I've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation, And There's This Invariable, Fascinating And Rather Sad Situation Of Concentric Circles Of Availability. There Are Green Rooms Within Green Rooms Literally Within Green Rooms. There Are Seven Or Eight Degrees Of Exclusivity, And Within Each Circle Of Exclusivity, Everyone Is So Happy To Be There, And They Don't Know That The Next Level Exists.

-William Gibson

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I've Gone To Big

William Gibson

Topic

Artist

Eight

Rocks

More From William Gibson

I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There, For Me.

Layers

Buried

Code

I Was Once Really Close To Sitting Down And Having A Conversation With A Shadowy Young Woman Who Is Reputed Have Become A Millionaire By Investing In Beanie Babies. She Was Someone That A Couple People Claimed To Know, She Seemed To Exist, But She Remained Shadowy.

Baby

Couple

People

That's One Of My Favorite Things About Twitter: You Can Tweak Your Feed Into A Fabulous Novelty Engine. That's Only One Thing You Can Do With It, But It's One Of The Things I Find Most Entertaining About It.

Fabulous

Favorites Things

Novelty

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description, As Science Writers, But There Are Bad Dreams As Well As Good Dreams. We're Dreamers, You See, But We're Also Realists, Of A Sort.

Dream

Jobs

Work

There Is Always A Point At Which The Terrorist Ceases To Manipulate The Media Gestalt. A Point At Which The Violence May Well Escalate, But Beyond Which The Terrorist Has Become Symptomatic Of The Media Gestalt Itself. Terrorism As We Ordinarily Understand It Is Innately Media-related.

Media

Gestalt

May

It Doesn't Matter How Fast Your Modem Is If You're Being Shelled By Ethnic Separatists.

Statistics

Matter

Ifs

Some People Dote On Contemplating Disasters.

People

Apocalypse

Disaster

If Ignorance Were Enough To Make Things Not Exist, The World Would Be More Like A Lot Of People Think It Is. But It's Not. And It's Not.

Ignorance

Thinking

People

The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things.

Use

Streets

Cyberpunk

I'm Quite Proud Of What I Anticipated About Reality Television From My Books In The Early '90s, Which I Based On The Early Seasons Of 'cops' And On The Amazing Stuff I Had Read About Happening On Japanese Shows And The British 'big Brother'.

Brother

Book

Reality

I'm A Reluctant Writer Of Non-fiction, In Part Because I Don't Really Feel Qualified.

Fiction

Feels

Qualified

I Had A List Of Things That Science Fiction, Particularly American Science Fiction, To Me Seemed To Do With Tedious Regularity. One Was To Not Have Strong Female Protagonists. One Was To Envision The Future, Whatever It Was, As America.

Strong

America

Lists

The 'net Is A Waste Of Time.

Technology

Waste

Wasting Time

The Box Was A Universe, A Poem, Frozen On The Boundaries Of Human Experience.

Frozen

Boundaries

Boxes

The Ecological Impact Of Book Manufacture And Traditional Book Marketing - I Think That Should Really Be Considered. We Have This Industry In Which We Cut Down Trees To Make The Paper That We Then Use Enormous Amounts Of Electricity To Turn Into Books That Weigh A Great Deal And Are Then Shipped Enormous Distances To Point-of-sale Retail.

Distance

Book

Cutting

If I Were In Severely Straitened Socio-economic Circumstances And Had To Move To The U.s., I'd Probably Opt For Athens, Ga, Or Lawrence, Ks. As Boho Guys Usually Do, Live Cheap In The Left Bank Of Kansas.

Moving

Kansas

Guy

I Don't Think About The Real Future Very Much.

Real

Thinking

[when] Johnny Mnemonic Was Coming Out And I Realized That All The Kids That Worked In 7-11 Knew More - Or Thought They Knew More - About Feature Film Production Than I Did. And That Was From Reading Premiere, That Was From This Change That Came From Magazines That Treat Their Readers As Players. Magazines That Purport To Sell You The Inside Experience.

Reading

Kids

Player

The Future Has Already Arrived. It's Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet.

Wisdom

Time

Poverty

It Was Hot, The Night We Burned Chrome.

Night

Hot

Chrome

We Monitor Many Frequencies. We Listen Always. Came A Voice, Out Of The Babel Of Tongues, Speaking To Us. It Played Us A Mighty Dub.

Voice

Tongue

Babel

Five Hours' New York Jet Lag And Cayce Pollard Wakes In Camden Town To The Dire And Ever-circling Wolves Of Disrupted Circadian Rhythm.

New York

Lag

Towns

Home. Home Was Bama, The Sprawl, The Boston-atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program A Map To Display Frequency Of Data Exchange, Every Thousand Megabytes A Single Pixel On A Very Large Screen. Manhattan And Atlanta Burn Solid White. Then They Start To Pulse, The Rate Of Traffic Threatening To Overload Your Simulation. Your Map Is About To Go Nova. Cool It Down. Up Your Scale. Each Pixel A Million Megabytes. At A Hundred Million Megabytes Per Second, You Begin To Make Out Certain Blocks In Midtown Manhattan, Outlines Of Hundred-year-old Industrial Parks Ringing The Old Core Of Atlanta.

Block

Home

White

I'm Often Saddened And Dismayed To See Myself Portrayed As Either A Luddite Or As A Raving Technophile. I've Always Thought That My Job Was To Be As Anthropologically Neutral About Emerging Technologies As Possible.

Jobs

Technology

Saddened

Enlightenment Is "being," And It Grows; It's End Is Serenity.

Serenity

Enlightenment

Ends

I Had A Lot Of Issues With The Genre, And I Probably Even Had Issues With The Whole Idea Of Genre. I Was Coming Into It With A Certain Degree Of Outsider Attitude, And I Didn't Have A Long-term Plan. But I Think The Way It's Worked Out, It's Sort Of Warped Into What I Suppose You Could Say Is My Own Genre. If People Like My Books, They Have Some Idea Of What The Next One Will Be Like.

