Killheffer, Robert. “Publishers Weekly Interviews — William Gibson.” Publishers Weekly, September 6, 1993. p.70.
Martin, Guy. “Read it Once.” Esquire Magazine, May 1992. p.33.
Hamburg, Victoria. “William Gibson Talks to Victoria Hamburg.” Interview, January 1989.
Side Note: Not available online, but my understanding is that all are about Agrippa. Will track down and annotate these when I return to the U.S.
Video Resources
No maps for these territories: on the road with William Gibson. Produced and directed by Mark Neale.
“On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson stepped into a limousine in Los Angeles and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a TV, a stereo and a cellphone. The entire movie was generated by this four-wheeled media machine. Both an account of Gibson’s life and work and a commentary on the world outside the car windows, the film reveals the landscape of Western culture on the edge of the new millennium, in the throes of convulsive, tech-driven change.”
ADDITIONAL PRINT RESOURCES
Brande, David. “The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson.” Virtual realities and their discontents. Ed. Robert Markley. Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Brummett, Barry. The world and how we describe it: rhetorics of reality, representation, simulation. Westport: Praeger, 2003. Includes a chapter on “A rhetoric of reality in the novels of William Gibson.”
Bukatman, Scott. “Gibson’s typewriter.” Flame wars: the discourse by cyberculture. Ed. Mark Dery. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
Calcutt, Andrew and Shephard, Richard. Cult fiction: a reader’s guide. Lincolnwood, IL: Contemporary Books, 1999. Includes a section on Gibson.
Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. “Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (Gibson).” Ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. pp. 794-5.
Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and cyberculture : science fiction and the work of William Gibson. London: Athlone Press, 2000.
Kneale, James. “Thinking and writing the virtual: the virtual realities of technology and fiction : reading William Gibson’s cyberspace.” Virtual geographies : bodies, space, and relations. Ed. Mike Crang, Phil Crang, and Jon May. New York: Routledge, 1999
Leary, Timothy Francis. Chaos & cyber culture. Ed. Michael Horowitz, Vicki Marshall, with guest appearances by William Gibson …et al. Berkeley: Ronin Pub., 1994. Includes “William Gibson: Quark of the Decade.”
Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid. A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. (2000)
Rapatzikou, Tatiani G. Gothic motifs in the fiction of William Gibson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.
Roberts, Adam. Science fiction. London: Routledge, 2000. Has a chapter entitled “Technology and metaphor. Spaceships. Robots. Cyberspace. Case study: William Gibson, Neuromancer.” (Perhaps not close enough to our topic to warrant inclusion. )
Sponsler, Claire. “William Gibson and the Death of Cyberpunk.” Modes of the fantastic : selected essays from the twelfth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Side Note: While some of these books/articles clearly deal directly with Agrippa, some may be off topic. All apparently contain bibliographies that may be of value. I will track down, refine, and annotate these entries when I return to the U.S.
ADDITIONAL ACADEMIC/SCHOLARLY WORK RELATED TO AGRIPPA
“Toward a Post-Critical Theory of Hypertext”
by John E. McEneaney, Indiana Univ. South Bend
Discusses Agrippa in terms of an unconventional theory of hypertext that regards traditional print as more “hypertextual” than electronic text formats: “on-line help systems, text-based diagnostic systems, and hypertext fiction [which] typically involve either a central axis of organization, a hierarchical structure, or both.”
“[Agrippa’s] electronic medium serves not only to enforce the linearity of the text, but even takes the linearity two steps further by making it both directional and temporal–Agrippa is a one-way trip and there’s no way back!”
“A Tale of Three Futurists”
By Alex Lowenthal, Univ. Hawaii
Includes a biography of Gibson with a description of Agrippa.
“In Agrippa, Gibson weaves together the ancient art of bookmaking and
the cold touch of modern binary encryption code technology with New York artist Dennis Ashbaugh. It is an elaborately conceived marriage of antique bookcraft and modern computer technology that may alter our conceptions of the immortality of art. Gibson’s book challenges the fundamental assumptions about books, art and reality.”
“Digital Aesthetics: A Systematic Approach”
By Bo Kampmann Walther, Univ. of So. Denmark
Keynote address at the conference Digital Aesthetics, 2003, in which Agrippa is cited as “[o]ne of the most artistically advanced examples of a digitally transient, that is, temporally dependent or adjusted, piece of art.”
“Agrippa is described as a ‘black box recovered from some unspecified disaster’, and instead of meaningful words the pages of the book are filled with DNA -codes – ‘AATAT/TACGA/GTTTG’ and so on. -Yet the allegory seems obvious: just as letters generate semantics, so DNA strings create life that interprets information (or ‘recipes’) in a cycle.”
