Where Our Civilization Stands Now

.

The great John Linwood Grant recently posted this piece of nonsense:

which I reposted on Facebook. Karl Johanson responded to my post with the above video. That's Karl and I as we were 30 years ago.

So this is where we, as a civilization, are now. Either Karl travelled back in time 30 years to present me with a porcupine--to demonstrate that he has admired my work for a long time--or this is an AI fake.

One can no longer believe anything we see. I had to actually think for a moment, did Karl ever present me with a procupine? Pretty sure he did not.

Review of Noah Chinn's Lost Souls

My review of Noah Chinn's Lost Souls is up at The Ottawa Review of Books

https://www.ottawareviewofbooks.com/single-post/lost-souls-by-noah-chinn

Short Story Released in Audio

It's been a good month!

Very pleased that my short story, "Hacker Chess," has been released by Centropic Oracle Nov 20, 2020 as an audio production read by Larissa Thompson. Listen here:

http://centropicoracle.com/library/S0027_HackerChess.php

Thanks to Charly Thompson for choosing it! Thanks to Larissa Thompson for her nuanced reading!

The story originally appeared in the anthology The Playground of Lost Toys, edited by Ursula Pflug and Colleen Anderson in 2015 and was previously reprinted in Exile Literary Quarterly 39(3) 2016.

Elevator Adventures

I related this story in a comment on Facebook, and thought I should probably post it somewhere more permanent. I'm going to try to post more anecdotes as they pop into my head, partly to fill space here, partly so I get stuff down when I remember it.

Once, when we were in our twenties, I was on a crowded elevator on my way to an ESFCAS meeting on the top floor of the Students Union Building at the UofA, when Ardian ran up. Seeing me already in the elevator he pushed his way in to stand next to me in the back. Because I thought saying random spy stuff in public places was funny, I turned to him and said in a stage whisper, "Did you bring the explosives?" .

Ardian stares at me strangely and says, "Yes. Yes I did" and opens his coat to reveal twenty sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest.

And we stood staring at each other as everyone else started jabbing buttons for the floor the elevator was passing, and got the hell out of there, even though it was after hours and those offices were all closed.

"Adrian," I asked when we were alone, "Why are you wearing a dynamite vest?"

To which he reasonably replied, "Because Ive just come from a audition for the play House of Blue Leaves and I was trying out for the part of the guy with the dynamite vest. Why did you ask me if I had brought explosives?"

"I don't know," I shrugged, and we went to our meeting.

* * *

I've told that story more than once over the years, because it's a pretty good story, but my daughters often looked like they didn't believe me. Then they had the opportunity to meet Adrian on one of our trips, and the youngest one looked at him and said, "elevator story?" and Adrian said, "Oh, you mean the dynamite". So that was another good moment, because if they had to believe that one, then all the other slightly less outlandish stories were also now on the 'could be true' list.

* * *

A few years later I got into another crowded elevator, this time at work with Dr. David and he asked me something like, "Why in the world did you volunteer to be on that committee?"

And I said, "Because if I get on that committee, it's possible I'd qualify for [more senior] committee and if I did well there, I could maybe work my way all the way up to the [most senior] comittee."

"But why would you want to be on that [senior] committee?"

"Because then I could rise to be Chair of [Department]?"

"Okay, but why would you want to?"

"Because once there, there'd be no stopping me. Tomorrow, the World!"

"Yes, but why would you want to rule the world? It would entail a lot of headaches."

"Yeah, but...if I ruled the world... maybe then I could finally get a date."

At which point, the rest of the elevator, colleagues from other departments who had been trying hard to pretend they weren't listening to us, exploded into laughter. And the doors opened on the ground floor, and everybody went their seperate ways. I was pleased I had been able to lighten the mood, if only momentarily, for an elevator full of stressed management types. A few perhaps, might even have given thought to their own motivations for struggling up their respective career ladders.

* * *

And then there were the elevators at the Faculty of Education at the UofA where I was doing my PhD. Whenever I got in it, I would say hello to the elevator, and wish it a good day when I left. Which was, admittedly odd behaviour, but I was living alone at that point, and didn't really have classes, so was pretty much on my own a lot of the time, so talking to the TV and the computer and now the elevator had become a bit of habit. (Fans of my short stories will recognize where Alan and Fami get their perchance for talking to their toasters, fridges, watches, etc.) Anyway, inevitably, I got caught doing this a couple of times by colleagues who, not unreasonably, inquired after my well being and, I believe, mentioned it to the Chair of the Department.