Attitude

Book

Thinking

My Problem Is That All Things Are Increasingly Interesting To Me

Interesting

Problem

All Things

I Grew Up In Southwestern Virginia. I Was Born In South Carolina, But Only Because My Parents Had A Vacation Cabin Or Something There On The Beach. I Was Like A Summer Baby. But I Did Grow Up In The South. I Grew Up In Serious, Serious Appalachia, In A Very Small Town.

Summer

Baby

Beach

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description.

Dream

Jobs

Writing

The Future Is There," Cayce Hears Herself Say, "looking Back At Us. Trying To Make Sense Of The Fiction We Will Have Become. And From Where They Are, The Past Behind Us Will Look Nothing At All Like The Past We Imagine Behind Us Now.

Past

Trying

Looks

I Don't Much Live My Life As If I Was Living In A Raymond Chandler Novel, Which Is Probably A Good Thing.

Living My Life

Good Things

Novel

I Do Not Think An Enormous Permanent Underclass Is A Very Good Thing To Have If You're Attempting To Operate Something That At Least Pretends Sometimes To Be A Democracy.

Thinking

Democracy

Sometimes

[i've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation], And Eventually You Find Yourself In The Room With The Radiant Being Around Whom All This Is Revolving. It's Very Bizarre, And It's Quasi-religious, Or Possibly Genuinely Religious. Spooky. It's A Spooky And Interesting Thing.

Religious

Artist

Rocks

The Future Is Not Google-able.

Google

Able

All My Life I've Encountered People Who Were Obsessed With One Particular Class Of Object Or Experience, Who Were Constantly Pursuing That Thing. Since I Was A Little Kid, I Hadn't Afforded Myself The Opportunity, I Guess, To Have A Hobby.

Kids

Opportunity

Class

In Effect, I Grew Up In A Sort Of Timewarp, A Place Where Times Are Scrambled Up. There Are Elements Of My Childhood That Look To Me Now, In Memory More Like The 1940s Or The 1950s Than The 1960s. Jack [womack] Says That That Made Us Science Fiction Writers, Because We Grew Up Experiencing A Kind Of Time Travel.

Memories

Childhood

Looks

When I Began To Write Fiction That I Knew Would Be Published As Science Fiction, [and] Part Of What I Brought To It Was The Critical Knowledge That Science Fiction Was Always About The Period In Which It Was Written.

Writing

Would Be

Fiction

When I Was A Child, Science Fiction Was The First Source I've Found For Information. Science Fiction Was A Very Very Low Cultural Stream In Those Days. It Was Completly Below The Radar And No One Bothered To Censurate It.

Children

Fiction

Information

There's An Idea Called "gray Man", In The Security Business, That I Find Interesting. They Teach People To Dress Unobtrusively. Chinos Instead Of Combat Pants, And If You Really Need The Extra Pockets, A Better Design Conceals Them. They Assume, Actually, That The Bad Guys Will Shoot All The Guys Wearing Combat Pants First, Just To Be Sure.

Men

Ideas

Interesting

Part Of The Core Of My System, Is A Way Of Trying To Give The Characters More Control. If I'm Practicing Making Up What The Characters Will Do, It's Never Good. In Fact, When I Catch Myself Doing That, I Try To Get Rid Of That Section, And Try And Let Them Start Making The Decisions.

Character

Giving

Decision

Every Shop In Every High Street In Europe Is Filled With Basically The Same Stuff. There's A Street In Every City Of The World That Has A Gap And Benneton's, And The Upscale Versions Of Those.

Europe

Cities

World

Tim Powers Is A Brilliant Writer.

Brilliant

You Could Have Sex Relatively Comfortably On A Platform Of Books, But Not On A Platform Of Pda.s. Hardcover Books. Paperbacks Might Start Sliding Around. Though I.d Still Prefer Paperbacks To A Pile Of Pda.s.

Sex

Book

Pda

[the Currency Of Being Celebrity] Used To Be Only The Elect Had Any Manna In The Information Society And Everyone Else Was A Consumer.

Information

Currency

Used

To Some Extent I'm Guilty Of Wishful Thinking. The Absence Of The Interstitial I Find Unbearable.

Thinking

Unbearable

Guilty

I Like Living In Vancouver .it's More A Matter Of Being A Vancouver Loyalist. Harking Back To What I Said About Growing Up With The Inherent Violence In The Southern U.s., I'm Deeply Enamoured Of, And Entirely Used To Living In A Society With Gun Laws Akin To Those Of A Scandinavian Social Democracy .it's A Good Thing.

Growing Up

Gun

Law

Things Aren't Different. Things Are Things.

Life

Different

Different Things

Our Hardware Is Likely To Turn Into Something Like Us A Lot Faster Than We Are Likely To Turn Into Something Like Our Hardware...i Very Much Doubt That Our Grandchildren Will Understand The Distinction Between That Which Is A Computer And That Which Isn't.

Grandchildren

Doubt

Computer

When I Was First Writing About Japan, It Was At The Peak Of The Bubble. Bubble Popped, But They Kept On Going. Japanese Street Style Feeds American Iconics Back Into America In Somewhat The Way English Rock Once Fed American Blues Back Into America.

Writing

America

Rocks

I Think The Large Part Of The Function Of The Internet Is It Is Archival. It's Unreliable To The Extent That Word On The Street Is Unreliable. It's No More Unreliable Than That. You Can Find The Truth On The Street If You Work At It. I Don't Think Of The Internet Or The Virtual As Being Inherently Inferior To The So-called Real.

Real

Thinking

Internet

If There's A Movie Of Neuromancer, What I Really Want The Special Effects Guys To Do Is Make You See, From Case's Point Of View, The Little Acid Giggies: The Little Lines And Trails Coming Off Of Things.

Art

Views

Guy

I Find It Interesting To See People - Mostly People Who Are Younger Than I Am - Going To Considerable Trouble To Try To Reproduce Things From An Era That Was Far More Physical, From A Less Virtual Day. That Fascinates Me, Because It Seems To Be Symbolic Of Something Going On In The Culture Itself, And I Also Have A Sort Of Innate Admiration For The Stubbornness It Requires To Actually Make Those Things Physically. It's Become Incredibly Difficult. In North America, We've Largely Forgotten How To Do It.

