No Maps for These Territories Page #2

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We just have...I think there is a pervasive...

there is a pervasive sense of loss,

and a pervasive excitement at what we seem to be gaining.

And they seem...those two feelings seem to go together,

in effect, to be parts of the same feeling.

It's like Frederic Jameson's "postmodern divide": you have it right there.

That sense of loss, and that sense of Christmas morning, at the same time.

I think that most people, myself included, are most comfortable, conceptually,

living about ten years back from whatever point in time we've reached.

And I think we all have these...these moments that

are vertiginous and terribly exciting,

and very frightening, in which we realize the contemporary, absolutely.

And I think it induces terror and ecstasy, and we retreat,

we retreat from it, because we can't stay.

We can't stay in that state of panic, which is,

I think, the real response to what's happening to us.

We're most comfortable with an earlier version of who we were,

and what we were. It makes us feel more in...more in control.

I think the last time...the last time I had one of those "CNN moments,"

where I was slammed right up against the windshield of...

of the present, would have been flipping on the television one day,

and seeing that Federal Building in Oklahoma City lying there in its own...

own crater, and listening to a little bit of the audio, and...

and getting the idea that something,

something bad had happened in Middle America.

And I had...some...very, very deep within me,

something seemed to say, "Everything is different from now on.

Something, something very fundamental has changed, here."

Somehow it upped the... Whenever this...

whenever something like this happens, and I have one of these moments,

it ups the ante on being a science-fiction writer. It changes...

it changes the nature of the game. Another example

maybe a better one, in a way

was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson

was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter.

A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply...

he said,

"This makes your job more difficult."

And I knew exactly, I knew exactly what he meant.

'Cos something that seemed to...a scenario that seemed

to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern,

was suddenly, suddenly real.

It's that "truth-is-stranger-than-fiction" factor keeps getting jacked up on us

on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis.

And I think that's a peculiar...

that's something that's something that's peculiar to our time.

I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered

his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat.

"It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."

It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was

a bar for professional expatriates;

you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.

Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously

has he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin.

He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork

of East European steel and brown decay.

Well it sounds like something. It sounds good...

it sounds like something that was written in the 1940s, somehow.

It really is kind of weirdly Chandler-esque.

So what would you say now about that piece of writing,

and the man who wrote it?

I dunno, you know. I'd buy 'im a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan 'im any money.

I think of NEUROMANCER as being,

in a good sense, an adolescent book.

It's a young man's book. It was written...

a very young man's book...that was written by a man who was not very young

when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature

to still get back there and get a hold of that stuff.

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend.

In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug.

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator,

cased in grubby pink plastic.

"You are too much the artiste, Herr Case." Ratz grunted;

the sound served him as laughter.

He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw.

"You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal."

"Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer.

"[Someone's] gotta be funny around here. Sure the f*** isn't you."

The whore's giggle went up an octave.

"Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay?

Zone, he's a close personal friend of mine."

It's a world without...

it's a world where there aren't families.

It's, you know, it's the world of a...it's the world of a young person,

going out into the wilderness of cities, and sort of, in a way, creating...

creating a family.

It's very, you know, it's kind of like... it's kind of like, not that it's a "Goth" book,

but it's kind of out of the same stuff that makes...

makes kids be Goths.

I think of NEUROMANCER as kind of a rock 'n' roll book.

Its got everything...its got sex, its got the drugs...

its got the sense of alienation.

In that sense, it is truly rock 'n' roll.

As Case was picking up his beer,

one of those strange instants of silence descended,

as though a hundred unrelated conversations

had simultaneously arrived at the same pause.

Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.

Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."

"The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian,

"Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing.

Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate..."

"Now that," Case said to his glass,

all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile,

"that is so much bullshit."

It owes a lot of its effectiveness as an experience

to the fact that I didn't know what I was doing.

It's a first novel...

and I just had to put one foot after another.

I was just terrified, actually, by it. It was very scary.

I think the disappointment that I sometimes sense

in younger readers who find NEUROMANCER and really, really like it,

and then find my later work, and they're like,

"Whoa! Why can't you please do more...do more like this?"

And I have to say, "Well, I just can't!"

you know. I...I don't have access...

I don't have access to that material now,

and if I did, I would probably be in grave trouble.

It just wouldn't be natural...wouldn't be natural.

it'd be bad news if I could,

if that's where I was. In a way, it was...

I think it was, personally

it was kind of bad news at the time that

I was where I was then, at that...at that age.

Initially, I had a lot of reluctance toward going

toward going for it.

And I think that I still had that reluctance up

until I met Bruce Sterling

and was introduced to, through Bruce, to some other writers who were trying to do something similar.

And just having company you know, a little fellowship

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