A Dance With Dragons.

The last time I attended a Langara-sponsored digital FX seminar, I was in the middle of a crowded lecture hall at the Vancouver Film School.

Thanks to the coronavirus, these are different times - I'm currently sitting in my spare bedroom in my bare feet with a cup of tea at hand, waiting for a Zoom webinar on Game of Thrones digital dragon effects to begin.

Although most of the 155 attendees are from North America (based on a quick pre-event survey) guests are attending from around the world.  A second poll reveals that we're fairly evenly split betwen VFX pros, students, would-be students, and Game of Thrones fans - sadly, there was no option for genre fans, so I put myself in with the GOT crowd.

We're running a bit late, but we start at five minutes after the hour.  Resolution is average, but there's a lot of that going around right now, even YouTube™ has been limiting bandwidth to deal with the increased stay-at-home demand.

 

The hosts for the evening* are Tyler Weiss, Visual Effects producer and currently Vice President in charge of Strategic Initiatives at the Langara Centre for Entertainment Arts, and Visual Effects Supervisor Thomas Schelesny, both of whom worked on Seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones for Image Engine Design, a digital effects company that specializes in animal and creature animation. Ironically, the two first met after Weiss lost an Emmy award for special effects to Schelesny's work on Season Four of Game of Thrones.

Their presentation begins with a very fundamental question regarding the extensive and complicated Season 8 animation work:  how did they get this job done, given the combination of high standards and tight deadlines involved?

Both presenters emphasize the cooperative aspect of the production process behind their success, with a team of 120 people working on Game of Thrones FX.  Image Engine worked primarily on the dragons for the last two seasons of the show, producing 99% of the dragon animation work.

 

The key to the process was efficiency, given that the final season of the program required that the same crew produce three times as many effects, leading the the fundamental question of "What do we spend time doing that doesn't result in dragons on screen?"  This resulted in several basic procedural changes in order to optimize the production process.

As with the previous session on Thanos from the Avengers movies, the two presenters don't go into the technical details of the production process, but they provide some fascinating insights into the creation of believable fantasy animation.

As an example, the primary references for dragon flight came from passenger jets, given their roughly equivalents sizes - Drogon, the largest of the three dragons, is approximately the size of a 747.

As Schelesny explains, the audience knows how airplanes move, and using them as references connects to their mental image of large objects in flight,  "Grabbing onto that part of your mind."

Each dragon had a different type of flight model, based on their sizes.  After Viserion's rebirth under the control of the Night King, a different treatment was required to convincingly reflect the slower, more deliberate flight of a magical dead creature.

 

The flight cycle for the dragon wings utilized actual animal references, with the upward flap coming from eagles in flight, and the downward flap from bats, whose hunting flight patterns also provided the reference for dragons picking up objects from the ground.

As part of the process for focusing on "getting dragons on screen", the animation rig that controlled dragon motion was simplified so that it had fewer controls that were better, making it easier for animators to animate the movements, and providing smooth preview playback without rendering the figures.  The dragon "face rig" was rebuilt as well, making it easier to control every small nuance of the dragon's facial expressions.

Standardized flight cycles provided a signature performance for each dragon in terms of speed, how fast their wings flapped and how high and low they went during both flight and hovering, thereby helping the varied group of animators to stay consistent.

 

The presenters then demonstrated how a variety of techniques came together to create a sequence from the first episode of Season 8, where Jon Snow first rides Rhaegal.

The workflow for the sequence began with paintings from the art department that provided the animation department with the visual intent of the scene.  A simple cartoon version was created based on the painting to establish the editorial needs of the sequence, and a basic pre-animation was then done in order to establish the correct speed and motion for each shot in the sequence.

The shots themselves relied upon a combination of live action featuring the actors, and digital versions of the dragons in flight.  The actors were filmed on a motion base - commonly referred to as a "buck plate" - which was programmed to match the dragon flight from the pre-animation. In cases where the buck plate was unable to match the dragon, camera movements completed the effect.