America

Interesting

People

I Think Science Fiction Gives Us A Wonderful Toolkit To Disassemble And Reexamine This Kind Of Incomprehensible, Constantly Changing Present That We Live In, That We Often Live In Quite Uncomfortably.

Thinking

Giving

Fiction

I Don't Think Of Myself As Being Particulary A Subversive Writer, But I Like To Think That My Work Could Afford Someone Else, The Extra Degree Of Freedom That I Found When I First Found Science Fiction.

Thinking

Degrees

Fiction

I Think That I've Always Written About Things That Are Very Personal, But Initially, I Coded Everything.

Thinking

Written

I've Become Convinced That Nostalgia Is A Fundamentally Unhealthy Modality. When You See It, It's Usually Attached To Something Else That's Really, Seriously Bad. I Don't Traffic In Nostalgia. We're Becoming A Global Culture.

Culture

Becoming

Nostalgia

It Had Also Been My Belief Since I Started Writing Fiction That Science Fiction Is Never Really About The Future. When Science Fiction Is Old, You Can Only Read It As Being Pretty Much About The Moment In Which It Was Written. But It Seemed To Me That The Toolkit That Science Fiction Had Given Me When I Started Working Had Become The Toolkit Of A Kind Of Literary Naturalism That Could Be Applied To An Inherently Incredible Present.

Writing

Belief

Kind

We See In Order To Move; We Move In Order To See.

Moving

Order

Movement

His Smile Was The Nightmare In My Back Pocket.(speaking About Ronald Reagan)

Pockets

Nightmare

His Smile

I'm A Really Good Eavesdropper. I Listen To What People Say And Remember All The Buzzwords.

People

Remember

I Watch For Emergent Technologies And Pay Attention To What People Say They'll Be Good For, Then See What We Actually Use Them For. It Never Occurred To Me That A Tiny Telephone With A Wireless Transceiver Would Do Whatever It Is That It's Done To Us.

Technology

People

Done

I Realized That Everyone In Western Society, In Some Weird Way, Believes That They've Had The Experience Of Producing Feature Films.

Believe

Way

Film

Sometimes, I Feel Like A Time Traveller, Cause The Only Way That We Can Really Travel In Time Is Just To Get Older.

Way

Causes

Sometimes

Genuinely Ubiquitous Computing Spreads Like Warm Vaseline.

Vaseline

Spread

Computing

I Look At [toronto] And Think Well, Perhaps My Grandchildren Will Someday Look At This Stuff With The Sort Of Appreciation I Once Held For Art Deco. Although I've Come To Find Art Deco Quite Creepy Too.

Appreciation

Art

Grandchildren

For Years I Have Been Mourning And Not For My Dead, It Is For This Boy For Whatever Corner In My Heart Died When His Childhood Slid Out Of My Arms.

Heart

Boys

Years

I Feel Like I've Been Very Fortunate In That I've Stuck Like A Burr To The Dog-leg Of The Next Generation Of Nerdism. I've Been Carried Into The Xxith Century On Bill Gates' Pants-cuff.

Dog

Generations

Cuffs

I Loved The Limey [movie]! It's So Violent! And Yet It's So Exquisitely Romanticized In A Sort Of Japanese Way, It's A Samurai Film. Coming Out Of That, I Was Really Deeply Conflicted, Because A Friend Who Had Seen It Said, It's Beautiful, But It's Not About Anything. It's One Micron Thick.

Beautiful

Samurai

Way

The Internet Is Part Of This Ongoing, Species-long Project We've Been Working On Since We Climbed Down Out Of The Trees In The Savanna. We've Been Working On It Without Really Knowing It.

Knowing

Long

Tree

It Seems As Though Everyone Is Going To The Currency Of Celebrity. Everyone's Getting Their Own Account Of Whatever That Currency Is. That's Something Neat.

Currency

Neat

Accounts

I Worry About What We'll Do In The Future, [about The Instantaneous Co-opting Of Pop Culture]. Where Is Our New Stuff Going To Come From?

Worry

Stuff

Culture

I've Always Assumed From The Beginning That I Had Relatively Few Contemporaries Among My Readership. Not That I Was Consciously Writing For A Younger Audience But That What I Was Doing Interested A Younger Audience, Or At Least Threatened Them Less.

Writing

Readership

Audience

You Know What Your Trouble Is? You're The Kind Who Always Reads The Handbook. Anything People Build, Any Kind Of Technology, It's Going To Have Some Specific Purpose. It's For Doing Something That Somebody Already Understands. But If It's New Technology, It'll Open Areas Nobody's Ever Thought Of Before. You Read The Manual, Man, And You Won't Play Around With It, Not The Same Way. And You Get All Funny When Somebody Else Uses It To Do Something You Never Thought Of.

Technology

Men

Play

There Are Bits Of The Literal Future Right Here, Right Now, If You Know How To Look For Them.

Looks

Right Now

Knows

Television Has - Particularly At The Hbo Level In The United States - Become A Completely New Genre. Something Like Deadwood Or The Wire Is A Whole New Thing - There Was No Equivalent To That Medium Before. It's Like A New Way Of Telling Stories.

Hbo

Wire

Television

And, For An Instant, She Stared Directly Into Those Soft Blue Eyes And Knew, With An Instinctive Mammalian Certainty, That The Exceedingly Rich Were No Longer Even Remotely Human.

Money

Eye

Blue

I Can't Do Fiction Unless I Visualize What's Going On. When I Began To Write Science Fiction, One Of The Things I Found Lacking In It Was Visual Specificity. It Seemed There Was A Lot Of Lazy Imagining, A Lot Of Shorthand.

Writing

Lazy

Fiction

The Future Is Here - It Just Has Not Been Uniformly Distributed.

Cyberspace. A Consensual Hallucination Experienced Daily By Billions Of Legitimate Operators, In Every Nation, By Children Being Taught Mathematical Concepts.

Children

Technology

Cyberspace

I Don't Think We Know Yet What Broadcast Television Did To Us, Although It Obviously Did Lots. I Don't Think We're Far Enough Away From It Yet To Really Get A Handle On It. We Get These Things, I Think They Start Changing Us Right Away, We Don't Notice We're Changing. Our Perception Of The Whole Thing Shifts, And Then We're In The New Way Of Doing Things, And We Take It For Granted.

