No Maps for These Territories Page #4

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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.

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