No Maps for These Territories Page #3

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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

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