Gibson on Second Life

I'm dying of a headache, but still, this is brilliant:

Across the Border to Spook Country: An Interview with William Gibson
Courtesy of Amazon.com

Amazon.com : Speaking of virtual multiplayer worlds, have you visited Second Life at all? I know that you're doing some promotions for the book there.

Gibson: I'm going to do something there, and it'll pretty much be the first time I've been there since I did go and check it out last winter. It was a strange experience.

Amazon.com : Did they treat you as a god there?

Gibson: Well, I didn't go as myself. I went as the guy that I cooked up when signed up, so nobody knew it was me. And actually it was like a cross between being in some suburban shopping mall on the outskirts of Edmonton in the middle of winter and the worst day you ever spent in high school. [laughter]

Amazon.com : Yeah, I have to say I've visited the outskirts and it frightens me.

Gibson: It's deserted. It seems like functionally it has to be deserted. If it's not deserted it crashes. So there's all this empty, empty architecture. There's whole cities where there's only one other person and they don't even want to get close to you. And when you do succeed in finding a group of other avatars, people aren't very nice.

Amazon.com : They're meaner than they are--it's like people are in their cars.

Gibson: Yeah, they're meaner than they are in the real world. There may be other places that I haven't seen...

Amazon.com : If you had said who you were, you would have been one of the popular kids, I imagine.

Gibson: Yeah, but then you don't get to find out what it is. But who would have believed me? [laughter] And who could have know that, because a part of my frosty reception was that I set all of the avatar's sliders in the opposite direction than I assumed most people would do. So I wound up being this grotesquely overweight, bright blue smurf. In a tutu. Nobody thought that was cool. You know what really worried me about Second Life? Is that after I'd spent maybe like four or five hours checking it out last December, I was walking around in the Christmas shopping crowds here, and every so often I would see somebody from Second Life walking down the street. There are people, always well under 30, who look like they've escaped from Second Life.

Amazon.com : They dress like an avatar.

Gibson: Yeah, they dress like an avatar, they're built like an avatar. It's a very spooky thing. And I think somewhere in my file of lines for fiction there's one about a guy, his girlfriend looks like he found her in Second Life.

"The fisting of life to the music outside."

This isn't going to be much of a blog entry. I'm on hour 41+ of a headache, and my coherency level is not very high. Also, it's 84F in the house, and poor Dr. Muñoz, parked in my office, can hardly make a dint in the heat. Oh, a favor please. No headache advice. Or AC advice, either. When I finish this, I'll take a cool bath, and try to clear my head. My dreams culminated in fire.

There was no writing yesterday, no work. A lost day. "L" in the day planner.

I have a doctor's appointment in two days, and I dread it more than I can say. It's one of those socially acceptable bodily violations, the casual, careless, expensive ministrations of a physician.

"Is small life so manic?
Are these really the days?
Poor dunce..."

I'm mostly very pleased with how The Red Tree is doing, and with the reviews I've seen thus far. Sure, it could be selling better, but that's almost always the case. I have mixed feelings over its being received as a horror novel. People tell me how much it frightened them, and clearly they mean this as a compliment, and it would be rude of me, I know, to take it any other way. I am grateful for the compliments. But they also leave me confused. I didn't set out to write a horror novel. I'm still not sure that I see the book as a horror novel. Which is not to say that it does not contain elements of the horrific, for it surely does. It may be that "horror" has taken on too many negative connotations for me. It may also be that this is what I have inside me, horror and awe, terror and the uncanny, and that I have little else in me to send out into the world. And it's just a matter of my learning to accept this.

Okay. The headache is intent that I will say no more for now.