Comment by kevin_thibedeau
Comment by kevin_thibedeau 18 hours ago
Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson:
"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."
It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992.
I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.
I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle into the mind and fade out.
(Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)