Writers – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about William Gibson

Interesting William Gibson facts

1. William Gibson popularised the term ‘cyberspace’ in a short story of 1982. Defined as ‘the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs’, cyberspace first appeared in fiction in William Gibson’s 1982 story ‘Burning Chrome’ (no relation to Google Chrome, we’re told), a story about a couple of freelance hackers. (Before it was published, Gibson read this story out at a science fiction convention – to an audience of four people.) But contrary to a widely held belief, William Gibson did not actually coin the term: it had originated, surprisingly, back in the 1960s when two Danish artists styled themselves as Atelier Cyberspace, after ‘cybernetics’, a term invented by Norbert Wiener way back in 1948 in his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. (‘Cybernetics’, by the way, comes from the Greek meaning ‘steersman’ or ‘pilot’.) Gibson, however, helped to bring the term ‘cyberspace’ to a much wider audience, especially after the success of his smash-hit cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, in that uncannily dystopian year, 1984.

5 Sly Habits Able to Poison Your Writing Creativity

By Lesley Vos

Once upon a time, someone somewhere told people they couldn’t be creative writers if didn’t have particular genes or characteristics of brains.

Gone are those days when we believed those yucks.

Writers have learned to unlock and develop creativity with particular daily routine and lifestyle. Positive thinking, mindfulness, tons of writing techniques, and even drinking a coffee work on us, modern age’s children striving for work-life balance. Great minds agree on the direct linking between beneficial habits and their influence on writing productivity.

But the question remains there still:

Five Fascinating Facts about Plutarch

Fun facts about a pioneering ancient writer

1. Plutarch effectively invented the genre of biography. Plutarch’s innovative approach to biography was to take two important figures – one from Greek civilisation and the other from the Roman empire – and compare and contrast their characters, fortunes, and outlooks. This is the basis for his most famous work, the Parallel Lives.

2. As well as being a serious biographer, though, he was also something of a gossip. Plutarch loves to home in on an individual story that sheds some light on his subject – an anecdote, a moral tale, a quirk or distinctive character trait. And this is why we at Interesting Literature admire Plutarch so much: he saw the importance of trivia, and the fact that it isn’t always as trivial as it might first appear. His Greek Lives and Roman Lives (of which there are two very good selections by Oxford World’s Classics) show the individual personalities of the great statesmen and cultural figures he discusses, their quirks and foibles, their eccentricities.

Five Fascinating Facts about Sappho

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although only a small amount of her poetry has survived, the ancient Greek poet Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) has had a posthumous literary reputation. She has become an icon for lyric poets, and, of course, a symbol for homosexual love between women.

Five Fascinating Facts about Edmund Spenser

Fun facts about the Elizabethan poet

1. The word ‘blatant’ was invented in Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. Spenser coined the word ‘blatant’ when he came up with the fictional many-tongued creature, the Blatant beast, in his epic poem. The Faerie Queene is a vast allegorical work of fantasy which mythologises England (using native myths, such as St George, alongside a sort of Chaucerian English) as a great Christian nation, ruled over by ‘Gloriana’ (i.e. Queen Elizabeth I). In the second book of his poem, Spenser mentions the ‘Blatant beast’, a thousand-tongued creature which is the offspring of Cerberus and Chimæra. (The Blatant beast actually has a hundred tongues when it first appears in the second book; when it reappears in the sixth book, though, it’s grown another nine hundred.) In time, this vast, babbling animal became the common adjective we use today to refer to something obvious and obtrusive – as, one suspects, a large beast with lots of tongues would be in any room.