More with ‘Neuromancer’ author William Gibson
William Gibson talks about his influence on the Steampunk movement, the information content of broadcast television vs. the internet and his experience at Woodstock.
Here’s more of my conversation with William Gibson, author of the pioneering cyberpunk novel Neuromancer and, most recently, the present-day thriller Zero History, who’ll be speaking at SCAD-Atlanta on Sep. 20:
By your own admission you knew nothing about computers when you wrote Neuromancer, and I read an interview with you from 1993 in which you expressed no interest in being on-line. Today, you’re very active on Twitter. Why did you start using the Internet?
It was the Web, really. In 1993, I was probably still saying that I’d only do e-mail when dogs and children could do it. Before the Web, there was nothing to do on the Internet but send e-mail and play games. And people forget how much of a learning curve it had — it was like becoming a ham radio operator to even do it. At the time, I thought it was really interesting, but I never wanted to do it myself.
The web turned it to an entertainment realm. It sort of became my first mass medium I’d had in a long time, other than popular music. I sort of lost broadcast television in the 1960s, and anything that was interesting on TV I absorbed through cultural osmosis. Ignoring broadcast TV gave me a whole other life, and time to do things like write books.