The Geek Canon

Wil Wheaton, erstwhile TV star and geek icon has taken up a gig at the Suicide Girls site (soft-core Goth porn, and NSFW). His latest post identifies the five most important geek books - and being true to my nature I find all kinds of problems with the list immediately. (No William Burroughs, Neal Stephenson, or Philp K. Dick?) But he does nail it down nicely on William Gibson - who deoes, of course, belong on the list. About Neuromancer:

Its opening line is one of the most repeated and well-known in the geek universe, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Of course, when Neuromancer was written, that meant the sky was a dull grey color, perhaps broken in places by swirling eddies of darkness in the clouds, but if it were written today, it would actually mean the sky was a clear, bright blue color, creating quite a different mood in the heavens above Chiba, and for the entire novel.

How strange that our metaphors depreciate so quickly, and already so many have grown up without any memory of a time when an untuned television displayed a spray of black, grey, and white.

Regardless, the book remains a indispensible modern classic - and it has an underappreciated influence on the more textural aspects of literature. Everyone knows that Gibson invented the template for thinking about cyberspace - but it's the clipped and condensed formalism that is an silent but very influential contibution to the way we write about ourselves in these modern times.

Tags: William Gibson, Wil Wheaton