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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.
-William Gibson
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If You’re Fifteen Or

William Gibson
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.
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Topic
Memories
Culture
Fifteen
More From William Gibson
A Book Exists At The Intersection Of The Author's Subconscious And The Reader's Response.
Book
Subconscious
Reader
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 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
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
The Experience Of Celebrity Is Gradually Being Democratized.
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
We Live In An Age Of Seriously Crap Mass Clothing. They've Made A Science Of It.
Age
Mass
Made
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
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
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
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
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.
Artist
Eight
Rocks
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
The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things.
Use
Streets
Cyberpunk
'cyberspace' As A Term Is Sort Of Over. It's Over In The Way That, After A Certain Time, People Stopped Using The Suffix '-electro' To Make Things Cool, Because Everything Was Electrical. 'electro' Was All Over The Early 20th Century, And Now It's Gone. I Think 'cyber' Is Sort Of The Same Way.
Thinking
People
Way
I Think That I've Always Written About Things That Are Very Personal, But Initially, I Coded Everything.
Thinking
Written
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
The Street Has Its Own Use For Things.
Use
Streets
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 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've Never Actually Been A Collector. I Like The Learning-curve, But I Buy Things, Sell Them To Finance Other Things.
Curves
Finance
Collectors
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
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
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
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
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
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
Generation X Is Dead. It Has Come To Mean Anyone Aged 13 To 55 Years Old.
Mean
Years
Generations
"cyberspace Is Everting." It's Interpenetrating Our Everyday Reality To The Point That On-line Is Our Normal Waking State.
Reality
Entrepreneur
Everyday
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
The Prefix Cyber Is Going The Way Of The Prefix Electro.
Way
Cyber
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
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
The Future's Here Already. It's Just Unevenly Distributed.
Thrive
The Future Has Already Arrived. It's Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet.
Wisdom
Time
Poverty
We Are That Strange Species That Constructs Artifacts Intended To Counter The Natural Flow Of Forgetting.
Flow
Strange
Forget
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 Don't Always Like Writing, But I Very Much Like Having Written.
Writing
Written
The Written Word Still Enjoyed A Certain Prestige Here. It Was A Sluggish Country.
Country
Automation
Prestige
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
The Future Is Here - It Just Has Not Been Uniformly Distributed.
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
Japan Had A More Radical Experience Of Future Shock Than Any Other Nation In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries. They Were This Feudal Place, Locked In The Past, But Then They Bought The Whole Industrial Revolution Kit From England, Blew Their Cultural Brains Out With It, Became The First Industrialized Asian Nation, Tried To Take Over Their Side Of The World, Got Nuked By The United States For Their Trouble, And Discovered Steve Mcqueen! Their Take On Iconic Menswear Emerges From That Matrix.
Past
Japan
Brain
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
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
I'm A Really Good Eavesdropper. I Listen To What People Say And Remember All The Buzzwords.
People
Remember
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
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
I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting.
Strong
Book
Writing
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
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
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 Think With One Exception I've Never Changed An Opening Sentence After A Book Was Completed.
Book
Thinking
Changed
When I Come To A New City Is I Combine: I Say, Well, It's Like Barcelona And Edinburgh, Though I Can't Imagine What That Would Be. But Toronto, The Last Few Times I've Been Here, What Always Comes Up Is Chicago And West Berlin. It's A Big, Sprawling City Beside A Lake, Of A Certain Age And A Certain Architectural Complexity. But The High-end Retail Core Looks More Like West Germany Than The Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street Is Like K-damm. There's An Excess Of Surface Marble And Bronze: It's Germanic And As Pretentious As Pretentious Can Be.
Lakes
West Germany
Cities
I Don't Begin A Novel With A Shopping List - The Novel Becomes My Shopping List As I Write It.
Writing
Shopping
Lists
"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
The Future Is Not Google-able.
Google
Able
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
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
Canadian Cities Looked The Way American Cities Did On Television.
Cities
Television
Way
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
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
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
His Smile Was The Nightmare In My Back Pocket.(speaking About Ronald Reagan)
Pockets
Nightmare
His Smile
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
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
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
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
As A Writer Of Fiction Who Deals With Technology, I Necessarily Deal With The History Of Technology And The History Of Technologically Induced Social Change. I Roam Up And Down It In A Kind Of Special Way Because I Roam Down It Into History, Which Is Invariably Itself A Speculative Affair.
Technology
Special
Fiction
Friday, August 04, 2006 Monument Posted 8:31 Am Silver Nitrous Girls Pointed Into Occult Winds Of Porn And Destiny.
