"Every once in a while, at a signing, someone will come through who's so anxious, at the prospect of actually meeting "the author", that they're visibly trembling." (1/10)

I'm no shrinking violet -- as a teenager I once dodged through four secret service agents to give Henry Kissenger a copy of my underground newspaper -- but I've never been as stricken as I was when W.G. signed a copy of ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES for me at a Borders in Santa Monica.

He noticed my terror and was incredibly kind. He actually asked me if there was anything I wanted to ask him. I managed croak out a question about recommending any contemporary authors, but I was so scared I wrote down his answer wrong and I could never find the book.

It wasn't WG himself who was so intimidating. He was very approachable and extremely patient. Meeting him took me back to the frame of mind that I was in when I first read NEUROMANCER, as a pop-culture and technology starved high-schooler in New Delhi. It affected more than anything else ever has: more than getting glasses did, more than LSD or even being shot at did. NEUROMANCER was like black ICE for my brain, it circumvented all of my preconceptions, and completely re-wired me. Meeting Gibson just brought it all back for a moment.

My copy of PATTERN RECOGNITION arrives tomorrow and I know it won't affect me the same way as NEUROMANCER did. Nothing possibly could, but I'm still eternally grateful to W.G. and I'm looking forward to it.

I know that feeling. Mr Gibson rewired my 14-year old brain when I picked up a copy of "Count Zero" from a market stall in our front yard (wasn't a very big yard, or market). Of course I was totally blown away - this was nothing like Asimov, or EE Doc Smith, and had to get hold of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive immediately. Then read them in sequence, a lot...but I like to feel that if I met Mr Gibson I would be okay, not nervous, only because I worked for several years in a bookshop and met lots and lots of favourite authors, and gradually the novelty wears off.

Like when you walk in on Douglas Coupland (another favourite at the time) in the washroom - that really brings people down to a human level...

I even went for a few pints in Cambridge with Neal Stephenson, circa Diamond Age. I guess I was slightly nervous then, as I rattled on about a TV documentary about crashing airplanes for about an hour while he sat their, drinking his Bass and looking slightly bemused, not able to get a word in edgewise, even if he had wanted to. But still, I'm sure I'd be okay meeting "Bill".

Thomas Pynchon, however, might just cause my brain to explode.

Yep, add me to the list of anxiety stricken fans.

I discovered Gibson in my local library back in the 80's at the age of 14, a way, WAY too impressionable age to be exposed to the likes of "Burning Chrome," but there you go. For better or for worse (Though, in retrospect, DEFINITELY for the better), short stories like "Burning Chrome", "The Hinterlands" and the sublime "Winter Market" (Someone in another thread posted this as a perfect short story. I'm inclined to agree) wreaked more havoc with my brain than all the chemicals I would digest in the future and put me firmly on the path, "Damn, I wanna' be a writer too."

For me, SF up to that point had been the standards like Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, et al... Gibson's use of language blew me away, and the fact that his locales, lingo and themes were firmly SF didn't detract from the fact that they were also beautifully written, edgey and remarkably personal and human in scope. I more or less spent the next few years putting all his short stories and novels under a scalpel trying to figure out what he did that blew me away and trying to imitate in my early endeavours at writing.

Eventually, as it must, my own voice eventually did come out, mixing with Gibson's & Gaiman's influences, and it seems to be working out. I got myself an agent, he found a publisher with an interested editor, and I'm waiting on the attempts of that editor to extort a decision from his higher-ups to secure a two book deal.

So personally, Gibson has been a MASSIVE influence on my life, not just as fan, but as one of those writers he wrote about in his Blog who would regard him in the same he regarded his own Writers.

I had the pleasure of meeting him during a signing of "Virtual Light" in Edmonton, Alberta in the winter of 94 or 93 at the Greenwood's bookstore. At the time I was still getting my writing legs and was very unsure of myself, plus deliriously nervous about meeting the guy that put me on the road. I remember asking some question about how he snagged his cameo appearance on "Wild Palms" and he graciously answered the question. Later he completely blew my mind when I (Quivering in my space boots, to paraphrase "Rocket Robin Hood") came up to him with the dog-eared, ratchety copy of "Burning Chrome" that I had bought after I read in the library and held onto all this time. I wanted to be suave and calm and in control, just walking up to him, saying "You've been a real inspiration to me," then calmly walking away.

So instead of course, I gushed, told him he was the reason I wanted to become a writer, and generally made a sycophantic ass of myself. He took it in stride and said some very generous things to me, none of which I actually remember because there was just this high frequency buzz oscillating through my brain that squealed "Oh my GOD, HE'S *TALKING* TO ME..." and when my friends asked me what my idol had said, all I could reply was "I don't remember."

So that's my nervous fan-boy story.

Mr. Gibson, if you do happen to read this, I'd like to say, after a little over a decade to calm down, I'm glad I stuck with the writing. I don't do SF, and I don't think I ever will be, but your stylistic decisions such as fragmented sentences and dense descriptions still resonate with me to this day and apparently I've managed to hide the blatant rip-off of your style enough that agents and publishers consider me to a new voice. In a strange twist of fate, I've been living in Singapore for the last 7 years, and believe me, your observations in "Disneyland With A Death Penalty" haven't changed much.

--Shoeless Wayne Santos, Stranded in Singapore

Changed my life.

I knew about Gibson and the Matrix from this essay written by some college student on the local University's (there's only one university in Singapore back then...circa 1988) sci-fi club newsletter - Tesseract.

I was introduced to the idea of 'cyberpunk' (wonder what that actually meant - but i was drawn to that genre of sci-fi, around the same time i discovered Nine Inch Nails). I managed to track down a brand new copy of Neuromancer at one of the best rental bookshop (during the 80s and early 90s) - Sunny Bookshop.

Since then, life had never been the same. That book led me to the Arpanet, lightyears before the world learnt to pronounce "dot.com"...

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Where is the Disneyland?

Because I've been living transatlantically enough as to have my friends joke that I suffer from permanent jet lag, I've been to several signings in three countries and would just like to say to anyone attending a signing that Mr. William Gibson is a nice guy. He dilligently will answer non sequitir or repetitive questions without an air of arrogance or annoyance and he's got a decent sense of humor. So you have nothing to worry about.

I first bumped into him just coming out of adolscence (in years and not attitude) while he was still enormously influential on me; seeing him cranky from jet lag and sneaking a Silk Cut, but still generous and kind drove home very early on that people you admire for the work they produce are, indeed, regular mortals. Nothing more, nothing less.