This is the a most interesting and detailed recent online broadcast podcast interview with William Gibson talking in quite a lot of detail about
The 50Mb mp3 file (about 50 minutes) is well worth listening to, if you are a fan, especially, one who reads the discussion threads on the official William Gibson discussion forums board:
- the details about Hubertus Bigend being Belgian and therefore "üaut;ber European" so-probably perverted and / or aesthetically brillliant,
- the fun that William Gibson had in writing the fictional WIkipedia entry about Hubertus Biigend (now, of course a "real" Wikipedia entry)
- hearing William Gibson pronounce the "bay-jend" version of "Bigend"
- the accidental link between the Wikipedia entry biography and Norman Cohn's book
The Pursuit of the Millennium useed by the Milgrim character, via the Situationist International. - the non significance of the choice of "Blue" in the name "Blue Ant" - better than "Red" or "Black" Ant.
- The choice of the name Milgrim - apparently not a reference to Stanley Miligrim, the behavioral scientist, but because Milgrim is a common name in the rural county where William Gibson grew up.
- tthe fact that William Gibson noticed the possibility that some readers would use their "20 per cent" of the experience of reading a novel to fill in the plot and charters , by jumping to the conclusion that "the old man" might be Cayce Polllard's fatherWin Pollard from Pattern Recognition, but that he decided "not to go there".
- The burning down of The Bridge in All Tomorrow's Parties in order to escape John Clute's references to William Gibson's work as Cornell Boxes
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Puzzled by cyberspace.
Author: William Gibson
Subjects Discussed: Coats, blankets, and carapaces in Gibson’s fiction, textures, characters with shaved heads, on not having technological issues, the Apple Store, cell phones and the natural street state, obsolete technology and thrift shops, ZX81s, VR, sitting atop the technological anthill, the internal combustion engine, how to escape being handcuffed with a piece of a ball point pen, the origin of Blue Ant, color taxonomies, Belgians, locative art, rock ‘n roll novels from the 1960s, the downsides of sitting in a SFWA suite, Bobby Chombo, cigarettes, Cory Doctorow, GPS plausibilities, celebrity deaths, Philip K. Dick, Milgram and Dr. Stanley Milgrim, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, ghostly connections between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, tripartite plot structures, writing while not knowing what was in the suitcase, extra-terrestrial artifacts in Baghdad, how to confuse John Clute, the historical record being determined by Wikipedia and Google results, Google Maps and street view, lonelygirl15, YouTube, Japanese behavioral protocols, responding to Ed Park’s theory about the old man and Win being the same character, unreliable narrators, and Iain Sinclair.