The Words At Large podcast, an amalgam of book related tidbits from CBC radio programs, has an in-depth interview with William Gibson about his latest novel Spook Country. This originally aired in the NXNW Studio One Book Club slot on Saturday September 15th. You can download the |MP3| direct or get the file by subscribing to the podcast feed:

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/wordsatlarge.xml

Also, there was a great interview with William Gibson on NPR’s “On Point” program, in which Gibson speaks about Spook Country. From the introduction…

“Now the man who coined the term cyberspace is writing wild fiction set in the here and now”

Gibson’s recent writing (starting with Pattern Recognition) is a swing away from futuristic science fiction – about this, Gibson later remarks, “One of the conclusions that I’ve come to is that science fiction is never about the future, really . . . it’s always about the day in which it was written.” Gibson also predicts “within a decade from now cyberspace with be a nostalgic term”; much in the same way that the use of “electric” as a prefixed adjective in the 19th century went away when electric devices became commonplace, so will the term “digital” be subsumed.

Here’s the direct link to the |MP3| file for the interview.

[Special thanks to Moriond]

And of course, this post mentioning CBC means I must mention that… Apocalypse Al must be freed!

posted by Jesse Willis