Thinking

Perception

Television

Personally I Like To Imagine Something The Size Of A Baby Hippo, The Color Of A Week-old Boiled Potato, That Lives By Itself, In The Dark, In A Double-wide On The Outskirts Of Topeka. It's Covered With Eyes And It Sweats Constantly. The Sweat Runs Into Those Eyes And Makes Them Sting. It Has No Mouth, No Genitals, And Can Only Express Its Mute Extremes Of Murderous Rage And Infantile Desire By Changing The Channels On A Universal Remote. Or By Voting In Presidential Elections.

Running

Baby

Eye

Laney Had Recently Noticed That The Only People Who Had Titles That Clearly Described Their Jobs Had Jobs He Wouldn't Have Wanted.

Jobs

People

Titles

When You Want To Know How Things Really Work, Study Them When They're Coming Apart.

Engineering

Design

Want

When Did It Become Necessary To Explain What's So Cool About Japan? Everyone Was Quite Obsessed With It 15 Years Ago. I Suppose It's The Only Asian Country That Developed An Imaginary Entree To Me. That's Why I Go Back.

Country

Japan

Years

Somewhere, Deep Within Her, Surfaces A Tiny Clockwork Submarine. There Are Times When You Can Only Take The Next Step. And Then Another.

Next Steps

Submarines

Tiny

I Think That I've Always Written About Things That Are Very Personal, But Initially, I Coded Everything. I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There For Me. I Knew Where The Magnets Were, Behind The Gyprock, And The Magnets Were Very Powerful. I Think They Had To Be Powerful For Me, Otherwise The Reader Wouldn't Have A Reciprocal Experience.

Powerful

Thinking

Layers

I Don't Begin A Novel With A Shopping List - The Novel Becomes My Shopping List As I Write It.

Writing

Shopping

Lists

If You’re Fifteen Or So, Today, I Suspect That You Inhabit A Sort Of Endless Digital Now, A State Of Atemporality Enabled By Our Increasingly Efficient Communal Prosthetic Memory. I Also Suspect That You Don’t Know It, Because, As Anthropologists Tell Us, One Cannot Know One’s Own Culture.

Memories

Culture

Fifteen

Secrets...are The Very Root Of Cool.

Roots

Secret

Twitter Is The Only Brand Of Social Media That I Have Ever Taken To At All. I Like The Feeling Of Having My Perception Of The World Expanded Daily, 24/7, By Being Able To Monitor The Reactions Of 100-and-some People Throughout The World That I Personally Follow So I Have Some Sense Of Who They Are. There Has Never Really Been Anything Like That Before, At Least In Terms Of The Digestible 140-character Bandwidth That Twitter Is Based On. I Am Able To Wake Up, Open Twitter, And Sort Of Glance Across The Psychic State Of The Planet.

Taken

People

Feelings

Fiction Is An Illusion Wrought With Many Small, Conventionally Symbolic Marks, Triggering Visions In The Minds Of Others

Mind

Vision

Fiction

I Think With One Exception I've Never Changed An Opening Sentence After A Book Was Completed.

Book

Thinking

Changed

The Past Is Past, The Future Unformed. There Is Only The Moment, And That Is Where He Prefers To Be.

Time

Past

Moments

I Started Writing Short Fiction Very Briefly, As I Imagine Is The Case For Some Novelists.

Writing

Novelists

Fiction

To Present A Whole World That Doesn’t Exist And Make It Seem Real, We Have To More Or Less Pretend We’re Polymaths. That’s Just The Act Of All Good Writing.

Real

Writing

World

I Would Like To Design What People Generally Call Streetwear. I'd Like To Dress Skateboarders, Or Whatever The Older Equivalent Of Skateboarders Are. I Pay More Attention To That Stuff Than Anyone Would Ever Imagine Because I'm Watching What The Designers Do.

People

Design

Pay

I Probably Had Something To Do With Being Southern. For Some Reason, Over The Last Few Years I've Been Much More Conscious Of That. It's Probably Because My Friend Jack Womack Has A Thesis That He And I Write The Way We Do Because We're Southern And We Experienced The Very Tail End Of The Premeditated South.

Writing

Years

Southern

Time Moves In One Direction, Memory In Another.

Time

Memories

Moving

I'm Interested In People Who Become Culturally Fluent. And When I Meet Young People I'm Often Amazed They Don't Quite Seem To Have A Sense Of Where They're From. They're Like The Citizens Of The Airport.

Airports

People

Citizens

Why Shouldn't We Give Our Teachers A License To Obtain Software, All Software, Any Software, For Nothing? Does Anyone Demand A Licensing Fee, Each Time A Child Is Taught The Alphabet?

A Lot Of The Buildings [in Toronto] Around Yonge And Bloor Is The Architectural Equivalent Of Kipper Ties And 8" Collar Points. It's Ghastly And No Amount Of Street-level Retail Glitz Can Lift It.

Ties

Retail

Toronto

A Part Of That [timewrap] For Me Was Growing Up In A Culture That Violence Had Always Been A Part Of. It Wasn't An Aberration, Though I Realize That In Retrospect. I Grew Up In The Part Of The U.s. Where All Of Cormac Mccarthy's Novels Are Set And That's A Pretty Violent Place.

Growing Up

Culture

Aberration

Novels Set In Imaginary Futures Are Necessarily About The Moment In Which They Are Written.

Moments

Novel

Imaginary

A Book Exists At The Intersection Of The Author's Subconscious And The Reader's Response.

Book

Subconscious

Reader

The Prefix Cyber Is Going The Way Of The Prefix Electro.

Way

Cyber

I Assume That - Because You Can Get Degrees In Journalism From Very Reputable Universities - I Assume That People Can Be Trained To Be Journalists. I've Never Been Entirely Certain That Anyone Can Be Trained To Be A Novelist In The Same Way.

People

Way

Novelists

A Snappy Label And A Manifesto Would Have Been Two Of The Very Last Things On My Own Career Want List. That Label Enabled Mainstream Science Fiction To Safely Assimilate Our Dissident Influence, Such As It Was. Cyberpunk Could Then Be Embraced And Given Prizes And Patted On The Head, And Genre Science Fiction Could Continue Unchanged.

