]

with virtual reality being what it is, i really wish we had developed sim stim instead.

[@freakyfadge]

"I really don't think of myself as a predictive, extrapolative science fiction writer..." Sorry mate, that's what you are

[@theboogie_monsta]

0:34 droid has left the chat

[@ryangarritty9761]

I used to love BBC2's The Late Show.

[@warmecanic]

2:09 wait a second, burning chrome was earlier than neuromancer, right?

[@cybertrophic]

Yup. A short story he wrote there (“Johnny Mnemonic”) really started the idea, but it was expanded upon and crystallised with Neuromancer. Mona Lisa Overdrive is the sequel.

[@Disco1000]

Wonderful. Thank you!

[@BADSOI]

Why is this 2024 in a nutshell?

[@exiles_dot_tv]

Almost sounds like William Gibson has a British accent in some parts of this.

[@popeyedoyle6360]

He's from Canada no?

[@enzocignetti6359]

It sounds almost southern, he has a certain drawl

[@godofchaoskhorne5043]

No cyber does not mean pilot old son

[@daliparton777]

6:36 with a Gertrude Stein quote? Nice reinterpretation of it.

[@plunderpunk2]

5:08 is what we do all day in part to absorb content incl. Gibson's

[@mheiseus]

God damn he was so right

[@MrJibsIV]

Harrowing.

[@palchristianandersen9086]

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My cyber garage was covered in cyber graffiti. "This has to be the work of those damn cyberpunks from up the street," I thought. I turned back from the window to face the television in the living room. It was tuned to a dead channel. An anger rose up inside me. The same anger that had helped me get through the GONGO-12 conflict in the BLING BLONG sector. "They cut my cable. Those damn cyberpunks cut my cable!" -William Gibson, The Cyberpunks.

[@bcx1138]

Liberal arts majors will always be the most brilliant ppl

[@JoaoChimay]

so the vr already existed in the 90's huh...

[@Mynipplesmychoice]

João Macario tablets to but sucked wnd was useless. They had srlf driving cars in the eighties which wasnt bad

[@RhysOlwyn]

There was a VR based game show on TV here in the UK in the early 90s called Cyber Zone

[@themarsvoltas]

I remember going to Ceder Point and they had Duke Nuke'em VR in the early 90's. Similar what we got now. A bigger contraption.

[@eyeseer1]

VR was popularized in 1990, but “cyberspace” was phrased in 1984.

[@will-love-lvx]

Yea, but it sucked.

[@bernardocoto8519]

Cool, he's a great writer with a lot of style and creativity, yet he's so dismissive about everything surrounding cyberpunk, I guess he was afraid the fad would overwhelm his writing...

[@ToABrighterFuture]

Well, there is that part in Neuromancer that involves the precise ringing of a bunch of pay phones. To be fair, widespread cellular use wasn't going to be on the horizon for a few more years. If you watch Series 1 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), for instance, their communicators would still have been sci-fi at the time. In the 2003 series, they would be called "Shell cells." Technology moves fast, even in sci-fi.

[@enzocignetti6359]

He’s just not pretentious about it

[@End-Result]

The fateful year most of us elderly millennials were born...

[@AleksandarBloom]

what do you mean? seriously.

[@The-Autistic-Rat]

Nah that's closer to the end of millenials

[@hanniffydinn6019]

He does time travel now ...

[@joshporter5205]

... sorta.

[@ConeFlower-gx2qk]

It’s that accent that get to me. It’s reminds me of someone trying to covering up a southern accent. Maybe I’m projecting cuz I’m from Atlanta but it sounds like my friends and I talking. I mean he’s from North Carolina right?

[@Calypso694]

Gibson is overrated.

[@riggsbr1]

You’re overrated

[@tkeleth2931]

@@riggsbr1 nah, somebody has to give a shit to overrate something

[@freqout674]

I place videos on KZbin out of respect and interest. No need to hear somebody saying what he doesn't like about it. But if you feel the urge, then do that on your own KZbin channel. Simple as that.