The initial dragon animation was then refined to match the 3D buck plate shots, the two elements were combined, and the effects were completed by lighting the dragon and fine-tuning the movement of individual dragon parts such as the tail.

For many of the sequences, the production team realized that it was easier to use green-screened practical shots instead of animation, such as the movement of Jon Snow's cape during the dragon ride, which created by fans blowing on the buck plate rather than adding another animation element to the scene.

Similarly, all the dragon fire was created using real flames that were then composited with the dragons.  When necessary, multiple flames were combined to created a larger, more solid flame.

 

In some cases, the production team initially struggled to achieve the look that they wanted.  In the case of the wight attack on Drogon and Daenerys in Episode 3 of the final season, the animators initially used actual stunt performers with greenscreen elements and buck plates in the same manner that they'd produced the dragon riding sequence from Episode 1, but the results didn't sync with the dragon movements.

The group needed some kind of simple idea to simplify the wight attack and allow the hundreds of wights to match the dragon movement while holding onto the dragon and each other.

The clever solution was based on a single live action crawl performance by Animation Supervisor Jason Snyman, a performance that was motion tracked to create an animation cycle that was then given to the animators.  This allowed for the creation of hundreds of digital wights that could directly interact with each other and Drogon.

 

Surprisingly, the animators were also able to use the same cycle to make running wights, through the simple technique of "making their feet heavier than their heads".  The resulting combination of effects "created the sense of chaos and interactivity that you see in the final shot."

In addition to dragon and combat animations, the Image Engine team created cloud effects as well.  Once again, they relied on airplane and fighter jet references to establish how objects in flight interact with clouds:  breaking up the cloud formations, creating turbulence, and wingtip contrails and similar vapour effects that helped to create direction, which Schelesny described as "subtle but necessary to sell the effect."   The clouds were initially created as high definition polygon based static elements kilometers in relative length, and then motion was added to each individual cloud, regardless of whether or not a dragon was in contact with the cloud formation.

The evening concluded with an acknowledgement of the partnerships behind the success of the final Game of Throne effects as they appeared on screen.  The final shot compositions were completed by the award-winning WETA Digital Studios, located in New Zealand, where all of the additional elements such as water, people and wights were added to the scenes, and the building renders for the destruction of King's Landing were provided by Scanline VFX.

Overall, it was an extremely interesting event, and I have to give the organizers full credit for adapting to the current situation.  In fact, as with some of the other changes that COVID-19 has caused, I'd fully support this format for future seminars - all other issues aside, it's certainly nice to have a comfortable seat and lots of elbow room.

 - Sid

* It's a bit ironic that two people who do award-winning movie-quality special effects are relying on the standard Zoom background feature. It's like being invited to have lunch at McDonald's with Gordon Ramsay.

"Remember — you’ll get through this."

And now, some medical advice - well, advice from a Doctor, anyway:

Incoming message... #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/lTXziuzWVQ

— Doctor Who on BBC America (@DoctorWho_BBCA) March 25, 2020

And don't forget, be kind, even kinder than you were yesterday - and look out for each other. Because in the end, we're all family.

- Sid

"Happy birthday to you....one more time!"

And, really, aren't we already just sick and tired of singing Happy Birthday twice?

- Sid

P.S.  Just for the record, you should be humming the Next Generation theme with this version of the Star Trek intro, regardless of the presence of Spock in the background.

Fans will know why.

And Seventy Cents: Hunting for Books, Fit the Third.

I spent $234 on books at Pulp Fiction today, and I feel a little drunk.

Or perhaps giddy is the word I'm looking for.  Because, really, when does anyone spend two hundred bucks on books?  On USED books?  Okay, mostly used, Pulp Fiction leavens its used books with new ones, and a couple of my selections were new rather than used, but still, two hundred and thirty four dollars worth of books?  How did this happen?  How did we get here?

(Needle scratch.)

