Virtual Light is my favorite Gibson book and I liked Al Tomorrow's Parties. If you are in the same camp as me, but want to try Gibson, I would suggest you start with Virtual Light. I am more of a Heinlein, Asimov person and prefer my art to be realistic, so I was not happy with these stories.
These statements should tell you how you will feel about these stories. Another reviewer stated these stories were like abstract art. He was influenced by Bester, Swanwick, and Sheckley. And William Gibson isn't somebody you would think of as being clueless about future technology trends.YOUR THE REASON OUR KIDS ARE UGLY Gibson starts out with an intro, in which he states that Asimov and Heinlein never did anything for him. I have no idea as to whether he was involved in the movie, but I'd be surprised if he sold the movie rights without being involved. Interestingly, Johnny Mnemonic was originally a short story published in a magazine by William Gibson in 1981. On that basis, 320 Gb of memory in a device small enough to fit into somebody's brain would seem a fantastical achievement. Plus in 1991 the first solid state drives came on the market and cost $900 for 20 Mb of storage. My guess with regards to the Johnny Mnemonic script writers (and the tech people they consulted with in the early 90's) is that they didn't give it much consideration, other than the fact that 320Gb of storage at the time would have required a lot of space and cooling. When Quantum Computing becomes an everyday reality in consumer devices, Moores Law will seem conservative and lacking in ambition! Sure server farms have an incredible amount of computing power but that has little to do with Moores Law. The main thing that has increased computing power over the last ten years has been parallel processing, not core processor speeds. The point was mainly that Moores Law has been so misused and distorted as a metaphor over the years (particularly on the Internet) to the extent that it ceases to have any real value or meaning.
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