Thanks for the Tiptree reccomendation Nabakov, i’ll keep an eye out next time i’m in Sybers’.

ciao

I hope a new one comes out soon as well as another Australian tour by Neko.

The last Neko gig I attended in Brissie was seriously sublime:

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/29/neko-case-live-at-the-troubadour-280107/

Or compare and contrast her sharp eye for the commercial, political and bureaucratic imperatives of dealing with aliens with Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanic cosmos.

She was in her own weird way one of the seminal mothers of the cyberpunk (“the street finds its own uses for technology”) ethos that Bill, Bruce, Neal et al picked up and ran with nearly two decades later. And they know it.

Over the past eight novels, he’s been winding back from the future to now while his prose style and narratives have been getting more zen. With his last couple of novels (and with one more in the same vein it’ll become the Bigend trilogy, joining the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies*) he really has emerged as Raymond Chandler’s true heir. A master of compressed detail, effortlessly rendered, about time and place that drives the narrative as much as the characters’ actions.

Somewhere out there on the interyoutubes, which I can’t be arsed googling now, is some wonderful footage of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson on stage together getting completely absorbed in a discussion between the three of them. The only person missing was James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon)- who they all namechecked as a key influence.

*Another brilliant Canadian writer with a keen eye for how social-demographic minutia can be artfully accumulated to gear up a sweeping narrative, Robertson Davies, was also fond of the trilogy format.