Time Is Money, But Also Money Is Money.

Time Is Money

I'm Not A Very Intentional Writer. I Try To Be As Unintentional As Possible. What I Basically Try To Do Is Invite The Zeitgeist In To Tea.

Tea

Trying

Zeitgeist

The Experience Of Celebrity Is Gradually Being Democratized.

Cyberspace Is Colonising What We Used To Think Of As The Real World. I Think That Our Grandchildren Will Probably Regard The Distinction We Make Between What We Call The Real World And What They Think Of As Simply The World As The Quaintest And Most Incomprehensible Thing About Us.

Real

Thinking

Grandchildren

The Nature Of Emergent Technology Is, As Kevin Kelly Once Said, Right Out Of Control. It's An Element Of Human Evolution That's Completely Out Of Control. It's Sort Of Driving Itself, And I Don't See It Ceasing To Do That.

Technology

Elements

Kevin

Canadian Cities Looked The Way American Cities Did On Television.

Cities

Television

Way

If I Meet Someone And Discover That They're An Absolute, Very Earnest Nationalist, It's Unlikely That I'm Going To Get Much Closer To Them. I Don't Understand Them. It Doesn't Matter Where They're From, I Just Don't Get It. I'm A Multi-national Kind Of Guy.

Guy

Matter

Kind

To The Very Limited Extent That I Have A Political Consciousness, To Some Extent I'm A Lazy, Apolitical Sort Of Guy That Just Flits Around.

Political

Guy

Lazy

All I Knew About The Word Cyberspace When I Coined It, Was That It Seemed Like An Effective Buzzword. It Seemed Evocative And Essentially Meaningless. It Was Suggestive Of Something, But Had No Real Semantic Meaning, Even For Me, As I Saw It Emerge On The Page.

Real

Cyberspace

Pages

He Took A Duck In The Face At 250 Knots.

Ducks

Faces

Knots

Three In The Morning. Making Yourself A Cup Of Coffee In The Dark, Using A Flashlight When You Pour The Boiling Water.

Morning

Coffee

Dark

Occasionally If I Look Back At Something I've Written I'll Find One Of Those That I Don't Understand, But That's A Bad Thing - The Unconscious Has Dealt Me A Bad Hand.

Hands

Looks

Unconscious

I Have Always Been Intensely Uncomfortable With The Idea Of A Science Fiction Writer As Prophet. Not That There Haven't Been Science Fiction Writers Who Think Of Themselves As Having Some Sort Of Prophetic Role, But When I Think Of That, I Always Think Of H.g. Wells - He Would Think Of What Was Going To Happen, And He Would Imagine How It Would Happen, And Then He Would Create A Fiction To Illustrate The Idea That He'd Had. And No Part Of My Process Has Ever Resembled That At All.

Thinking

Imagine

Science Fiction

I'd Always Maintained That Much Of The Anarchy And Craziness Of The Early Internet Had A Lot To Do With The Fact That Governments Just Hadn't Realised It Was There.

Government

Anarchy

Facts

I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity.

Thinking

Important

Fiction

I Took Punk To Be The Detonation Of Some Slow-fused Projectile Buried Deep In Society's Flank A Decade Earlier, And I Took It To Be, Somehow, A Sign.

Punk

Buried

Projectile

All We Really Have When We Pretend To Write About The Future Is The Moment In Which We Are Writing. That's Why Every Imagined Future Obsoletes Like An Ice Cream Melting On The Way Back From The Corner Store.

Writing

Ice Cream

Melting

It's Impossible To Move, To Live, To Operate At Any Level Without Leaving Traces, Bits, Seemingly Meaningless Fragments Of Personal Information.

Moving

Technology

Leaving

Naps Are Essential To My Process. Not Dreams, But That State Adjacent To Sleep, The Mind On Waking.

Dream

Sleep

Naps

What Strikes Me About Toronto Is That Toronto's Great Misfortune Was To Have Too Much Money In The Late 70s And Early 80s, And Consequently, It Built In The Style Of Those Periods, Which Is Hideous.

Style

Toronto

Too Much

I Was Travelling With Bruce Sterling On Our Mutual Difference Engine Tour And He Became Aware From The Experience Of Travelling With Me That I Would Distinguish Among The Shoes In A Perfectly Normal Fashion, But Form Him It Was A Revelation. There's A Very Lyrical Passage In Holy Fire About Old Wealthy European Men And Their Shoes, And How Beautiful Their Shoes Are, And How There Have Never Been Shoes As Beautiful. I Think That That Was Probably As Close As Bruce Will Ever Get To Homage In My Direction. I Made Him Aware Of Footwear Fashion.

Beautiful

Fashion

Men

We Live In An Age Of Seriously Crap Mass Clothing. They've Made A Science Of It.

Age

Mass

Made

One Of The Things I Have Taken For Granted, In Terms Of How Technology Works In The World, Is The People That Develop It And Get It Out There Don't Really Know What We Are Going To Do With Until We Have Really Gotten Ahold Of It And It Has Become Ubiquitous. And Then We Wind Up Doing Things That Its Inventors Never Dreamed Of And Those Things Become The Real Change Drivers. That Is Actually Where The Whole Technocracy Thing Falls Apart For Me, Because The People Who Invented It Can't Predict What We're Going To Do With It.

Real

Fall

Taken

A Nation,” He Heard Himself Say, “consists Of Its Laws. A Nation Does Not Consist Of Its Situation At A Given Time. If An Individual’s Morals Are Situational, That Individual Is Without Morals. If A Nation’s Laws Are Situational, That Nation Has No Laws, And Soon Isn’t A Nation.

Law

Doe

Moral

I Don't Have To Write About The Future. For Most People, The Present Is Enough Like The Future To Be Pretty Scary.

Writing

People

Scary

There Must Be Some Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon, Beyond Which It Is Impossible To Be More Derivative, More Removed From The Source, More Devoid Of Soul.

