Anodyne
Saturday, June 05, 2010
 

William Gibson lunchtime talk at Book Expo America. The recent novels don't do that much for me, but Gibson's careful eye for the quotidian and his precise, slightly melancholic, all-too-infrequent nonfiction pieces continue to exert a lasting hold.

"The synthetic genome, arguably artificial life, was somehow less amazing. The sort of thing one feels might already have been achieved, somehow. Triggering the 'Oh, yeah' module. 'Artificial life? Oh, yeah.'

Though these scientists also inserted a line of James Joyce’s prose into their genome. That triggers a sense of the surreal, in me at least. They did it to incorporate a yardstick for the ongoing measurement of mutation. So James Joyce’s prose is now being very slowly pummelled into incoherence by cosmic rays."
- posted by cjb @ 9:43 AM


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