William Gibson - Footnotes

Footnotes

. ^ The New York Times Magazine and Gibson himself report his age at the time of his father's death to be six years old, while Gibson scholar Tatiani Rapatzikou claims in The Literary Encyclopedia that he was eight years old.
. ^ Several track names on Hamm's Kings of Sleep album ("Black Ice", "Count Zero", "Kings of Sleep") reference Gibson's work.
. ^ Idol released an album in 1993 titled Cyberpunk, which featured a track named Neuromancer. Robert Christgau excoriated Idol's treatment of cyberpunk, and Gibson later stated that Idol had "turned it into something very silly."
. ^ Zevon's 1989 album Transverse City was inspired by Gibson's fiction.
. ^ Gibson later successfully resisted attempts by Autodesk to copyright the word for their abortive foray into virtual reality.
. ^ Both the Internet with its dramatic social effects and the cyberpunk genre itself were also anticipated in John Brunner's 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.
. ^ The idea of a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site was first described in 1962 in a series of memos on the "Galactic Computer Network" by J.C.R. Licklider of DARPA.

Neuromancer was written on a "clockwork typewriter," the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane's office in Chiba City. This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930's. It's a very tough and elegant piece of work, from the factory of E. PAILLARD & Cie S.A. YVERDON (SUISSE). Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green- and-black "crackle" paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant's ledger. Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.) In its day, the Hermes 2000 was one of the best portable writing-machines in the world, and one of the most expensive. This one belonged to my wife's step-grandfather, who had been a journalist of sorts and had used it to compose laudatory essays on the poetry of Robert Burns. I used it first to write undergraduate Eng. lit. papers, then my early attempts at short stories, then Neuromancer, all without so much as ever having touched an actual computer.