Oh! Dudes. Last week I had to write to SPIN to demand attribution for my 1988 William Gibson interview, which they’d credited to “SPIN Staff.” I’ve always been proud of the piece, despite its manifest amateurism, because I pitched it to my editors & believe it is the first-ever interview with Gibson in a mainstream, national outlet. (Quotes from it have been used as blurbs!) Credit where due: SPIN got back to me within minutes, and actually fixed the attribution! https://www.spin.com/2019/08/william-gibson-mona-lisa-overdrive-neuromancer-december-1988-interview-new-romancer/
@adamgreenfield Whoa, this article and the interview took me a way back. Thank you! I came on Gibson while browsing in the sci-fi section of a used bookstore maybe around 1987 or so. Since then I’ve read and/or bought every novel he writes that I can find. His work and even he as writer - all frozen in time for me. Of course he and I are only 40. Such a surprise to see a mirror or photos where we look decades older. I bet Cory Doctorow read his work in grade school, right? @pluralistic
Legs McNeil was my editor at SPIN and, for a disgusting 90 days or so, my E 6th Street landlord and flatmate. There are, of course, Stories. But those are for a different day.
Those of us who first encountered Gibson’s stories in Omni, thoroughly unprepared, c. 1981, will tell you that no short fiction before or since has rivaled them for immediate physical effect. Sure, “cyberpunk” is as completely cooked now as a Trump steak, with the more-than-faintly embarrassing tang of a different time wafting off it. But on its first appearance? A mulekick. No, more: a bolt that arced through you on its way to ground, and propelled you wholly and bodily into the future. Damn.
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