NP Gibson interview sounds a bit like P re entropy

[pynchonoid]

Thursday, February 6, 2003
William Gibson's new novel asks, is the truth stranger
than science fiction today?
By JOHN MARSHALL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER BOOK CRITIC

Those were the days before he was a famous writer,
before he was renowned as a trend-spotting seer and
futurist, someone who coined the term "cyberspace" and
was at the vanguard of the cyberpunk movement from his
special insight into the way that technology was
reshaping human lives. Those were the days when he was
just a guy hanging around the hotel bar at a
science-fiction convention near Sea-Tac Airport in
hopes of overhearing something that might become
material.

The eavesdropping did produce results for William
Gibson. He still remembers the time more than two
decades ago when he was listening to two women in such
a bar reminiscing about their days as keypunch
operators at the Pentagon. They talked of how a guy
used to come around and erase the games on their
computers, although what he was really looking for was
computer viruses.

"Excuse me," Gibson interjected, "I couldn't help but
overhear your conversation. What exactly are computer
viruses?"

"They're computer programs that get into computers and
behave like viruses. They replicate."

Gibson went home to Vancouver, B.C., and soon
implanted the notion of computer viruses into a short
story that he was writing, later a novel.

"When I did that," Gibson recalled Tuesday in Seattle,
"very, very few people had heard of computer viruses.
Those two women at Sea-Tac had gotten me totally ahead
of the curve. And I just went with the poetry of
computer viruses; I never called up any information
about how they might work. I knew how viruses worked
biologically, and that seemed enough. I must say that
is embarrassingly typical of how I actually
operate."[...] 

"Computer guys would come up to me and say this is all
bs, that there is simply not enough bandwidth in the
universe to do what I had written and I would respond,
'Then sue me,' " Gibson relates. "If I had known more
about how computers actually worked, I couldn't have
written those books. There were others writers who
knew how computers worked and couldn't dream up the
fiction I wrote because they were so worried about
bandwidth. I wasn't interested in how computers
worked, I was interested in how people related to
them, and how they might change human behavior." [...]



continues:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/107368_gibson06.shtml

...enjoy!

-Doug


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com