Literature
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“I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer”
Writers’ rooms: JG Ballard Distrusting computers, the science fiction writer JG Ballard wrote the first drafts of his novels by hand before finishing them off on a typewriter: “On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old… >>>
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Beating the Event Horizon
Interviewed by Phillip Dodd for BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves last night, novelist William Gibson talked about the difficulties of writing in an age in which history has its finger pressed down firmly on the fast-forward button – not a cliché in 1984 when it appeared in Neuromancer – with no letting up in sight. Gibson wanted to set Pattern Recognition, his latest novel, in the present. He thought that he’d become ‘a little bit too slick at doing the present-trends-transmogrified-into-an-imaginary-future thing.’ But how to catch it, fix it down on paper, a fictional present in a real present which won’t… >>>