Pass the mic

Dizzyhead Dennis interviews William Gibson over at Salon. It's the second DL/WG interview (the first was a snippet at the PTSNBN) and it's terrific. An appetizer:

You recently did a reading in the virtual world of Second Life, where you are a kind of patron saint. I got shut out—I didn't realize capacity would be an issue—but I caught up with it afterward on YouTube. Did the event turn out as you'd expected?

Apparently there's always finite space in Second Life. I was actually in a room at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver with a live audience so I wasn't paying much attention to the Second Life aspect, which is probably a good thing in terms of my performance. I had a laptop open so I could see it as if I was watching from within Second Life. What I saw I found a bit distracting—people levitating and sitting on top of the microphone.

The Pattern Recognitions

Via a comment on Light Reading: Someone going by "Patternboy" is posting chapter summaries of the new William Gibson novel (which I reviewed in today's L.A. Times).

He also provides links to this UK-based Spook Country site...and a website for the fictitious Node magazine.

Here's Gibson's Second Life avatar, answering questions.

Just say Node

Speaking of Gibson, my review of his latest novel, Spook Country, is up at the L.A. Times. (It's not one of my columns, just a stand-alone piece.)




















(Thanks to Bowen for the scan.)