I'm told you talk to the elevators," he said once when we both arrived at the elevator doors at the same time. He used a jocular tone as if to say, "I haven't called yet security, but let's see where this conversation takes us."

"True," I confessed, "but I would like to point out I am the only person in the department who has yet to be stuck in the elevators."

"What, never?" Because, getting stuck in the elevators had become sort of a regular thing that year. At least, it happened a couple of times, and people arriving late for meetings or night classes and would frequently announce, "Sorry I'm late, but I got caught in the elevator again just now."

"Not once."

He gave me a calculating look, and did not raise the issue with me again. But then, several fellow grad students, rather sheepishly, approached me with something like, "I hear talking to the elevators means you don't get stuck in them, eh?"

"Talking politely to them," I would always clarify. Because often, getting stuck in the elevator had caused them to express some very negative feelings about the elevator for some weeks following any little incidents, like "I hope this stupid f-ing elevator doesn't get f-ing stuck again. I don't have time for that s**t today."

I never once got stuck in either of those elevators for all the years I took them (over 20 by my calculations) and I noticed that people had stopped swearing at them and that the elevators stopped getting stuck, though who is to say in which direction the causation runs there?

Photo: Freepik.com

The Elixir of Life

 I enjoy CBC's Grown-ups Read What They Wrote As Kids,  so in the same spirit, here is my major creative writing assignment from Grade 6*.

Clearly, a budding genius even then.

I'd kept it all these years partly because I was raised by a hoarder who taught me one must never throw anything of that sort out; and partly because I was aware that I would someday become a teacher and would need to calibrate my expectations for students by comparing their work with mine at a similar age, as opposed to against the great masters of literature, which seemed to me at the time to be the bar. I didn't become a Grade 6 teacher, but I did have daughters, both of whom were greatly relieved that no matter how bad their own Grade 6 writing, they were considerably better than their dad. I also kept all my university papers, and looking back at those periodically has kept me humble and a better marker. "These kids today don't know anything!" is a common refrain, but people forget how they didn't know much as an undergrad either--kind of the point of going to university, really.

I also clearly remember being concerned my teacher would think I had plagarized from Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Colors of Space which I had read as I started outlining for the assignment and by which I was greatly inspired. I had only discovered Science Fiction half-way through Grade 6, and Bradley's was perhaps the second or third book of that sort that I had read, so my limited familiarity with the field meant that I thought I was copying by having, you know, spaceships. In retrospect, I'm fairly certain anyone would be hard-pressed to find any parallel between the two works.

New Story: "Fami's Dissertation Defence"

My flash fiction, "Fami’s Dissertation Defense" was published today by RIPPLES IN SPACE and is available free at: https://ripplesinspacecom.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/famis-dissertation-defense.pdf The tagline is "Having your AI pass the Turing Test may not be the problem…"

Page and Spine Story

My flash "fiction" (*cough cough*) piece, "The Novice Instructor" is available at Page and Spine in their "Reading Lamp" section.

The Compliment

Tigana: I just wanted to say, I forget how smart you are sometimes.

Me: What?

Tigana: I mean, of course you're smart, but it's not always obvious the way it is with Mom.

Me: What?

Tigana: I was reading your story and I forgot that you had written it.

Me: Okay?

Tigana: I was reading your story and enjoying it; not, you know, because my dad-had-written-it-enjoying, but actually enjoying it, and I thought, "this guy writes kind of like Terry Pratchett." Well, not as good as Terry Pratchett, of course, because--Terry Pratchett--but you know, kind of like that. So I just wanted to tell you that.

---

I'll take 'kind of like Terry Pratchett'.

Earlier this week an editor said a different story of mine had reminded her of Connie Willis.

But know I will never be in the same league as "mom".

A Good month for my fiction

After coming in second in the Hummingbird Prize, I got more good news today: my time travel story, "Sermon on the Mount" was selected by On Spec Magazine to showcase the magazine in Alberta Unbound, the Alberta Magazine Publications Association online exhibit. The exhibit only lasts a couple of months, but you're welcome to read my story for free while it lasts.