Girl
Friday
Destiny
The Designers [of The 1930s] Were Populists, You See; They Were Trying To Give The Public What It Wanted. What The Public Wanted Was The Future.
Giving
Trying
Architecture
There Are Bits Of The Literal Future Right Here, Right Now, If You Know How To Look For Them.
Looks
Right Now
Knows
I'm Embarrassed If I Think Anyone Knows Exactly What I Paid For Something, Or Even Where I Got It. I Want What I'm Wearing To Feel Good On, Wear Well, And To Be Extremely Functional.
Thinking
Feel Good
Want
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
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
The Past Is Past, The Future Unformed. There Is Only The Moment, And That Is Where He Prefers To Be.
Time
Past
Moments
The Sky Above The Port Was The Color Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Station.
Color
Sky
Television
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
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
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
If Someone Comes In And Says, "what Are You Doing," If I'm Honest, The Answer Is, "i Don't Know. But I'm Doing This, Don't Know Why."
Answers
Honest
Knows
I Think That Technologies Are Morally Neutral Until We Apply Them. It's Only When We Use Them For Good Or For Evil That They Become Good Or Evil.
Military
War
Technology
My Dream Scenario Would Be That You Could Go Into A Bookshop, Examine Copies Of Every Book In Print That They're Able To Offer, Then For A Fee Have Them Produce In A Minute Or Two A Beautiful Finished Copy In A Dust Jacket That You Would Pay For And Take Home.
Beautiful
Dream
Book
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
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
The Box Was A Universe, A Poem, Frozen On The Boundaries Of Human Experience.
Frozen
Boundaries
Boxes
Some People Dote On Contemplating Disasters.
People
Apocalypse
Disaster
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
I Think That One Of The Visions That Is Closest To Reality Is The Cardboard City In The Subway Station In Tokyo, Which Is Based Very Closely On A Series Of Documentary Photographs Of People Living Like That And Of The Contents Of The Boxes. Those Are Quite Haunting Because Tokyo Homeless People Reiterate The Whole Nature Of Living In Tokyo In These Cardboard Boxes, They're Only Slightly Smaller Than Tokyo Apartments, And They Have Almost As Many Consumer Goods. It's A Nightmare Of Boxes Within Boxes.
Reality
Thinking
Cities
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
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?
Inspirational
Motivational
Education
I Don't Think About The Real Future Very Much.
Real
Thinking
Novels Set In Imaginary Futures Are Necessarily About The Moment In Which They Are Written.
Moments
Novel
Imaginary
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
She Walked On, Comforted By The Surf, By The One Perpetual Moment Of Beach-time, The Now-and-always Of It.
Beach
Surf
Moments
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
We're Living In A Future That's Weirder Than Anybody Except Possibly.
I'm Happiest With People Who've Gotten Furthest From Traditional Ideas Of Nationalism.
Ideas
People
Traditional
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
The Future Is Already Upon Us, It Is Just Unevenly Distributed.
Change
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
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
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
Damien Is A Friend. Their Boy-girl Lego Doesn't Click, He Would Say.
Girl
Boys
Legos
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
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
To Some Extent I'm Guilty Of Wishful Thinking. The Absence Of The Interstitial I Find Unbearable.
Thinking
Unbearable
Guilty
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
I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There, For Me.
Layers
Buried
Code
To The Extent That I Can Still Believe In Bohemia, Which I Think Is Very Important To Me In Some Way That I Don't Yet Really Understand, To The Extent That I Still Believe In That, I Have To Believe That There Are Viable Degrees Of Freedom Inherent If Not Realized In Interstitial Areas.
Believe
Thinking
Important
Genuinely Ubiquitous Computing Spreads Like Warm Vaseline.
Vaseline
Spread
Computing
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
I Was Afraid To Watch 'blade Runner' In The Theater Because I Was Afraid The Movie Would Be Better Than What I Myself Had Been Able To Imagine. In A Way, I Was Right To Be Afraid, Because Even The First Few Minutes Were Better.
Blade Runner
Able
Way
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
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 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
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
When You Want To Know How Things Really Work, Study Them When They're Coming Apart.
Engineering
Design
Want
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
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
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
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
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
Stand High Long Enough And Your Lightning Will Come.
Long
Lightning
Enough
The Future Is There... Looking Back At Us. Trying To Make Sense Of The Fiction We Will Have Become.
Trying
Fiction
Make Sense
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
Futurists Get To A Certain Age And, As One Does, They Suddenly Recognize Their Own Mortality.
Age
Doe
Mortality
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
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
Somehow I Think That If Toronto Had Been Forced To Wait A Decade [from 80th], It Would Be A Better Looking City.
