No Maps for These Territories Page #6

---

talking about your Apple II, people would walk off diagonally

We turned out to be great glamorizers.

We were able to make computers glamorous.

Andand of course, we werent the only ones.

I mean, once people caught on that that was possible, you had

Madison Avenue move into the job.

AT&T hires people to tell people that, now.

Its, you know, its become a very mainstream message.

I had a hunch that it was going to change things in a way that

the advent of the ubiquity of the automobile changed things.

It changed how we dressed, how we eat

it affects these things affect everything.

I mean, this was a supermodel among technologies.

It was just a matter of spraying on the hairspray,

and slapping on some lip-gloss, and this thing was gonna walk, you know?

They were gonna be cute. They were gonna be miniature.

They would be designed.

They would be adorable, you know.

The boundaries of the human body would be crossed.

What made you choose science fiction rather

than some other form of fiction?

Well, I wasit was my native literary culture,

and it was what I had grown up on.

I saw it as a viable, but essentially derelict

form of popular art.

And I thought that that wasthat was a remarkable thing.

I probably started looking at what was being done

then in science fiction, around 1976 or 77.

I saw an opening, you know?

I thought, Hmm, you know, I can fill the gap here.

Maybe I can do something

maybe I can do something with this.

That was the conscious part of it.

The unconscious part of it, I dont know.

I know that it seemed it seemed a weird and pathetic thing

to try to do

Were you still a student when you first got published?

Yeah. I figured out that I could make a living,

or augment my living by being a student,

which was possible in Canada at that time.

If you could maintain a high enough grade point average,

they were very generous.

You know, theyd give you loans and then forgive them.

You know.In fact, I wasnt even really studying; I was just making

maintaining a grade point average and reading, reading books.

You came to Canada to dodge the draft, didnt you?

Well, I had a peculiar experience with that.

I had gone in and basically

told them the truth.

I told them that that my one ambition in life was to take

every mind-altering substance that existed on the face of the planet,

and I just went in and babbled about

babbled about wanting to be like William Burroughs.

That seemed to do the trick.That, and the fact that

I promptly, you know, within a week or two,

exited the country for several years.

You know, I was very, very lucky in the timing of that,

because if I had turned up at an induction center two years later with

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes