Read A Book A Week
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Posts Organized by Category
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Hammett, Fiction Noir
Mention detective fiction and Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled private detective Sam Spade is likely to come up sooner or later, but most people think of the character created by Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston in the 1941 movie The Maltese … Continue reading
The Edges of Cyberspace
Novels about writer’s block always interest me and Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 is no exception. The cover is interesting to look at and challenging to understand, and the book is a good read after a few tedious early pages. I … Continue reading
Galatea, Raphael and Cyberspace
The dust jacket of my copy of Richard Powers’ fictional journey into cyberspace, Galatea 2.2, has the painting of a young woman by renaissance master Rafael; called La fornarina, the painting is a likeness of Raphael’s mistress. Judging a book by … Continue reading
Artificially Yours, Watson
When William Gibson wrote Neuromancer he introduced the word cyberspace into the American lexicon, and his images of giant Artificial Intelligences battling for cyberspace dominance captured the public imagination. I’m not sure that I understood then or now what AI … Continue reading
Robots and Cybernetic Animals
CyberneticZoo.com is a web site dedicated to the history of cybernetic animals and early robots. I came across Cybernetic Zoo while searching for pictures of Shakey the Robot, which was developed by Stanford Research Institute in the late 60s and … Continue reading
A Twinge in Cyberspace
The fictional characters in cyberpunk literature often have implanted electronics and connecters so that the character can jack into cyberspace. In 2002, that fiction became a reality when a British scientist became the world’s first cyborg by undergoing a medical … Continue reading
Max Headroom, Cyberpunk TV
Max Headroom and ABC brought Cyberpunk to the TV airwaves in 1986. The Museum of Broadcast Communications describes the series: Max Headroom was one of the most innovative science fiction series ever produced for American television, an ambitious attempt to … Continue reading
Cyberpunks and Phone Phreaks
From my library: Cyberpunk by Katie Hafner and John Markoff; subtitled Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. The book details the search for Kevin Mitnick, a computer hacker and phone phreak who made the top of the FBI’s most wanted … Continue reading
Cyberbaggage of the 80’s
William Gibson has been getting good press lately as he pushes his newest book: Zero History. He was also in the press in 2007 when Deborah Solomon interviewed him on occasion of the introduction of the novel Spook Country. Both … Continue reading
Traveling in Cyberspace—Count Zero
From my iBook library: Count Zero was published in 1986 and is one of the earliest Cyberpunk novels. The novel presents an alternate reality in a grim post apocalypse world where surgical hacks modify a person’s attributes and, for a price, … Continue reading
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