VR

[gothwalk]

I've just finished reading William Gibson's Idoru. It brings to mind a few oddities of cyberpunk novels of the 80s and early 90s. The main one being that cyberspace in them appears to conceived in one of two ways - highly stylistic, or highly realistic. In the stylistic version, everything is represented through simple looking avatars and icons. The second one has everything looking solid and three dimensional, a level or two above the iconic meanings of the stylistic one.

I think the cyberpunk writers didn't know people very well, because the "back streets" and dead areas of these cyberspaces are depicted as either either empty space, or realistic back alleys and abandoned side streets. But the dead areas of real cyberspaces are not like that. Look at the web - a good proportion of it is untended kitsch. It's not empty, or backstreet-y, it's just pastel or primary colours, tacky graphics, and pages dedicated to such-and-such.

But I'm not sure I'd want the novels to be like that. I like their versions better.

Comments

[podling]

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's usually depicted how they'd like it to be, when really, how it *has* actually developed is quite different. Sometimes I look at it like that's all the elite areas of whichever cyberspace area is operational in the particular universe. I think George Alec Effinger's dealing with it, or rather, more or less not dealing with it in his "When Gravity Fails" series was a decent approach. And I really like the way Daniel Keys Moran describes cyberspace in his novels. He rocks.