William Gibson si racconta in una lunga intervista, spaziando dall’infanzia in un paesino della Virginia alla vita adulta a Vancouver, dalle fortune scolastiche alterne agli scrittori di riferimento, dai primi passi della carriera di scrittore all’invenzione per esigenze narrative dell’ambiente che ora conosciamo come cyberspace.

INTERVIEWER

Where did cyberspace come from?

GIBSON

I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spaceship had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didn’t work for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballard’s that it didn’t work for him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps to treat one’s fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didn’t work for me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I needed something to replace outer space and the spaceship.