A warning shout and an exclamation of wonder : 無料・フリー素材/写真
A warning shout and an exclamation of wonder / solarisgirl
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | Simple proof of how good this book was that in spite of the hype I was totally amazed by the ideas and visions in the book - all the sci-fi I had read or seen till now or even, well, my life in the early 20s (early 2020s I mean ;)) had not prepared me for it. A book written in 1984 and reading it in 2021 and I still loved the experience and emotion. I envy all those who had read this book when it was released all those years back. It would be so cool to go back in time to 1984 when it was first published, and experience it as person who had never seen the Internet or any technology today and have to really imagine what the things described in this book could look and feel and hurt like!This edition has an introduction by Gibson that was really interesting to read as he is writing it in 2004, when we had so much more tech and where people have MADE his cyberspace a reality :).It was quite funny that I did really mis-imagine the first famous line of the book The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.I really imagined it as a rainbow colored striped sky :D not as a gray static. But Gibson says in his introduction that he hopes the readers will cut him some slack for it. My experience was so strange -- I really did imagine it as rainbow striped and with that I was hit with the old childhood memory - dead TV station - no signal, the unnatural bright colorful striped, the weird pitch sound and the feeling of sadness. I suppose emotion was to be felt by a human for other humans, their actions, their exchanges. How completely odd, I felt sad because it was just a dead signal and I wanted the TV to keep me company. Anyway, though I imagined color not, grey, it did evoke the same emotion in me - the disappointment, the melancholy, and the emptiness - the color only made it worse. A gray matches the mood. Rainbow colors don't match the mood and feel even more disconcerting as a result - a true cyberpunk feeling in my opinion - a mishmash of tech n emotion and the feeling of being lost in something very unnatural - a neon sadness!Great afterword by Jack Womack too (title of this post is from it) - a nice salute to William Gibson. Nice bits about understanding our past before we move to imagining/living the future...[ I wish I could write some notes or tags or some analysis for the bits below. I stopped in my tracks (well figuratively) when reading some parts - I have some vague idea or connection to something I had read or seen before (whether Gibson intended that reference or not) , and I just didn't have time to write it down in detail...Like what was that part about the origami crane (just reminded me of Blade Runner, is that a co-incidence in this book?) and the woman saying she always gets it wrong because the neck is always twisted backward ? why?Or the part of USA being a bunch of capitalist megacorps ( something I hear from late stage capitalism guys in discussions today). Cash being outright illegal, I'm sure we are headed in that direction. The Moderns being like Anonymous? The Matrix callbacks are too many to note. Zion n the music n the literal concept of the word the matrix. Ugh I just want a Neuromancer movie so badly - the movie plan always seems to have been shelved for various reasons :\. Some parts made me tear up - Dixie asking Case to erase him after their job is done as he knows he is not "really" alive and feels like "nothing". Kinda linking it the old questions of reality and sentience from Peter Watts books. And the part about the every AI having a shot-gun aimed at its head - well the point in this book was that the trigger would be pulled by the Turing entity that is keeping a careful watch that the AI don't get too smart or what sentient I suppose. But reading of that recent ridiculous news of the Google engineer who declared his AI sentient (just because the AI said so, what even) and the serious questions of meaning of life and sentience and all that - this gun-to-the-head metaphor made me think of Sisyphus for some odd reason. An AI being made to discuss and debate the absurd and it's own reason for living -- now that would prove it has something human. Not the what and the how, but the why of living. To end, before this post gets too long, I really appreciated the end of the book where there is no big change. Bad guys killed, good guys win, nothing changes, things are things.][Edit: Its cool when some scifi reminds you of other scifi - was forced to watch Person of Interest recently, and the last minute of the last episode of season 1 really made me grin like a fool - the AI calls a payphone right next to the hero and he answers. Black out to the episode end. No one can convince me that wasn't a nod to the payphone scene in this book! :)). Ugh]Some bits I liked from this book:--Another vast omission is my failure to have quietly collapsed the Soviet Union and swept the rubble offstage when nobody was looking.Though there was a strategic reason for my not having done that. I had already done it to the United States, which cannot be proven to exist in the world of Neuromancer. It’s deliberately never mentioned as such, and one vaguely gathers that it’s somehow gone sideways in a puff of what we today would call globalization, to be replaced by some less dangerous combine of large corporations and city-states.It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal.He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.The Moderns, he’d decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns were a soft head variant on the Scientists. If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.