Open Buddha

I saw William Freakin’ Gibson today! Woot!!!

He came to Microsoft to speak as the first place he attended on the first place of his book tour for Pattern Recognition, his new novel. (I bought a copy of it as well…)

He said that he’d heard that Bruce Sterling, his old friend, had been there within the last month and promised to be nowhere near as entertaining. He proved to be much more of the “literary author” type of speak. Whereas Sterling didn’t have any prepared notes and just riffed off of the that day’s newspaper as a springboard for his rants, Gibson had a bit of a prepared speech and then read to us from a 1,000 word poem that he wrote a couple of years ago that he’d brought. He said he’d written it for some airline magazine and had only re-discovered it while looking for interesting things to bring with him on his book tour. He felt that it contained the kernal of the ideas that went on to become Pattern Recognition. He did say it was on his web log, but I couldn’t find it anywhere there.

So, Bruce Sterling is one of my personal patron saints and inspirations (along with Freeman Dyson) but Gibson was the world to me as a teenager and early computer geek back in the 80s when I first got on the Internet. It’s really cool that I got to see him and hear him speak today and at work, for chrissake!