On paper, this was supposed to be a bit of a vacation weekend for both Karli and I.  She was headed over to Vancouver Island with her sister Stefanie to visit her mother and stepfather, and I had booked the Friday off with the intention of having a bit of an old school long weekend:  sleep in, watch episodes of Doctor Who and Picard, play computer games, do a little book shopping, eat peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and otherwise have a bit of a geek holiday.*

However, life had other plans, as it so often does. I was apologetically called back into work on the Friday to help with COVID-19 related handouts and signage, which resulted in a couple of hours of overtime, and was then informed that I'd be back in on Saturday as soon as the executive group had finalized additional content.

I still had hopes of salvaging at least a bit of my weekend plan, so on Saturday morning I decided to take the current replacement list from my New Year's Resolution book logging project, head over to Pulp Fiction's Main Street location (fortuitously located somewhat close to my workplace) and hopefully find some of the books on my list before I was called in.  We had recently received our annual bonus payments at work, most of which had gone into our moving fund, but Karli and I had both taken a small dividend from the bonus, so I had some money to spend. 

Pulp Fiction proved to be a target-rich environment, and, unhampered by too much concern about cost (or baggage fees) I enthusiastically worked away at my shopping list until I had pulled out a good stack of replacements.

Deciding that I had reached a reasonable point in the process to stop (based on weight rather than price, given that I would be carrying my purchases around with me), I carried my first stack over to the till, and said, "One minute, I'll be right back," and returned to the shelves for my second and third piles of books, for a grand total of 29 new and used paperbacks.

The salesperson working the till looked at my purchases, and thoughtfully said,  "Well, I have good news for you, we have a volume discount plan on used books, so please be patient while I figure that out."   

As I waited, I noticed a familiar cover on a lower shelf behind the till - a copy of Lone Sloane: Delirius, a spectacular graphic novel by French fantasy artist Phillipe Druillet that was published in 1973 by Dragon's Dream**.  I've had a copy for years, but it was already well used when I purchased it, and sadly, over time the binding has begun to come apart.  Druillet is one of the incredible ground-breaking French fantasy artists that I discovered in the pages of Heavy Metal, the American publication of the French fantasy art magazine Métal Hurlant which was started by Druillet and fellow artist Jean Giraud (better known as Moebius) in 1974.

I interrupted the discount calculations to ask if I could take a look at the book.

Not realizing that he was preaching to the choir, the salesperson commented, "Please be careful with that, we keep it behind the counter because the binding is a bit fragile."

Fragility aside, the copy was in excellent condition, even the binding.  I checked the interior for pricing (the better class of used bookstores pencils the price on the inside flyleaf - yes, I'm looking at YOU, Re:Read in Toronto) but didn't see anything - which kind of made sense, given that the pages were all full bleed 4-colour artwork.  I asked as to the price, and was told it was $75 - a lot to pay for a used book, but I had some fun money to spend, so I decided to add it to my purchases, thereby bringing my total up to a surprising $234.

As it turned out, my timing was good. Not long after I left the store, I started to receive e-mails from work, and spent the rest of the day seated at my desk, with an expectation of going back in on Sunday as well.

Meanwhile, mixed messages from BC Ferries regarding service were making Karli and her sister nervous about getting back to the mainland, so they cut their trip short and returned to Vancouver on the Saturday rather than Sunday.

And so ended the vacation part of the weekend for both of us, but at least I managed to make some good progress on updating my library - or perhaps improving is a better word, it seems odd to say that you're updating things when one of your purchases is 47 years old.

 - Sid

* For those of you for whom this would involve going to a car show, playing golf, getting drunk and watching hockey (not necessarily in that order), hey, live your truth.


** Probably best known for their publication of Views, a collection of artwork by Roger Dean.

Hopefully it's not going to get THAT bad - is it?

 

“Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.”

- Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

"Being prepared for anything" - like, perhaps a possible global pandemic of some sort?

