William Gibson has a new book coming out, and a blog to boot! I got his first book, Neuromancer, from a guy named Marco Kaltofen who used to be a Greenpeace campaigner in the Boston office in the early 80s. Marco was visiting the office in Lewes, in England, where I was working. He was raving about this new author. He hadn't finished the book, so he couldn't loan it to me, and it wasn't out in England yet, so I couldn't buy it, so Marco did the only sensible thing and ripped the paperback in half, leaving the me with 156 precious pages. It took me three months to find a complete copy, but by then I was totally taken in by this futuristic world that Gibson had created, where corporations ruled the world, brand names were saturated into daily life, computers spied on people and Boston to Atlanta was one continuous urban landscape. Because it wasn't a vision of the future -- it was simply a hyper-now.

Marco, by weird Sci-Fi coincidence, ended up befriending a young writer named Neal Stephenson, who eventually modelled his book "Zodiac" on Marco and his Greenpeace adventures -- pushed only slightly into the realm of fiction.