I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.

From the underground noise rock of Sonic Youth to the mainstream films of Nolan and Fincher, Gibson’s innovatory cyberpunk has become perhaps the key lens through which we view, understand, and criticize contemporary politics and technological forms of control. It’s not science fiction but the new realism.

…and another audio interview via Authors on Tour.

In “Zero History,” Gibson fully explores his product fetishism and grasp of the automotive zeitgeist by featuring a many of the same vehicles we can’t stop talking about on the pages of Jalopnik. Click through the images for a chronological appendix to the most important vehicles used in “Zero History.” There are no real spoilers, but don’t read if you’re especially impressionable.

But Gibson’s stair colors, and hundreds of similar offbeat details, force you not only into a cohesive fictional world that’s both familiar and slightly off-kilter, but (allow me to go meta for a sec) a reading headspace in which the familiar is continually being overlaid with new, slightly exoticized detail. There’s an alertness to the prose that spills into the reading experience. It’s a crackling, electric place to be, despite the hard-to-buy plot twist at the end — spoiler alert: Bigend + Iceland + voodoo math — and even if you don’t care about fashion.