From time to time I'm going to be quoting things from assorted novels that I find to be creatively inspirational. Who better to start the show than William Gibson?
His description of the AI-produced boxes in Count Zero is at the top of my list for inspirational passages in recent memory. More quotes from other authors will be coming from time to time...
From Count Zero, William Gibson, Arbor House, New York, 1986:
Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects.
"Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten. "Cornell?"
She turned to Virek.
"Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist."
"There are more? More boxes?"
"I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in.
But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin but the thing's face was seared and blackened.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
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