Pete Ryland's Web Log

An Evening with William Gibson [] (17:27)

Last night I attended a quite memorable event entitled An Evening with William Gibson. The author of classics Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, Mr Gibson read from chapter two of his new book Spook Country, which he indicated was orignially intended to be the primary chapter. To be honest, his oratory skills pale in comparison to his story-writing ability, but it was great to be read to by the author himself.

The reading was followed by an interview on stage with John Sutherland, with questions from the floor after that. There was also the obligatory signing once the formal part was over.

Many topics were discussed but a few topics recurred and stuck with me. One was the political nature of the new book compared with the previous books to which he stated that he wouldn't be offended if someone considered Neuromancer (which was set some time in the future) anti-Regan, and in the same way, Spook Country (which I haven't yet read, but is set in the very near future) could be called by someone anti-Bush without causing offence to the author. I liked the way he phrased the sentiment, but his thinking is that all his books have some political angle, and the time of the setting makes little difference.

Reference was also repeatedly made to Node Magazine and the interactiveness of modern fiction. He considers that we are already in a world of interactive fiction and that he planted many pages on the internet for people to find when reading his books and performing web searches on the characters and other things mentioned in the narrative. This was very much the case with Spook Country but was also the case with Pattern Recognition but to a much smaller degree, and with less community involvement.

He mentioned he'd been working that day on the Wikipedia entry for the Bigend character in the book, which raised a chuckle from Prof Sutherland and he offered a more French-like pronounciation to replace Mr Gibson's overtly Engligh-based take on the fictional name.

See also:

• the official William Gibson Books site,
• the (unofficial) Spook Country UK Blog, which has a brief write-up of the evening,
• the (unofficial) William Gibson Board whose members were out in force and in style,
• Flickr's collection of photos of the evening.

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