William Gibson

Quotes

1. She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth.

2. 

   There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore.

3. 

   “Okay,” Arleigh said.“What are the nodal points?”

   Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds, except the things you see are really there.”

   “Yamazaki promised me you weren’t crazy.”

   “It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”

4. 

   “What did Blackwell mean, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?”

   “Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.”

   Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”

5. 

   “But do they really have singers who don’t exist?”

   “The idol-singers,” he said. “The idoru. Some of them are enormously popular.”

   “Do people kill themselves over them?”

   “I don’t know. They could do, I suppose.”

   “Do people marry them?”

6. 

   A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives,” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse.

7. 

   Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.

8. 

   Masahiko’s room…was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers…It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn’t they love to bathe?

9. 

   Masahiko pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history…Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross…and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun…and the teacher had to call the police.

10. 

    Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System.

    “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.

    “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.”

    And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.

    The Russians’ mouths were open…

    “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.”

    But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard.

11. 

    The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.

12. 

    So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future.