I thought it might be fun to post questions from the tour and their answers. Or at least our paraphrasing of said answers.

I asked him about the debate we were having as to where the T in the footage originated from. Did Stella put it in intentionally? Did Nora put it in sumehow subtextually?

He said that "I have no buffer, I'm sure that when I wrote it I had it all worked out, I'm not that lazy, but I can't remeber what it was."

He also said, in response to another's query, that he believes the author should always imagine something more clearly than he necessarily puts in the book.

Someone asked about where he came up with the characters from Neuromancer and Gibson said that he "Felt that they were cardboard, very glossy and high resolution but cardboard. I took them off the top of the pile of the stock characters from pulp. It's in the text where I reference Molly as being like Clint Eastwood in all those movies. I was comissioned to write a novel, any novel, I couldn't cop out but I felt that I was 4 or 6 years from being able to do it right. In retrospect maybe I was right."

Or to that effect.

I also asked about whether or not the old man was who I thought he was. I did this while he was signing my books so as not to risk a spoiler for too many.

He said: "I don't know. I can see why people would think that. But I don't know."

He spoke at length about the unconsciouss aspect of his process, of its essential nature, and that examing it too closely was like Oscar Wilde's quote: "I have always felt that cats and mirrors are unhealthy things to examine too closely." A quote he used in the Salon interview I think.

He also said, which I really appreciated as a writer that he feels any book he knows what's going on in is bound to be bad. further he said that E.M. Forster had said something that burned itself into his head when he "entered the gates of genre fiction" which was:

"Any author who can control what his characters do is not doing their job. At all."

He aslo quoted someone whose name escapes me regarding Alice in Wonderland:

"Alice in Wonderland is good. Alice in Weird Wonderland is good. But Weird Alice in Weird Wonderland doesn't work at all."

That's what I remember for now.

I had wanted to ask him a question, but he didn't pick me.

I wanted to know, since someone asked him about what he thought of where sci-fi went after Neuromancer and his place in it (to paraphrase pretty broadly), where he thought the "new ground" would be broken next in Sci-Fi.

Some woman asked him if the main character in Winter Market was patterned after anyone in real life. WTF?

quote:

Originally posted by InfinityCircuit:
I had wanted to ask him a question, but he didn't pick me.

I wanted to know, since someone asked him about what he thought of where sci-fi went after Neuromancer and his place in it (to paraphrase pretty broadly), where he thought the "new ground" would be broken next in Sci-Fi.

Some woman asked him if the main character in Winter Market was patterned after anyone in real life. WTF?

That would have been a good question.

I asked him about his watch. He said a friend specially modified an old Rolex, and he compared it to chrome plating a Morgan.