The Destruction of Planet Zor

Today's launch of Sherry Ramey's mid-grade SF adventure, Planet Fleep, reminds me of my own attempt to launch Planet Zor. Enough time has passed that I can tell that story here without hurting anyone's feelings (and they can't fire me over it at this late date) so here goes:

Back in the 1980s, I was in charge of compiling (which usually meant actually writing most of it myself) the Grade 3 Social Studies provincial exam. The exam had significant issues, chief among them all the research available that said Grade 3 students couldn't write multiple-choice questions and that the concept of a Grade 3 examination was a stunningly stupid idea. I had read all that research, compiled it for my then boss, who agreed with me, but such decisions are not made by the technical experts but by politicians. We were, therefore, going to have a provincial Grade 3 examination one way or another, so up to me to make it the least ghastly possible. (To their credit, the team did come up with a number of innovations that did make things better, and for a while there we were able to resist political pressure to keep the results from affecting the students' grades, but all that is a story for another time...)

One of the key concepts for Grade 3 Social Studies was "culturally distinctive communities" and the understanding of why, in Canada's multicultural society, some people want to preserve the traditions of their homelands while living in Canda. This presented two problems to me.

First, being a province-wide test, I had to be fair to everybody, but the curriculum encouraged each community to take as their case study in the course their own culturally distinctive communities. So students in Southern Alberta studied the Hutterites, because that's where most Hutterite colonies are, but students in Calgary studied Chinatown because Calgary still has a vibrant Chinatown, and kids in Northern Alberta studentied the Old Believer colonies and so on. Which makes it impossible to take a case study on the test that everyone had studied, so I would necessarily be biasing the exam depending on whether I used one case study or another.

The second problem was, when I got teams of Grade 3 teachers together to write questions on "culturally distinctive communities" it quickly became painfully obvious that these white English middle-class ladies had absolutely no idea why anyone would want to retain their culturally distinctive community. They all tried valiantly to understand what was to them a mistaken desire of these communities to hold onto a dead past, but um, I couldn't use anything they wrote. It was terrifying that the teachers did not get the curriculum objective here themselves, let alone teach it to children. (I like to think the situation is better today as all the work on addressing First Nations content over the last couple of decades might have given the general population, including Grade 3 teachers, at least a glimmer of why multiculturalism is a better idea than assimilation. But then, I'm a hopeless optimist.)

Anyway.

As much as I tried to come up with generalizable questions on "culturally distinctive communities" that would apply to all cultures everywhere--that can't be done. Being an SF reader, however, I hit upon the idea of writing the test about human emigration to the Planet Zor and why some humans might wish to retain their human culture, even when living among the friendly Zorians. So my artist and I worked together on mocking up a unit on the Planet Zor and why some humans preferred to stick with their own holidays rather than celebrate Ko Day, and so on. Problem solved. I wasn't biasing the test by which case study the class happened to take in their community because Zor would be new to all of them; and putting the kids in the position of a human among Zorians was a pretty good way of getting them to think about why people want to retain their "culturally diverse" community.

The artist and I presented the mock-up to my boss. Who immediately got it, but said NO in no uncertain terms. "I can't put science fiction on a provincial exam! What were you thinking! Zor is not part of the curriculum, and I did not authorize this!"

I may have argued back a bit. Like a lot. Because it was the only possible solution to my problem, and the artist's illustrations were brilliant, and the two of us had already talked about doing the book that would be used in every grade 3 classroom in the province, because this was gold, right?

But my boss was adamant--in spite of conceding the logic of my argument--because he was convinced science fiction was simply a nonstarter with the public. When I argued that it was no longer a nonstarter in the age of Star Trek and Star Wars and so on, he retreated to his ultimate defense which was, "You could never get it past the Committee."

The Committee was actually one of several that oversaw our work, and had absolute veto power, as it should, since it consisted of representatives of all the relevant stakeholders (except parents and students, of course--another one of my suggestions that went nowhere) and the Committee was inclined to err on the side of caution.

So having had Zor shot down by my boss in anticipation of a 'no' from the committee, he set us to chose the culturally distinctive community of Old Believers because that represented the smallest population in the province, so probably new to most students. *sigh* All work on Zor stopped, and we struggled to put together a test on the Old Believers about which none of us knew very much, and very little of which would fit into the Grade 3 curriculum.