- Sid 

The Legend: Part 2

(This posting is the second of two on William Gibson's Agency book tour appearance at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre, where he is interviewed by Marsha Lederman, the Globe & Mail's Western Art Correspondent - Part One can be read here.)

Marsha Lederman refers to Gibson's traumatic childhood - his father died when he was six, and his mother when he was 18 - and observes that, "Your protagonists sometimes have that feeling of being an orphan, and being cared for by a community, such as the character of Verity in Agency.  Am I reading too much into that?"

Gibson shrugs in response.

"Well, probably – I’m not very conscious… of it.

When I was studying comparative literary critical methodology, which I actually did, I ran across something that was very popular at that time with academics, I don’t know if it still is.

It’s an idea called the Interpretive Fallacy...

The interpretive fallacy said, that the fallacy was... that the author of the book had any more idea of what it was really about than anyone else reading it. And I got that. I think, I kind of see how that would work.  I think that I still apply that… to my own work.

I’ve got it - E. M Forster, Aspects of the Novel*. (The audience applauds.)

We’re now talking about something else that Forster addresses in Aspects of the Novel.

He says that the exact extent to which a novel is didactic is the exact extent – he doesn’t put it this way – to which it SUCKS."

As the audience laughs, he goes on to explain that he has no desire to be didactic in his writing.

"It’s not that I want to teach people things, I want to cause people to ask themselves questions.  And I don’t even know what those questions will be. That’s my idea of what a good book… does - to cause people to wonder… and then come to their own conclusions."

Lederman responds by noting that Agency may not be didactic but that he does have a platform, citing the Shard-shaped climate change towers in future London that "minimize the carbon emissions, or…I don’t know how it works."

Gibson interrupts her and says with a smile: "The reason you don’t know is that I don’t know how it works either. That’s a deliberately flagrant example of soft science fiction hand waving. Climate change (waves hand) – we fixed it."

 

He then takes a look at the similarly casual post-apocalyptic future he's created and the degree to which is it only sketched out.  Almost all of the action takes place within central London, there are references to characters from Toronto and New York, as well as a vague curiousity on the part of the characters regarding China (which has apparently survived by sealing itself off from the rest of the world), but that's the extent of information about the world.

A propos of nothing, he then says, "I don’t know…I’ve been talking about this book for SO LONG."

To which she responds, "Should I ask about Neuromancer**?  You’ve only been talking about that for ...35 years?

He replies that it's somewhat refreshing for him to discuss Neuromancer at this point.  Interestingly, based on his earlier comments about not being aware of the influence of parental death on his work, he focuses on the fact that none of the characters in Neuromancer have parents:

"I was incredibly young when I wrote it – I wasn’t that young chronologically, I should say I was incredibly immature when I wrote it – so I look at it now and it’s such a completely adolescent thing.  No one in Neuromancer has parents. None of them have parents, or ever had any parents, they’re these splendid... feral creatures!

One of the things which has changed over the course of my writing is that now they have parents. Verity’s mother is still alive, and she has to call her, and she doesn’t get along with her stepfather... there are families that aren’t families of evil technocratic billionaires and whatnot.  Those are the only families in Neuromancer… and I don’t think I knew that I was doing that, you know.

It’s probably quite appealing for some readers."

Lederman tells us that as she was getting ready for the evening, her 11 year old was playing Fortnite, and shouted out, "Welcome to the Agency," which obviously has no link to Gibson's book, but which seems to speak to the interconnectedness of popular culture.  She then asks, "Do you game at all?"

Gibson points out that although he himself wasn't (and isn't) a gamer, Neuromancer's virtual interaction with the digital environment had its roots in the gaming environment of the 1980s:

"The whole cyberspace thing in my early fiction came from walking by really early gaming arcades on Granville Street and seeing the posture of the kids who were playing those games like how physically into it they were and it seemed to me that if they could have reached through the screen and grabbed those giant wonky pixels and moved them around that would have given them what they wanted.  And that was where the cyberspace concept came from, from looking into very primitive game arcades.

