Quotation of April

William Gibson's short story "New Rose Hotel", which can be found in the collection Burning Crome (1986), is a good example of typical cyberpunk literature. It is set in a future society, where governments and states have been to a large extent replaced by multinational companies, which write their own laws. Outside these powerful organisations there are free-lancing thiefs, hackers and agents, who play the main part in most cyberpunk texts.

" Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who comes here to find the most highly developed organism on this planet. The alien has a look around and then chooses one. What do you think he points at? I probably shroud.

The zaibatsus, Fox said. The multinational companies. The blood in the arteries of a zaibatsu is information, not people. Its structure is independent of the individual lifes it is composed of. The company as a lifeform. "

(The excerpt has been translated back into English from Swedish by me, so don't expect to find a similar passage in the original text.) Here you may find more about William Gibson and his latest novel, Idoru, set in the early 21st century. The Gibson web pages seem very unorganised and are still under construction.

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