Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer who coined 'cyberspace' and wrote the seminal novel 'Neuromancer', hailed as a saviour of science fiction.
On the island
Eight records
This is Alejandro Escovedo playing Amsterdam, which is a a song by John Cale, who's one of my favorite favorite songwriters.
is a very, very early Demo of All Tomorrow's Parties by Louie, John Cale and Sterling Morrison. who had not yet become the Velvet Underground and were, I believe, sitting around recording this on a reel-to-reel in John Cale's apartment.
This is Doc Boggs singing Sugar Baby, and it's from the Smithsonian Folkways Collection, so called, which is actually the Rosetta Stone of all American popular music since about nineteen sixty.
This is Dirty Work by by Steely Dan, who were my absolute favorites in the in the early seventies when there was very, very little happening in that I liked in American popular music.
This is a a a fairly recent Bruce Springsteen song called Highway Twenty Nine, which I I think of as a two-minute Jim Thompson novel as shot by John Ford.
Are You the One That I've Been Waiting For?Favourite
This is Nick Cave singing Are You the One That I've Been Waiting For? And I've always thought that all good love songs aspire in some way to the condition of him.
16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six
This is Tom Waits doing sixteen shells from a thirty odd six, which I think is just from the beginning of the period in which most of his percussion was provided by beating on broken tractors with sledgehammers.
This is Taj Mahal singing Johnny Toobad, and he's accompanied by an a an astonishingly ancient East Indian metal slide instrument. This this one's a favorite of my son Graham's.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:02How did you make that leap [to the concept of cyberspace]?
I think I've always been lucky in that it it seems to be easy for me to spot those bits of the future that have arrived a little early. With Cyberspace I found the first Sony Walkman … I looked at that and I thought, what if the relationship to the information that this this machine processes could be like the relationship I'm having to the to the music that my Walkman processes? And somehow I could see that this stuff was going to get under our skin.
Presenter asks
6:05Can you describe your vision of this cyberspace that you created?
Well, it's it's a notional space, and that seems to be the thing about it that's that's difficult for people to grasp prior to having had individual hands on experience of the Internet or the World Wide Web. … When I met years later, when I met the people who were busy inventing virtual reality, they thanked me for having given them in Neuromancer a document that they could hand to their backers and say, This is what I'm trying to build.
Presenter asks
9:24Did you feel [Wytheville, Virginia] was backward, or was it just everything you knew?
I had been taken there very suddenly immediately after my father's death, and uh I was uh eight years old, I think. And and up until then we had lived in a sort of transient middle class way … And I have a sort of key visual memory of being in this little brick box suburb with very new turf … and looking over into this other older world.
The keepsakes
The book
Jorge Luis Borges
I probably grab the the Borges because it contains the the higher the the highest available clinical dosage of the infinite.
The luxury
Presenter asks
15:21At what point did you decide that you could write?
Well, I think that I had s in some ways such fundamentally low self esteem. … I didn't want to find out that whatever I I had to offer wasn't wanted. But what took me across the line was uh f noticing that all of the other people I knew who'd been living the way I was was living were were signing up for CBC radio or going into law school. Like suddenly everyone was looking for a career and I didn't have one.
Presenter asks
17:26How did you make the long leap then from deciding you should write to publishing short stories and then a novel?
It was rather a long leap. It was a a a leap in in parts … I had met an American writer named John Shirley … And John was so pushy and uh such a big personality that he shoved me quite against all my instincts to the front and forced me to submit my work to the top markets. And within a year of that I had been commissioned to write a a first novel which became Near a man surbai, a man named Terry Cod.
“I think I've always been lucky in that it it seems to be easy for me to spot those bits of the future that have arrived a little early.”
“I was also giving them a better costume department. I gave them permission to wear black leather and have surly attitudes.”
“I think I may be uh I'm from the the bohemian end of the conventional spectrum.”
“I probably grab the the Borges because it contains the the higher the the highest available clinical dosage of the infinite.”