Thinking
Cities
Waiting
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.
People
Interesting
Trying
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
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
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
For Me, The Melancholy Of The Late Xxth Century Is Walking Late At Night By The Mont Blanc Pen Store And Seeing These Things Always Strike Me As Simulacra Of Luxury Items. They Seem Like Fakes.
Night
Luxury
Fake
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
Naps Are Essential To My Process. Not Dreams, But That State Adjacent To Sleep, The Mind On Waking.
Dream
Sleep
Naps
Some Very Considerable Part Of The Gestural Language Of Public Places That Had Once Belonged To Cigarettes Now Belonged To Phones.
Phones
Language
Cigarette
It Doesn't Matter How Fast Your Modem Is If You're Being Shelled By Ethnic Separatists.
Statistics
Matter
Ifs
I Started Writing Short Fiction Very Briefly, As I Imagine Is The Case For Some Novelists.
Writing
Novelists
Fiction
We See In Order To Move; We Move In Order To See.
Moving
Order
Movement
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Cyberspace Is Where You Are When You're On The Telephone.
Cyberspace
Telephones
Where You Are
Cyberspace. A Consensual Hallucination.
Cyberspace
Hallucinations
Art Deco For Me Except In Its Most Crazed And Attenuated Forms, It's Jut A Matter Of Taste.
Art
Matter
Taste
Language Is To The Mind More Than Light Is To The Eye.
Eye
Light
Mind
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
The Deadliest Bullshit Is Odorless, And Transparent.
Bullshit
Internet
Free Speech
Upon Arriving In The Capital-f Future, We Discover It, Invariably, To Be The Lower-case Now.
Arriving
Cases
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 Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting. I Actually Tend To Suspect That In Real Life, There Have Always Been Very Strong Female Characters, But At Certain Stages Of Society, They've Been Asked To Cool It.
Strong
Real
Book
The Present Tense Made Him Nervous.
Nervous
Made
Tense
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 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
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
His Teeth Sang In Their Individual Sockets Like Tuning Forks, Each One Pitch-perfect And Clear As Ethanol.
Perfect
Teeth
Tuning
He Took A Duck In The Face At 250 Knots.
Ducks
Faces
Knots
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
Tim Powers Is A Brilliant Writer.
Brilliant
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
Fiction Is An Illusion Wrought With Many Small, Conventionally Symbolic Marks, Triggering Visions In The Minds Of Others
Mind
Vision
Fiction
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
I Have This Prejudice That Trilogies Are Long, Three-volume Novels.
Long
Prejudice
Three
I've Been Through The Whole Western World, And It Seems To Me That There's More Retail Floor Space Devoted To The Sale Of Books Than Food! There's More Retail Floor Space Devoted To The Sale Of Books Than There's Been In The Entire History Of Humanity! It's Grotesque!
Book
Space
Humanity
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
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 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
All The Speed He Took, All The Turns He'd Taken And The Corners He'd Cut In Night City, And Still He'd See The Matrix In His Sleep, Bright Lattices Of Logic Unfolding Across That Colorless Void.
Taken
Sleep
Cutting
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
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
Things Aren't Different. Things Are Things.
Life
Different
Different Things
I'm A Reluctant Writer Of Non-fiction, In Part Because I Don't Really Feel Qualified.
Fiction
Feels
Qualified
The 'net Is A Waste Of Time.
Technology
Waste
Wasting Time
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
Cyberspace. A Consensual Hallucination Experienced Daily By Billions Of Legitimate Operators, In Every Nation, By Children Being Taught Mathematical Concepts.
Children
Technology
Cyberspace
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
He'd Been Numb A Long Time, Years. All His Nights Down Ninsei, His Nights With Linda, Numb In Bed And Numb At The Cold Sweating Center Of Every Drug Deal. But Now He'd Found This Warm Thing, This Chip Of Murder. Meat, Some Part Of Him Said. It's The Meat Talking, Ignore It.
Night
Numbness
Talking
You Must Learn To Overcome Your Very Natural And Appropriate Revulsion For Your Own Work.
Writing
Overcoming
Natural
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 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
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
Time Moves In One Direction, Memory In Another.
Time
Memories
Moving
Lost, So Small Amid That Dark, Hands Grown Cold, Body Image Fading Down Corridors Of Television Sky.
Dark
Hands
Sky
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
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
There's Violence In My Culture [from America's South].
America
Culture
Violence
I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity.
Thinking
Important
Fiction
My Problem Is That All Things Are Increasingly Interesting To Me
Interesting
Problem
All Things
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
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
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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