Soul

Events

Horizon

I Don't Generate A Storyline And Then Fill It Out In The Course Of Writing. The Story Actually Generates In The Course Of The Writing. It's One Of The Reasons I've Never Been Comfortable Doing Screenplays, Because In Order To Get The Contract For The Screenplay, You Have To Sit Down And Tell Them What's Going To Happen.

Writing

Order

Down And

I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity. Its Record For Being Accurately Predictive Is Really, Really Poor! If You Look At The Whole History Of Science Fiction, What People Have Said Is Going To Happen, What Writers Have Said Is Going To Happen, And What Actually Happened - It's Terrible.

Thinking

People

Important

Magazines In The Traditional Sense Were Aggregators Of Novelty. A Good Magazine Was A Lot Of Novelty, Stuff You've Never Heard Of Before, Clearly Aggregated By People Who Have Been Able To Travel Further And Dig Deeper Than You Have Been Able To Do. And That Used To Be Really An Important Source Of Stuff For Me. And Now It Is Less Important Because The Internet Has Eaten It All Up. But My Twitter Feed As An Aggregator Of Novelty Is Like... I Don't Know What I Would Do If It Became Any More Powerful, I Would Have To Start Reining It In Somehow.

Powerful

People

Important

I Have This Prejudice That Trilogies Are Long, Three-volume Novels.

Long

Prejudice

Three

Addictions [...] Started Out Like Magical Pets, Pocket Monsters. They Did Extraordinary Tricks, Showed You Things You Hadn't Seen, Were Fun. But Came, Through Some Gradual Dire Alchemy, To Make Decisions For You. Eventually, They Were Making Your Most Crucial Life-decisions. And They Were [...] Less Intelligent Than Goldfish.

Fun

Intelligent

Addiction

I Have Friends Who Go [tokyo] Frequently On Business, And It Sounds Interesting. I've Heard That They Have For The First Time Serious Drug Problems.

Interesting

Drug

Sound

We Have No Future Because Our Present Is Too Volatile. We Have Only Risk Management. The Spinning Of The Given Moment's Scenarios. Pattern Recognition.

Life

Risk

Patterns

The Culture Is Still There, And People Are Still Doing It. I Imagine Some People Are Doing It Very Well Indeed. As For Me, It Definitely Was My Native Literary Culture. Science Fiction Was Where I'm From, But On The Way To Now, I Went Through A Lot Of Other Territory, And I Wasn't Really That Culturally Conventional An Sf Writer When I Started.

People

Way

Culture

Futurists Get To A Certain Age And, As One Does, They Suddenly Recognize Their Own Mortality.

Age

Doe

Mortality

The Future Is Already Upon Us, It Is Just Unevenly Distributed.

Change

"authenticity" Doesn't Mean Much To Me. I Just Want "good", In The Sense Of Well-designed, Well-constructed, Long-lasting Garments. My Interest In Military Clothing Stems From That. It's Not About Macho, Playing Soldiers, Anything Militaristic. It's The Functionality, The Design-solutions, The Durability. Likewise Workwear.

Military

Mean

Long

I Wanted To Make Room For Antiheroes.

Rooms

Antiheroes

Wanted

I've Always Been Interested In People Who Aren't From Anywhere In Particular. I Think It's All Melting. This Has Been True For As Long As I Can Remember In My Adult Life.

Thinking

Long

People

The Future Is There... Looking Back At Us. Trying To Make Sense Of The Fiction We Will Have Become.

Trying

Fiction

Make Sense

She Walked On, Comforted By The Surf, By The One Perpetual Moment Of Beach-time, The Now-and-always Of It.

Beach

Surf

Moments

When I Start Writing A New Imaginary Future, I Have No Idea What It Is. The Characters Arrive First. They Help Me Figure Out Where They Are Living And I Get To Fill In The Gaps With That And Where We Are. So When I Get To The End Of The Process Of Composition, If I Feel That I Have Really Done My Job, I Have No Idea What I've Got - And I Then Spend Essentially The Rest Of My Life Figuring Out What It Might Mean.

Writing

Character

Mean

We Don't Legislate Emergent Technologies Into Existence. We Almost Never Do. They Just Emerge, Dragged Forth By Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Then We Have To See What People Are Actually Going To Do With Them, And Try To Legislate To Take Account Of That.

Technology

Hands

Invisible Hand

I Think I'd Probably Tell You That It's Easier To Desire And Pursue The Attention Of Tens Of Millions Of Total Strangers Than It Is To Accept The Love And Loyalty Of The People Closest To Us.

Loyalty

Thinking

People

You Needed A New Pancreas. The One We Bought For You Frees You From A Dangerous Dependency.” “thanks, But I Was Enjoying That Dependency.

Thanks

Pancreas

Enjoy

If You Make Something, It's An Artifact. It's Something That Somebody Or Some Corporate Entity Has Caused To Come Into Being. A Great Many Human Beings Have Thought About Each Of The Artifacts That Surround Us. Different Degrees Of Intelligence And Attention Have Been Brought To Bear On Anything.

Bears

Degrees

Different

Friday, August 04, 2006 Monument Posted 8:31 Am Silver Nitrous Girls Pointed Into Occult Winds Of Porn And Destiny.

Girl

Friday

Destiny

We Are That Strange Species That Constructs Artifacts Intended To Counter The Natural Flow Of Forgetting.

Flow

Strange

Forget

I've Never Actually Been A Collector. I Like The Learning-curve, But I Buy Things, Sell Them To Finance Other Things.

Curves

Finance

Collectors

I Think That The Collectible Ephemera Craze/awareness Is Probably Driven By A Reverse Market, Rebounding Off The Sense Of Everything Being Mass-produced. It's The Last Step You Take In Trying To Find Something Unique.

Unique

Thinking

Trying

His Teeth Sang In Their Individual Sockets Like Tuning Forks, Each One Pitch-perfect And Clear As Ethanol.

Perfect

Teeth

Tuning

The Sky Above The Port Was The Color Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Station.

Color

Sky

Television

I'm Very Primitive In Terms Of Economics. The Kind Of New Business In Which Stock Gets More Valuable Because The Company Grows, But There Must Be Limits To Growth. But If Publishing Is Expanding To Fill That Retail Space, It Seems Like There May Be A Necessary And Unpleasant Correction Waiting Down The Road. How Many Books To People Want?

