So, I just got back from Bill Gibson's reading (of a short essay on the interaction of memory and culture, starting in the Pleistocene), and I am now the happy owner of a signed Neuromancer, All Tomorrow's Parties, and Pattern Recognition. The Q&A session was much longer than the reading, and generated a lot of worthwhile questions such as "How have you been successful as a writer? How do you define your success?" to "What's your favorite WWII movie?" (A: The Longest Day).

In between, some interesting bits I noted: Neuromancer was written very deliberately to omit time cues, but he always assumed it was circa 2035. Gibson believes that "every piece of SF is about the year in which it was written" (true only to a point, or else where's the power of imagination?). He's currently reading bits of Borges as well as Landor's Tower by Ian Sinclair (an obscure Brit stylist — I should guessed).

And he blew everyone's mind with a bit about the "function of the Heracletian self" in his fiction-writing process, but I guess I'm saving that story to dine out on.