Download or read book Agency written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. *The Boston Globe

Download or read book The Peripheral written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Agency presents a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that takes a terrifying look into the future. DON'T MISS THE SERIES—NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON PRIME VIDEO! Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go. Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby. Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad. Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

Download or read book Distrust That Particular Flavor written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of New York Times bestselling author William Gibson’s articles and essays about contemporary culture—a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture... Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times, and the Observer, these articles and essays cover thirty years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave. “Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us.”—The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Pattern Recognition written by William Gibson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2004-06-24 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Part-detective story, part-cultural snapshot . . . all bound by Gibson's pin-sharp prose' Arena -------------- THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE BLUE ANT TRILIOGY - READ ZERO HISTORY AND SPOOK COUNTRY FOR MORE Cayce Pollard has a new job. She's been offered a special project: track down the makers of an addictive online film that's lighting up the internet. Hunting the source will take her to Tokyo and Moscow and put her in the sights of Japanese hackers and Russian Mafia. She's up against those who want to control the film, to own it - who figure breaking the law is just another business strategy. The kind of people who relish turning the hunter into the hunted . . . A gripping spy thriller by William Gibson, bestselling author of Neuromancer. Part prophesy, part satire, Pattern Recognition skewers the absurdity of modern life with the lightest and most engaging of touches. Readers of Neal Stephenson, Ray Bradbury and Iain M. Banks won't be able to put this book down. -------------- 'Fast, witty and cleverly politicized' Guardian 'A big novel, full of bold ideas . . . races along like an expert thriller' GQ 'Dangerously hip. Its dialogue and characterization will amaze you. A wonderfully detailed, reckless journey of espionage and lies' USA Today 'A compelling, humane story with a sympathetic heroine searching for meaning and consolation in a post-everything world' Daily Telegraph 'Electric, profound. Gibson's descriptions of Tokyo, Russia and London are surreally spot-on' Financial Times

Download or read book Zero History written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend again. But now she’s broke, and Bigend has just the thing to get her back in the game... Milgrim can disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic—so much so that he spoke it with his therapist in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of his addiction... Garreth doesn't owe Bigend a thing. But he does have friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors powerful people need when things go sideways... They all have something Bigend wants as he finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift, after a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy they can out-Bigend Bigend himself. “Zero History is [Gibson’s] best yet, a triumph of science fiction as social criticism and adventure.”—BoingBoing.net

Download or read book Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology written by Anna McFarlane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the ‘godfather of cyberpunk’, William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of ‘gestalt’ psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked identities found in cyberpunk, the author draws out relations with key cultural moments of the last 40 years: postmodernism, posthumanism, 9/11, and the Anthropocene. By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical level, as well as on an aesthetic level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts. Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology.

Download or read book Spook Country written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer. • spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.” • country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. • spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live. Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him... “A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World

Download or read book Conversations with Tim O Brien written by Patrick A. Smith and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-10-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with the author of Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried

Download or read book Virtual Light written by William Gibson and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES bestseller • 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. The millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich—or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash. . . . Praise for Virtual Light “Both exhilarating and terrifying . . . Although considered the master of 'cyberpunk' science fiction, William Gibson is also one fine suspense writer.”—People “A stunner . . . A terrifically stylish burst of kick-butt imagination.”—Entertainment Weekly “Convincing . . . frightening . . . Virtual Light is written with a sense of craft, a sense of humor and a sense of the ultimate seriousness of the problems it explores.”—Chicago Tribune “In the emerging pop culture of the information age, Gibson is the brightest star.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

Download or read book Conversations with William Gibson written by Patrick A. Smith and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with the author of Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History

Download or read book All Tomorrow s Parties written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-02-04 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...

Download or read book Burning Chrome written by William Gibson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A breath of fresh air . . . the vision is deeply imagined, very complete and controlled . . . Gibson is truly brilliant.”—Washington Times magazine From a true master of science fiction comes a collection of short stories that show how, no matter the length, Gibson is one of the greatest writers working today. Known for his seminal science fiction novel Neuromancer, and for the acclaimed books Pattern Recognition, The Peripheral, and Agency, William Gibson is actually best when writing short fiction. Tautly written and suspenseful, Burning Chrome collects 10 short stories, including some written with Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and Michael Swanwick, and with a preface from Bruce Sterling, now available for the first time in trade paperback. These brilliant, high-resolution stories show Gibson’s characters and intensely realized worlds at their absolute best, from the chip-enhanced couriers of “Johnny Mnemonic” to the street-tech melancholy of “Burning Chrome.”

Download or read book The Difference Engine written by William Gibson and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history—and the future: Sybil Gerard—a fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator Edward “Leviathan” Mallory—explorer and paleontologist Laurence Oliphant—diplomat, mystic, and spy. Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for…. Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine is the collaborative masterpiece by two of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today. Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, it is a startling extension of Gibson’s and Sterling’s unique visions—and the beginning of movement we know today as “steampunk!”

Download or read book The Sands of Mars written by Arthur Charles Clarke and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Proxy written by Alex London and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Put down what you’re doing and read this book. Right now. The complex characters, intricate world, and blistering pace are off-the-charts amazing.” —Marie Lu, author of the Legend trilogy Syd’s life is not his own. As a proxy he must to pay for someone else's crimes. When his patron Knox crashes a car and kills someone, Syd is branded and sentenced to death. The boys realize the only way to beat the system is to save each other so they flee. The ensuing cross-country chase will uncover a secret society of rebels, test the boys' resolve, and shine a blinding light onto a world of those who owe and those who pay. This fast-paced thrill ride of a novel is full of breakneck action, shocking twists and heart-hammering suspense that will have readers gasping until the very last page. This edition includes a exclusive bonus story featuring Syd and Knox! “Looking for an awesome YA summer read? Look no further than Alex London’s Proxy.” —EW.com “Whipping Boy + Blade Runner with a sprinkling of The Hunger Games (plus, of course, a dash of A Tale of Two Cities) = a treat for teen SF fans.” —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book Pamphlet Architecture 15 War and Architecture written by Lebbeus Woods and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War and Architecture is a timely and moving response by architect Lebbeus Woods to the bombing of Sarajevo. With text in both English and Croatian, accompanied by the author's exquisitely drawn, hauntingly beautiful proposals, the book is both dedicated and addressed to the citizens of this ravaged city. Lebbeus Woods has long been fascinated by the intimate ties between architecture and violence. He identifies the two predominant patterns for rebuilding cities following catastrophic destruction: restoring the city exactly to its previous, "historical" state; or "erasing" the remains of the city to construct a new utopia. These, he argues, are twin forms of denial. Woods draws an analogy to the process of biological and emotional healing, presenting architectural forms that act as "injections," "scabs," "scars," and "new tissue," within the complex organism of a city. "Only by facing the insanity of willful destruction," he argues, "can reason begin to believe again in itself."

Download or read book Idoru written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-01-07 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best novel William Gibson has ever written about the world we’re entering daily. Neuromancer made Gibson famous; Idoru cements that fame.”—The Washington Post Book World 21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature... Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the “signature” an individual creates simply by going about the business of living. But Laney knows how to sift for the dangerous bits. Which makes him useful—to certain people. Chia McKenzie is here on a rescue mission. She’s fourteen. Her idol is the singer Rez, of the band Lo/Rez. When the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club decided that he might be in trouble in Tokyo, they sent Chia to check it out. Rei Toei is the idoru—the beautiful, entirely virtual media star adored by all Japan. Rez has declared that he will marry her. This is the rumor that has brought Chia to Tokyo. True or not, the idoru and the powerful interests surrounding her are enough to put all their lives in danger...