Book

Space

People

Maybe I've Been A Small Part Of The Democratisation Of Celebrity, Because I've Been Fascinated By It, And When It Started To Happen To Me To The Very Limited Extent That It Happens To Writers In North America, I Was Exposed To People Who Had The Disease Of Celebrity. People Who Had Raging, Raging, Life-threatening Celebrity, People Who Would Be In Danger If They Were Left Alone On The Street Without Their Minders. It's A Great Anthropological Privilege To Be There.

America

People

Would Be

I Very Seldom Compose Anything In My Head Which Later Finds Its Way Into Text, Except Character Names Sometimes - I'm Often Very Much Inspired By Things That I Misunderstand.

Character

Names

Way

The Simpson's In Piccadilly Has Been Turned Into The Largest Bookstore In All Of Europe! How Can They Fill It? All Of These Purpose-built Borders And Chapters And Every New Mall That Goes Up Has A Giant Chain Bookstore With A Purpose-built Author Reading Space, Whoah, What's Gong On There.

Reading

Europe

Space

People Who Feel Safer With A Gun Than With Guaranteed Medical Insurance Don't Yet Have A Fully Adult Concept Of Scary.

Gun

People

Scary

She Knows, Now, Absolutely, Hearing The White Noise That Is London, That Damien's Theory Of Jet Lag Is Correct: That Her Mortal Soul Is Leagues Behind Her, Being Reeled In On Some Ghostly Umbilical Down The Vanished Wake Of The Plane That Brought Her Here, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Feet Above The Atlantic. Souls Can't Move That Quickly, And Are Left Behind, And Must Be Awaited, Upon Arrival, Like Lost Luggage.

Moving

White

Feet

Movies Have Gotten Dull, The Way Network Television Got Dull. And Television, If We Can Still Even Call It That, Is Still Really Exciting And Riveting And People Are Totally Into It. I Am Always Meeting People Who Have These Favorite Shows That They Are Completely Wired Too And Not Only Have I Never Seen It But I Don't Even Know How To Find It.

People

Exciting

Meetings

I Only Go To Japan When There's Someone Who Can Afford To Bring Me There, And Consequently I May Never Go Again!

Japan

May

This Perpetual Toggling Between Nothing Being New, Under The Sun, And Everything Having Very Recently Changed, Absolutely, Is Perhaps The Central Driving Tension Of My Work.

Sun

Driving

Changed

What We're Doing Pop Culturally Is Like Burning The Rain Forest. The Biodiversity Of Pop Culture Is Really, Really In Danger.

Rain

Forests

Culture

The Most Common Human Act That Writing A Novel Resembles Is Lying. The Working Novelist Lies Daily, Very Complexly, And At Great Length.

Lying

Writing

Vanity

That's Something That Tends To Happen With New Technologies Generally: The Most Interesting Applications Turn Up On A Battlefield, Or In A Gallery.

Technology

Interesting

Gallery

I Can See Television Much More Easily Than I Can See Features, Because The Economy And Politics Of Making Big, Big Features Seems To Me To Be Narrowing Even From What It Was.

Television

Economy

Bigs

Before You Diagnose Yourself With Depression Or Low Self-esteem, First Make Sure That You Are Not, In Fact, Just Surrounded By Assholes.

Inspirational

Funny

Life

There's Violence In My Culture [from America's South].

America

Culture

Violence

The Present Tense Made Him Nervous.

Nervous

Made

Tense

I Don't Always Like Writing, But I Very Much Like Having Written.

Writing

Written

I've Been Interested In Autism Since I've Known About It, Which Is More Or Less Since I've Been Writing.

Writing

Autism

Known

I Knew Where The Magnets Were, Behind The Gyprock, And The Magnets Were Very Powerful. I Think They Had To Be Powerful For Me, Otherwise The Reader Wouldn't Have A Reciprocal Experience. But I Was Very Careful To Bury Them Deeply, Deeply In The Plaster And Paint Over Them. I Didn't Want Anybody To Directly Access Them, And That's Gradually Changed For Me.

Powerful

Thinking

Want

I'm Quite Good Friends With The Putative Director, Vincenzo Natali, And I'm A Big Fan Of His Work, But Beyond That, I Don't Like To Talk About Other People's Work Work-in-progress.

Good Friend

People

Progress

Stand High Long Enough And Your Lightning Will Come.

Long

Lightning

Enough

You Can Get In A Cab In Vancouver And The 20-year-old Driver Speaks More Knowingly Of Michael Ovitz Than Anyone In The Industry. They Just Know! And It's Perhaps Not Unhealthy.

Years

Vancouver

Speak

A Graphic Representation Of Data Abstracted From The Banks Of Every Computer In The Human System. Unthinkable Complexity. Lines Of Light Ranged In The Nonspace Of The Mind, Clusters And Constellations Of Data. Like City Lights, Receding.

Light

Data

Cities

Some Very Considerable Part Of The Gestural Language Of Public Places That Had Once Belonged To Cigarettes Now Belonged To Phones.

Phones

Language

Cigarette

The Future's Here Already. It's Just Unevenly Distributed.

Thrive

Generation X Is Dead. It Has Come To Mean Anyone Aged 13 To 55 Years Old.

Mean

Years

Generations

It's An American Thing, But It's Particularly A Southern Thing, And Its Romanticization Is Hyper-southern. And It's Still Irresistible To Me, Even In Middle Age. There's Something That Pulls Me To That, But At The Same Time, I Have This Increasing Awareness Of How Banal It Really Is - That Evil Is Inherently Banal.

Evil

Southern

Age

Upon Arriving In The Capital-f Future, We Discover It, Invariably, To Be The Lower-case Now.

Arriving

Cases

I Watch A Sort Of Primitive Form Of The Recommodification Machine Around My Friends And Myself In Sixties, And It Took About Two Years For This Clumsy Mechanism To Get And Try To Sell Us The Monkees. In 1977, It Took About Eight Months For A Slightly Faster More Refined Mechanism To Put Punk In The Window Of Holt Renfrew. It's Gotten Faster Ever Since. The Scene In Seattle That Nirvana Came From: As Soon As It Had A Label, It Was On The Runways Of Paris.there's No Grace Period, So That's A Way In Which I See Us Losing The Interstitial.