And my boss explicitly ordered my colleagues and I NOT to mention Zor to the Committee because we were a team, and the team had to present a common front to the Committee, so whatever arguments we were free to have among ourselves, we must toe the line when facing those outside the office, etc.

So his was the exam we wrote and took to the Committee which said, "you can't just take one community at random; that's not fair to everybody who studied a different one. And what are you going to do next year, and the year after that? If you always use Old Believers, then everybody will end up studying them to do well on the exam. And if you rotate communities through the test, then some students will be advantaged over others." And so on. Round and round we went with the impossibility of making any of this work. My frustration at not being allowed to even suggest the possibility of the obvious solution of Zor grew steadily throughout the day of the meeting, but my hands were tied, as were my colleagues' who knew about and thought the artist's illustrations for Zor were pretty awesome.

Near the end of the day, one of the Senior members of the committee looked up from the draft exam and said, "I don't know...why don't you have something like a Canadian going to an alien planet? Kids today love SciFi, and that way, it would put them in the shoes of someone trying to hang onto their own culture." And then he stopped talking because I and my colleagues were glaring at my boss.

"Did I say something wrong?" the Committee member asked, confused by our reaction.

There was a long pause as I continued to glare at my boss with the "I was right, you were wrong, and I'm probably going to find a way to kill you" look.

And then my boss turned to the Committee member and reassured him, "No, no, you said nothing wrong. It's just...that's a bit of a Zor point with my staff."

To the eternal confusion of the Committee members, I exploded into laughter, and my closest colleague fled the room to keep from doing the same. She returned, grinning, and announced, "I just needed a refill" holding up her coffee and trying not to weep with laughter. Because, of course, my boss' terrible pun was both acknowledgment and apology. After the meeting my boss shrugged and said, well it's too late to go back to Zor, so we'll have to move forward with this version for this year, but, we'll see for next time. But the Grade 3 Social Studies exam only happened every three years, so by next time both the artist and I had left for other careers, and Zor never happened.

I still wished we had written that textbook, though.

[I'm out of town at the moment, but will add some of the illustrations from Zor when I return home. I wanted to post this today, while the opening line was still true.]

And Another Thing

Reprinted from Rhonda Parrish's blog series And Another Thing: More about Candas Jane Dorsey each Friday in May related to the release of Prairie Starport: A Story Collection in Celebration of Candas Jane Dorsey

Candas as Role Model

By Robert Runté

I confess when I was younger, I found Candas a somewhat intimidating figure.

She was, after all, courageously following her bliss to live the life of a writer; whereas I had cowardly chosen employment for which one might actually get paid. I greatly envied her freedom and personal fulfilment, as I toiled 9 to 5 in my government job.

I was astonished by her ability to sit down and write without angst, to produce in twenty minutes a document that would have taken me all day, had I been able to manage the task at all. She was and remains a model of efficiency and effective writing, concise and on target in every instance.

I greatly admired her intuitive leadership skills, among which was the ability to move others to action: anyone who fell into her orbit was likely to discover they had somehow volunteered to sit on Boards, or to organize readings, or to make cold calls for some cause, or to otherwise be doing things they would not, in the normal course of events, have thought of doing.

I was somewhat overawed at her weekly salons in which the artistic elite of Edmonton, and frequently the literary greats from beyond, would sit around her living room debating the nature of writing, the cost of tomatoes, and similar eternal verities. It was sobering to discover that writers were real, that there were more of them about than one would have imagined, and that one did not have to travel to Toronto or New York to meet them.

And, being somewhat socially awkward, I was frequently thankful for her frank advice on a variety of topics concerning how one should move through the world, such as pointing out on one memorable occasion, that my attempts not to disrupt the proceedings had been far more disruptive than the initial disruption.

So.

It is possible that on occasion I allowed my better judgement to be overwhelmed by Candas’ unassuming charisma.

I recall one afternoon attending at her house and, having no response to the doorbell, took the initiative of going round the back to intrude upon the privacy of her garden. I found her sitting next the flower bed examining a bloom with flat, but colorful petals.

“Here, eat this,” Candas said, handing me the flower.

