The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a brief article on William Gibson. In it he discusses his tech life, the bus-stop ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, "Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer. I don't find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good."
"I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc," he says. "Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. I didn't know anything about it technologically. I just thought if it's that small and that nicely styled, everything is changing."
Author William Gibson is noted for creating the cyberpunk genre with his first novel, Neuromancer, published in 1984 and the only novel ever to win sci-fi's Triple Crown of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards. His most recent, Pattern Recognition, is set in the present. A short story, Johnny Mnemonic, is his only work to be set to film, starring Keanu Reeves.
