Excerpts from an interview with WILLIAM GIBSON (ILLUSIONS, Number 19, Winter 1992)

WILLIAM GIBSON is still feeling decidedly jet lagged as we wander the streets of Wellington looking for coffee, cigarettes and a place to talk; preferably all three in one hit. We're not having much luck. Gibson has just participated in a panel discussion on "other worlds" with two other nominally sci-fi writers. Earlier in the week he made his first appearance, "an hour with William Gibson," at the 1992 Wellington Festival of the Arts Writers and Readers Week. For those who don't know, William Gibson is an American born (Virginia), Canadian resident (Vancouver) novelist credited with the invention of the genre of cyberpunk which he developed across a trilogy of novels (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive) and a volume of short stories (Burning Chrome). He is also the co-author with Bruce Sterling of a lengthy novel set in the Victorian era, The Difference Engine. In other words, Gibson is equally at home within the machinations of both neo and paleo technological epochs. I interviewed William Gibson for Illusions, with Tony Chuah, on Saturday March 14 in Cuba Street, Wellington.
— Lawrence McDonald.