William Gibson –touring to promote the paperback release of Pattern Recognition– was interviewed by Leo Laporte on Tech TV’s The Screen Savers. Leo asked some good questions, including one about Gibson’s creative process. Gibson said he did not work out the plot in advance and wrote from day to day with no idea of what would happen next. He said he waited for the first sentence and everything grew (“fractally”) from that. And he would never consider going back to edit that first sentence because the story would (I think he said) “collapse.”

“The ghost was her father’s parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Nirita.” — Mona Lisa Overdrive

“I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pair of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.” — Burning Chrome

“Through this evening’s tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station’s airless heart, comes Shnya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.” — All Tomorrow’s Parties

“The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic.” — Virtual Light

“They set a Slashhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.” — Count Zero

“The sky above the Port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” — Neuromancer

“Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.” — Pattern Recognition

What I want to ask you is
Who are you?
Where are you?
Are you dreaming?
Are you there? The way I’m here?
Pattern Recognition, page 256

Finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and enjoyed it as much as expected. With the characters and settings still in my head, it was strange to read (on Gibson’s blog) how real they are for the creator:

“One odd moment, sitting in the lower lobby of the SoHo Grand, Cayce’s entrance suddenly unspooled and I looked up, almost expecting her to walk in. And simultaneously reminded I don’t know what she looks like; she’s written “from inside”.

This means zip to anyone that has not read the book. Other nuggets that got some highlighter:

“Like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.” (pg4)

“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. (pg57)

“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.” (pg67)

“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out onthe web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it every was.Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.” (pg68)

“History erased via the substitution of an identical object.” (pg194)

And my favorite…

“She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.” (pg92)