William Gibson's Blog, page 5

WE GET QUESTIONS

From Boogerhead :
Q Is there an actual person that inspired the Finn?
A No.

From ][mez:][ :
Q Why novels?
A Make a living at home, writing fiction!

From digitalprimate :
Q What's the process like from a physical standpoint?
A Sedentary.
Q Where do you write? When? For how long?
A Most recently, in the library (which is really the dining room but who needs one?). 10AM til whenever, pretty much daily when it's happening.
Q What do you eat or drink while writing?
A Whatever's available.
Q Do you write in W...

QUESTIONS FROM THE BOARD

I can't answer all of these, owing to constraints of life-having, etc., but I will try to answer a few on a regular basis.

First up is member Trogdor:

Q: Logarithms. What the fuck is with logarithms? Also Toluene and Microfiber. WTF?

A: I'm basically innumerate, and "logarithms" sound sexy to me. Kind of dirty, actually. But in a good way. Toluene is carcinogenic and smells like it is. Microfiber seems kind of miraculous to me, probably because I am old.

Q: Have you ever thought about doing a wes...

WHEW. IT'S DUSTY IN HERE...

I've turned in the manuscript of Zero History, my new novel. Publication date is September 7, 2010.

Just let me get a few windows open, get this placed aired out, and we'll have a little blogging.

Meanwhile, I'm @GreatDismal on Twitter.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

"Mean what you say, but don't say somethin' mean. Have a blessed Solstice."

--Dr. John (known as the Night Tripper) on Twitter today

MY POOR OLD BLOG'S JUST SITTING HERE...

While I write this book.

Meanwhile, however, try this:

@GreatDismal

I really do find microblogging congenial (not to mention collegial) and most of what I was doing here, before, was exactly that.

DUNCAN JONES' MOON

My favorite sf on film usually consists of brief luminous moments in what are generally rather low-budget and often actually very bad movies. The outstanding big-budget exceptions of course being Alien and Blade Runner. Duncan Jones' Moon challenges my aesthetic of brilliant pebbles, though, because it's so tightly and consistently excellent. It does everything I want an sf film to do, and none of the things I don't want an sf film to do. How did *that* ever happen?

OUR QUOTIDIAN ALEPH

"Aleph" as in the Borges story: the spot under the basement stairs from which can simultaneously be seen all things ever.

Simultaneously profoundly amazing and definitively boring:
PingWire

Because you can't step in the same river twice.

GOOD THING I'M NOT AN ACADEMIC

Had planned to sort through all the responses to my Orwell quote query and lay the result out here, but it turns out that I am a working novelist (among other things). So here's what I would tell you if you ran into me on the street and asked me about it: I doubt Orwell wrote it. It may have been cobbled together from a line in his essay on nationalism, and another, quoting Kipling, in his essay on Kipling. Weirdly, the very nearest thing to it is an authentic Churchill quote. As to how it becam

QUERY: RE THE AUTHORITARIAN'S FAVORITE ORWELL QUOTE

"People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Often this is given as "Good people..."

I have been unable to source this back to a specific piece of GO's prose. Have encountered the opinion that it is not an actual GO quotation.

Can anyone help? Thanks.

WHOLE THEORY OF BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE

'My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy