The 'net Is A Waste Of Time.

I Was Travelling With Bruce Sterling On Our Mutual Difference Engine Tour And He Became Aware From The Experience Of Travelling With Me That I Would Distinguish Among The Shoes In A Perfectly Normal Fashion, But Form Him It Was A Revelation. There's A Very Lyrical Passage In Holy Fire About Old Wealthy European Men And Their Shoes, And How Beautiful Their Shoes Are, And How There Have Never Been Shoes As Beautiful. I Think That That Was Probably As Close As Bruce Will Ever Get To Homage In My Direction. I Made Him Aware Of Footwear Fashion.

I Had A Lot Of Issues With The Genre, And I Probably Even Had Issues With The Whole Idea Of Genre. I Was Coming Into It With A Certain Degree Of Outsider Attitude, And I Didn't Have A Long-term Plan. But I Think The Way It's Worked Out, It's Sort Of Warped Into What I Suppose You Could Say Is My Own Genre. If People Like My Books, They Have Some Idea Of What The Next One Will Be Like.

The Culture Is Still There, And People Are Still Doing It. I Imagine Some People Are Doing It Very Well Indeed. As For Me, It Definitely Was My Native Literary Culture. Science Fiction Was Where I'm From, But On The Way To Now, I Went Through A Lot Of Other Territory, And I Wasn't Really That Culturally Conventional An Sf Writer When I Started.

This Perpetual Toggling Between Nothing Being New, Under The Sun, And Everything Having Very Recently Changed, Absolutely, Is Perhaps The Central Driving Tension Of My Work.

A Snappy Label And A Manifesto Would Have Been Two Of The Very Last Things On My Own Career Want List. That Label Enabled Mainstream Science Fiction To Safely Assimilate Our Dissident Influence, Such As It Was. Cyberpunk Could Then Be Embraced And Given Prizes And Patted On The Head, And Genre Science Fiction Could Continue Unchanged.