Eight

Years

Two

I Guess Twitter Is The First Thing That Has Been Attractive To Me As Social Media. I Never Felt The Least Draw To Facebook Or Myspace. I've Been Involved Anonymously In Some Tiny Listservs, Mainly In My Ceaseless Quest For Random Novelty, And Sometimes While Doing Something That More Closely Resembles Research.

Media

Quests

Tiny

Hollis Thought He Looked Like William Burroughs, Minus The Bohemian Substrate (or Perhaps The Methadone). Like Someone Who'd Be Invited Quail Shooting With The Vice-president, Though Too Careful To Get Himself Shot.

President

Vices

Shooting

His Eyes Were Eggs Of Unstable Crystal, Vibrating With A Frequency Whose Name Was Rain And The Sound Of Trains, Suddenly Sprouting A Humming Forest Of Hair-fine Glass Spines.

Rain

Eye

Glasses

One Of The Liberating Effects Of Science Fiction When I Was A Teenager Was Precisely Its Ability To Tune Me Into All Sorts Of Strange Data And Make Me Realize That I Wasn’t As Totally Isolated In Perceiving The World As Being Monstrous And Crazy

Crazy

Teenager

Data

I'm Not The Only One: Witness Pokemon! They Still Keep Coming Up With This Stuff That Just Rivets Us In Unexpected Areas.

Pokemon

Stuff

Unexpected

Language Is To The Mind More Than Light Is To The Eye.

Eye

Light

Mind

I Like The Idea Of People Who've Had Some Success In One Form Secretly Wanting To Be Something Else; I Have Some Of That Myself. I Look For It In Other People Who've Established Themselves In Some Particular Art Form, And Then You Find Out That They Really Would Like To Design Running Shoes, Or Edit Literary Magazines Or Something.

Running

Art

Shoes

I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting.

Strong

Book

Writing

"cyberspace Is Everting." It's Interpenetrating Our Everyday Reality To The Point That On-line Is Our Normal Waking State.

Reality

Entrepreneur

Everyday

I'm Happiest With People Who've Gotten Furthest From Traditional Ideas Of Nationalism.

Ideas

People

Traditional

Understanding Quotes: Their Essence and Application

Quotes, or quotations, are powerful tools in communication, encapsulating ideas, emotions, and wisdom in concise expressions. They serve various purposes across different contexts, from academic writing to everyday conversation.

1. Defining Quotes

A quote is a repetition of someone else's statement or thoughts. It can be a direct replication of words spoken or written by another individual, often used to support arguments, provide evidence, or convey profound insights.

2. The Importance of Quotes

2.1. Enhancing Credibility

Incorporating quotes from authoritative sources can bolster the credibility of your work. By referencing experts or primary sources, you demonstrate thorough research and a solid foundation for your arguments.

2.2. Providing Evidence

Quotes serve as concrete evidence to support claims. In academic and professional writing, they validate points made, offering readers a basis to trust the information presented.

2.3. Conveying Emotions and Perspectives

Quotes can encapsulate emotions and perspectives succinctly. They allow writers to express complex feelings or viewpoints through the words of others, often more eloquently than paraphrasing.

3. Types of Quotes

3.1. Direct Quotes

Direct quotes involve copying the exact words from a source, enclosed in quotation marks. They are used when the original wording is significant or particularly well-expressed.

3.2. Indirect Quotes (Paraphrasing)

Indirect quotes restate the original message in your own words. While not enclosed in quotation marks, they still require proper attribution to the original source.

3.3. Block Quotes

Block quotes are lengthy direct quotations, formatted as a separate block of text. They are typically used for quotes exceeding a certain length, varying by citation style. For instance, in APA style, quotes longer than 40 words are formatted as block quotes.

4. Proper Usage of Quotes

4.1. Contextual Relevance

Ensure that the quote you choose is relevant to the topic and adds value to your content. Avoid inserting quotes solely for decorative purposes.

4.2. Integration into Your Writing

Seamlessly integrate quotes into your writing. Introduce them appropriately and follow up with analysis or commentary to connect them to your main points.

4.3. Attribution and Citation

Always attribute quotes to their original authors and provide proper citations according to the required style guide (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).

5. Common Mistakes to Avoid

5.1. Overusing Quotes

Relying too heavily on quotes can overshadow your voice. Use them sparingly to support your arguments, not replace them.

5.2. Lack of Analysis

Presenting a quote without analysis or explanation can leave readers questioning its relevance. Always follow up with your interpretation or discussion.

5.3. Misquoting or Taking Out of Context

Ensure that quotes are accurate and not taken out of context, as this can mislead readers and undermine your credibility.

6. Quotes in Different Contexts

6.1. Academic Writing

In academic writing, quotes are used to support arguments, provide evidence, and engage with existing literature. Proper citation is crucial to avoid plagiarism.

6.2. Journalism

Journalists use quotes to provide firsthand accounts, add authenticity, and present multiple perspectives within a story.

6.3. Literature and Creative Writing

In literature, quotes can be used to convey character voices, themes, and stylistic elements. They enrich narratives and provide depth to storytelling.

7. Punctuation and Formatting

Understanding the correct punctuation and formatting of quotes is essential:

Quotation Marks: Always enclose direct quotes within quotation marks.

Punctuation Placement: In American English, periods and commas are placed inside quotation marks, while colons and semicolons are placed outside.

Block Quotes: For longer quotes, format them as block quotes without quotation marks, and indent the entire block.

8. Ethical Considerations

Ethical use of quotes involves accurate representation, proper attribution, and respect for intellectual property. Misuse can lead to plagiarism, which carries serious academic and professional consequences.

9. Tools for Managing Quotes

Utilize tools like citation generators and plagiarism checkers to manage quotes effectively. These tools help ensure proper formatting and originality in your writing.

Conclusion

Quotes are invaluable in enriching content, providing evidence, and conveying complex ideas succinctly. When used appropriately, they enhance the quality and credibility of your writing. Always ensure relevance, proper integration, and ethical usage to maximize their impact.

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