No Maps for These Territories Page #5

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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

went a longwent a long way.

When Louis Shiner and I, who were part

of the Turkey City group here in Austin

were first reading Gibsons work in manuscript,

we looked at it and said,

Look, you know, this is breakthrough material here.

This guys really doing something different.

Like, we gotta put down our preconceptions and pick up on

this guy from Vancouver. Its the way forward!

A hole had opened up in consensus reality,

and we just, like, saw daylight

When I was writing Burning Chrome, the short story that intro

you know, where the word cyberspace firstfirst appeared,

I knew as soon as I had the opening scene

that I actually had a completely original piece.

In the early days when he used to send me short stories,

I would send them around to people, and I would sort of give them copies of

OMNI that had his stories in them, and send them to people and sort of seek out their response.

And people were just genuinely baffled

You know I sat there thinking, Nobodys ever done this.

I mean, they literally could not parse the guys paragraphs.

They could not make sense ofthey didnt understand

concepts like cyberspace, for instance,

that there was a simulated space, which was inside the computer.

I mean, they literally could not get their heads around that concept.

I mean, What was the problemare they hallucinating?

Is it a real space? I mean, these

just these sort ofimaginative tropes,

which he was inventing and deploying,

were just beyond peoples grasp.

I met Bruce Sterling at a science fiction

convention in Denver in the fall of 1981,

and read, uh,

Burning Chrome, the first cyberspace short story,

to an audience of four people:

Sterling, his wife, a friend of mine, and some baffled stranger.

And it was, like, the most fun I think I ever had reading

reading anything, because Bruce completely got it.

We were aware that computers were a bigger

social revolution in the making than space flight

was ever going to be, or that robots ever had been.

No one seemed to have noticed

that there was a territory there.

Yeah, when we were first hanging out with computer geeks,

it was not something you spoke about in public.

I mean, reallyif you went to a party and started

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