Please call us to order a book - we're almost out of reserved seats, so to ensure your order is processed as one of those, calling us is the best method. We may have seats available due to no-shows or library registration/preorder overlap, and will certainly have standing room.
Influential, fantastic science fiction author William Gibson - of Neuromancer fame - will be at Bookworks September 13 for his new novel Zero History! Note the time change - the event will be held at 7:30. Doors open at 7pm for those who've purchased Zero History and 7pm to the general public. Also: parking at the garage on the corner of 5th and Copper is free with validation at the library!
As of 8/31, library registration is full; however, there may be seats still available depending on how many of our reserved seats are not needed (these will be filled in at 7:15). There will also be standing room available. For a guaranteed seat in the front of the auditorium (reserved until 7:15), please pre-order Zero History.
The book will be available at the store September 7, and at the event. Mr. Gibson WILL take photographs with attendees, and will sign other titles purchased at the event or brought from home only with purchase of Zero History.
Preorder your signed copy today - William will sign books from home if you purchase the new book at Bookworks or the event.
"Patron Saint of Cyberpunk" William Gibson Presents New Book Zero History at the Main Library
William Gibson's thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, design, academia, cyberculture, and technology. In his new novel Zero History (Putnam, $26.95), Gibson returns to his familiar concerns with hacker culture, surveillance, paranoia, and viral marketing.
Hollis Henry (returning from Spook Country) is hired to discover the identity of the designer of a secret brand of clothing called Gabriel Hounds, whom Bigend hopes to enlist in his bid to get into the design, contracting, and manufacture of U.S. military clothing (and its inevitable spin-off into the mainstream consumer market). What begins as a seemingly innocent apparel-related project takes on more sinister overtones when the two are followed from London to Paris by a competitor with shady dealings in the arms trade and a personal ax to grind with Milgrim.
Gibson's exploration and extension of computer technology in his novels is summed up well with this quotation from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
"Computer guys would come up to me and say this is all bs, that there is simply not enough bandwidth in the universe to do what I had written and I would respond, 'Then sue me,' " Gibson relates. "If I had known more about how computers actually worked, I couldn't have written those books. There were others writers who knew how computers worked and couldn't dream up the fiction I wrote because they were so worried about bandwidth. I wasn't interested in how computers worked; I was interested in how people related to them, and how they might change human behavior."
William Gibson has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the Web. Gibson is the author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country.
