Amazon has just published a lengthy interview with William Gibson about his forthcoming novel Spook Country, which is, in my opinion, his best novel to date.
Gibson holds forth on "writing in the age of Google," advancing the hypothesis that the Internet is more stimulus than distraction for the working writer.
We'll be interviewing Bill for the Boing Boing Boing podcast shortly, and I'll run a full review of the book then.
Amazon.com: You need a certain stimulation to work off of.
Gibson: Yeah, I need a certain stimulation. It kind of feels like when you're floating underwater and you're breathing through a straw. The open Firefox is the straw: like, I can get out of this if I have to. I can stay under until I can't stand it anymore, and then I go to BoingBoing or something.
Amazon.com: I think for some writers, they'd never get back in the pool with Google open to them.
Gibson: It's not that interesting for me. I'm okay with it because it doesn't pull me in that much. The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There's some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you've never seen before. You're still really inside some annotated version of your own head.
(Thanks, Tom!)
