William Gibson interviewed by Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy, the Los Angeles Times's book blog,
This is a surprising turnabout given that the Future was a concept he had decreed kaput, finito, all done with, only a few years ago. Indeed he'd pretty much derided futurism and the cult of the New as passé and uncool - only for the old-fashioned, those not nimble enough to keep up *.
Yet he himself was -perhaps still is - a neophiliac, a novelty-junkie, judging by this bit from Kellogg's interview:
Anything, everything feeds his imagination. He used to buy magazines in volume, hundreds of dollars at a time. "I needed to optimize novelty aggregation," he says. "Magazines, as a technology, were built and really intended to aggregate novelty." He'd flip through them while writing, looking for "hits of novelty" he could re-imagine and incorporate.
Now he's got Twitter. "Twitter now provides that in an almost lethal purity," he says. "This thing that used to leak out of a pipette one drop at a time has become a fire hose."
* As in these tweets:
“Very creative people get atemporal early on.
Are relatively unimpressed by the ‘now’ factor, by latest things”
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