Internally, I dithered. On the one hand, this was well before my culinary horizons had expanded much beyond burgers, and food prejudices being among the most strongly held, I did not wish to eat a flower. On the other hand, I did not wish to appear unsophisticated, and I considered carefully that there was no logical reason not to eat the offering. After all, Candas was hardly going to hand me a dangerous herb or one which she did not routinely consume herself. As in so many other cases, I should follow her lead to experience new things and benefit from our fellowship. And, knowing Candas’ powers of persuasion, I recognized that I was going to eat the flower in the end, and the only real question was whether I would do so after my usual whimpering hesitation, or man up and eat the damn thing as if that were a perfectly natural thing to do.

I stuffed it in my mouth and chewed, hopefully before my hesitation was detected.

Candas watched me carefully. I refused to allow any of my consternation to show on my face.

“Well?” Candas asked.

“What kind of flower was it?” I inquired, once I had swallowed.

She named the variety, though in truth the knowing of it made me none the wiser.

“So?” Candas asked. “What does it taste like?”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve always wondered what they tasted like, but I could never quite bring myself to eat one.”

“What!”

“Would you describe the flavour as ‘delicate’? It’s for a scene I’m writing.”

I like to believe that this was an important turning point in my maturity. As with so many other occasions, Candas had introduced me to an important concept, in this case something about not giving into peer pressure, especially when the pressure was entirely in my own head.

Candas, of course, has always been mystified by any suggestion she is intimidating. She considers herself perfectly normal. Which, considering her accomplishments, is a pretty intimidating standard against which to be held.

 

Protest Song

My daughter, Kasia, just showed me this. I thought it was mildly amusing until hit the chorus, at which point laughed out loud. So sad, so true.

Leacock Medal

The longlist for the 2017 Leacock Medal (in alphabetical order by author surname) is:

• John Armstrong for A Series of Dogs, New Star Books.
• Mona Awad for 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Penguin Canada.
• Gary Barwin for Yiddish for Pirates, Random House Canada.
• Judy Batalion for White Walls, New American Library/Random House Canada.
• Lesley Crewe for Mary, Mary, Nimbus Publishing.
• C. P. Hoff for A Town Called Forget, Five Rivers Publishing.
• Marni Jackson for Don’t I Know You, Flatiron Books.
• Amy Jones for We’re All in This Together, McClelland & Stewart.
• Jack Knox for Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada, Heritage House Publishing.
• Noah Richler for The Candidate: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Doubleday Canada.
• Drew Hayden Taylor for Take Us to Your Chief And Other Stories, Douglas & McIntyre.

From the Stephen Leacock Associates Press Release:

This year’s longlist will be narrowed down to three Leacock Medal finalists, who will be announced in Orillia on Wednesday, May 3, 2017.

The final winner, who also receives a $15,000 prize supported by TD Bank Financial Group, is to be announced on Saturday, June 10, 2017, at a gala award dinner at Geneva Park Conference Centre, just outside Orillia, Ontario. The gala dinner is open to the public, and limited tickets are on sale exclusively through the Stephen Leacock Museum in Orillia.

In announcing the list, Taylor described the submissions this year as of exceptionally high quality. The judges and readers recommend all the longlisted books as entertaining Canadian works, worthy of consideration for this prestigious and unique literary humour award in Canada’s sesquicentennial year.

I'm thrilled to see C. P. Hoff's A Town Called Forget on the longlist.

The novel follows the adventures of a young girl, sent without explanation to live with the eccentric aunt she didn't even know she had. As she tries to solve the mystery of her banishment, she slowly comes to terms with her aunt's skewed view of the world, and the exceedingly odd townsfolk of Forget.

From the moment I saw the manuscript, I knew this novel was something special. I acquired the book for Five Rivers, Lorina did the substantive editing, and I followed up with a line/edit (and then there was a copy edit after).

This makes four books that have been shortlisted for national awards from Five Rivers Publishing. Fingers crossed for the win!

[Now, hoping Den Valdron's The Mermaid Tale gets shortlisted for the World Fantasy or Bram Stoker Awards]

Stuart McLean Memorial — by Robert Dawson

photo credit:CBC

Dave turned off the television.

He thought for a long time.

"What do we do now, Morley?" he asked.

For once, Morley was at a loss for words.

 

 

When Words Collide 2016 GoH Speech

Dr. Robert Runté speaking at When Words Collide. [Photo:

The When Words Collide writers' conference (held each August in Calgary) has a podcast page on which they release Guest of Honour speeches, panel discussions, and interviews. These are generally well worth a listen.