“Jockeys all the same,” she said. “No imagination.”On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.“How you doing, Dixie?” “I’m dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.” “How’s it feel?” “It doesn’t.” “Bother you?” “What bothers me is, nothin’ does.” “How’s that?”“Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he’s tossin’ all night. Elroy. l said, what’s eatin’ you? Goddam thumb’s itchin’, he says. So l told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it’s the other goddam thumb.” When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine. “Do me a favor, boy.”“What’s that, Dix?” “This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.”...what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity’s brain. It’s rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let’s say you’re dealing with a small part of the man’s left brain. Difficult to say if you’re dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.”“Unreal,” he said, looking up again.“Nah,” she responded, assuming he meant the furs, “grow it on a collagen base, but it’s mink DNA. What’s it matter?”“Motive,” the construct said. “Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?”“Well, yeah, obviously.”“Nope. I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me, I’m not human either, but I respond like one. See?”“Wait a sec,” Case said. “Are you sentient, or not?”“Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...” The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case’s spine. “But I ain’t likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human.”“See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every Al ever built has an electro-magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”She laughed. “It won’t last.” “But it will,” he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, “that’s what’s so unnatural about it.”But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking, ignore it.She opened the purse and withdrew a paperbacked bubble with a blue derm inside. Something white tumbled to the floor; Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane. “Hideo gave it to me,” she said. “He tried to show me how, but I can’t ever get it right. The necks come out backwards.”“How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m curious.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. “I don’t cry, much.”“But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?” “I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.”“Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.” He rested the hand with the pistol on his knee and took a bottle from the table beside him, without bothering to choose from the half-dozen different liquors. He drank. Brandy. A trickle of the stuff ran from the corner of his mouth. “That is the way to handle tears.”Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the Al’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity.“You’re cracking. The ice is breaking up.”“No,” he said, suddenly sad, his fragile shoulders sagging. He rubbed his foot against the sand. “It is more simple than that. But the choice is yours.”He knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics. “But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. “I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference.”She’d seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and their other children — aside from 3Jane — she’d refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer. Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required.“So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?” “Things aren’t different. Things are things.”--Count ZeroI finished Count Zero and though I didn't like it as much a Neuromancer, it was a good read! Lot of twists, and the one part where the plane crashes and instead of the much mentioned and anticipated old man Christopher Mitchell, Turner finds a young woman was a nice twist. I was sitting in a salon while reading this section, and my very loud "what!" earned a lot of disapproving looks :D.Some nice bits from the book:--"Forgive me," she found herself saying, to her horror, "but I understood you to say that you live in a - a vat?""Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh. Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the world’s most expensive invalid. I was touched, Marly, at your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold."And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."It’s a history of the high-orbit industrial clans. A man at the University of Nice did it. Your Virek’s even in it, come to think; he’s cited as a counterexample, or rather as a type of parallel evolution. This fellow at Nice is interested in the paradox of individual wealth in a corporate age. in why it should still exist at all. Great wealth, I mean. He sees the high-orbit clans, people like the Tessier-Ashpools, as a very late variant on traditional patterns of aristocracy, late because the corporate mode doesn’t really allow for an aristocracy.""he’d just say that the Lord moved in strange ways…" He shrugged "He said God likes to talk to Himself…"-- |
| 撮影日 | 2022-06-11 15:13:40 |
| 撮影者 | solarisgirl |
| タグ | |
| 撮影地 | |
| カメラ | Nokia 8.1 , HMD Global |
| 露出 | 0.033 sec (1/30) |
| 開放F値 | f/1.8 |