My Guest of Honour speech August 2016 was just released: "WWC 2016 GOH speech finds the curmudgeonly, retired professor Robert Runté questioning English teachers and praising fan fiction."

The True Story of Hamlet and the Danes

Saw Benedict Cumberbatch version of Hamlet yesterday. It was breath-taking. Cumberbatch's portrayal is the best Hamlet I have ever seen, and the rest of the cast/production up to that same outstanding standard. Very, very impressed.

However.

I could not help but notice that the only one who survives to tell the tale is Horatio, so we really only have HIS version of what happened. Which is ludicrous in the extreme. So here is what I think went down:

Fortinbras wants to invade Denmark to recapture the lands lost by his father. He gathers an army and is ready to march when the King of Norway stops him, at Denmark’s request. So Fortinbras makes up the ridiculous excuse that he just wants to march through Denmark enroute to Poland, though it is obvious to everyone that the targeted Polish territory is worthless--so clearly just an excuse to enter Denmark with his 20,000 troops. Then Fortinbras sends his agent Horatio to Denmark where Horatio murders the entire royal family and the chief minister and his daughter and son (the only witnesses) and invents this completely ridiculous story of how he--Horatio, friend to Hamlet--helped uncover the murder of Hamlet’s father by Hamlet’s uncle and the uncle’s marriage to the queen (Horatio thus undermining the legitimacy of the then current rulers) and how the current king’s attempt to murder Hamlet led to the deaths of the rest of the royal family and advisors. Thus, when Fortinbras arrives (conveniently timed to the exact moment to find the entire royal family dead of poison, the chief minister stabbed, and his daughter drowned) Fortinbras is well positioned to take over Denmark. With all the legitimate claimants to the throne dead simultaneously, and backed by a mobilized army of 20,000 already in place in Denmark with the Danes disorganized, rulerless, and the royal line discredited, Fortinbras is the only winner in this scenario…

What other possible explanation for events is there? Because clearly, Horatio’s versions of the events is so over-complicated as to be completely unbelievable.

My life

Ian Adam's The Trudeau Papers Re-Evaluated.

We need today to re-evaluate Ian Adam's 1971 novel The Trudeau Papers.

The basic plot was that America had invaded Canada in response to the newly elected NDP government in Ottawa trying to raise the price on Canadian natural resources going to the US, and possibly cutting the US off entirely to meet Canadian demand. The book follows a small band of resistance fighters. Canada as Viet Nam.

The title, our narrator tells us, was a reference to one of Canada's last elected Prime Ministers before the invasion. When the novel came out in 1971, we all assumed the author meant Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the book was a 'contemporary political thriller'. But clearly, Ian Adams was in fact writing predictive speculative fiction. The title was actually a prescient reference to Justin Trudeau as one of the last elected Canadian PMs. The novel seemed pretty far-fetched in 1971; but with Trump running for President of the US, and American running out of water... Yeah, maybe time to dig out an old copy of the "Trudeau Papers", dust it off, and have another read....

Dr. Runte / Doctor Who

Thanks to Stephanie Johanson for this.

30th Anniversary of Neuromancer

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

I keep trying to get my kids interested in the movies I liked, and they always ask, "Is it old?" And I'll say, "No no, fairly recent." And they'll ask, "Is it in colour?" and I'll say, "Yes! It's in Colour! Geeze! I'm not that old" and then I'll look it up and it will have been filmed in the 80s, which my kids confuse with the 1800s... "Really Dad? That old?! Then, no." Because a lot of older movies do not hold up for this generation.

Tried to recommend Neuromancer to Tigana this week, and she asked "How old?" and I had to think...

"It's a very influential book," I said, stalling. "You know, half the stuff on the Internet was named after what Gibson predicted in that book. The nerds who read that book were the same nerds that went out and built what he had described!"

And Tigana looked at me and said, "Neuromancer was before the Internet? That old? Were there dinosaurs?"

Hard to believe it's 30 years old. I remember Gibson doing readings from chapters in progress at conventions two to three years before that even. Great book. Still a great book, though feels more contemporary than predictive these days.

(Same with Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes which came out before Facebook and other social media. Fabulously brilliant predictive SF, but it only came out in 2005 and everything in those first couple of chapters is just, you know, how things are....)

Guardian article on the 30th anniversary of publication of Nueromancer.