That sort of does continue for me as a technique – I was able to do that because I wasn’t playing those games."

 He then admits to being a late adopter because of this approach.

"So when new things emerge, I’m usually reluctant to jump right into new technologies and new forms of mass media as they emerge but only because I want to watch other people being affected by it first – because it gives me some really valuable sort of material that I wouldn’t gain if I were a constant participant.

It’s like you can’t be the anthropologist of your own culture. You have to be outside … you have to be from, maybe a previous culture, it really doesn’t matter. 

But … I think that’s worked for me all along … I was very slow to get on the internet and all.  I used to say, my friends were on bulletin boards and things, and they’d say, You should do this, and I’d say, I’ll do it when dogs and children can do it

And then the world wide web was invented and dogs and children can do it!

So I had no choice.

But once I was IN it, I was OF it, and I could no longer had that extra perspective, I guess."

Lederman goes on to ask about virtual reality and whether or not Gibson has had any VR experiences, to which he replies that he's had "a TON of VR experiences... because when people make it, they like to catch me if I’m anywhere where they are, and say 'Put this thing on!' and I’d have this experience."

However, he also notes that, as far as he's concerned, VR has failed, and that the real success has been the flat screen gaming experience, which is immersive for users without the need for any kind of headmount.

Following the virtual reality exchange, there's a question period, after which we have the option of lining up for autographs, something that I don't normally do out of consideration for other people who may be with me.  However, in this case I'm on my own, so I decide to get in line. 

Pulp Fiction, one of Vancouver's better book stores, is conveniently selling Gibson's books in the lobby.  I buy a copy of Agency - graciously discounted by 20% - and join the queue.

As I stand there casually leafing through my newly purchased hardcover, a helpful theatre employee comes by with a supply of Post-it™ notes, asking people if they just want a signature or if they would like to have it personalized. I have no plans to flog the book on eBay™as an autographed Gibson, so I cheerfully request that it be personalized for Sid, which she writes on a sticky and adds to the flyleaf of my copy.

The line moves along fairly rapidly - Disneyland was worse - and it's only about 25 minutes before I arrive at the autograph table and Mr. Gibson himself.  I make the deadpan observation that the woman handing out the Post-its had reassured me that the signing wasn't a tipping situation, and that I just want to confirm that, which gets a bit of a chuckle from everyone except Gibson.

As he signs my book, I ask if I can take a picture, and he pauses and poses.  Hoping to get a reaction, I ask him to make love to the camera, but his faint Mona Lisa half-smile does not change by a hair.  I'm not completely off my game, other people smile, but apparently it takes a bit more than that to make a legend laugh.***

- Sid

* In the first half of the interview, Mr. Gibson was unable to summon up this author's name in the heat of the moment, so when it came back to him, we gave him a round of appreciative and sympathetic applause.

** For the non-fans in the audience, Neuromancer was Gibson's brilliant breakout novel from 1984.  That being said, if there are non-fans reading this, thank you.

*** And I don't even get a good shot, it's just too dim, something that they really should take into account for an autograph setup.

The Legend: Part 1

There's an unexpected optical illusion when you see the cover of William Gibson's new novel Agency from a distance.

Held in your hands, the book looks normal, but the combination of the sharp text and the blurred face just looks wrong from 40 or 50 feet away - the distance between me and the stage at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre, where Gibson is about to discuss Agency, his latest novel, with Marsha Lederman, the Western Arts Correspondent for The Globe and Mail.

I repeatedly adjust my glasses in an attempt to bring the cover photo into focus, until I finally realize what the problem is and force myself to stop.

To the audience's amusement, Marsha Lederman starts her introduction by saying, "I'm so excited!".  This is a common thread: there's a strong feeling of "we're not worthy" when people talk about William Gibson.* 

She provides us with a brief overview of his life and career, concludes her introduction by saying, "Tonight we are in the presence of a legend," and William Gibson ambles up to the microphone.

As legends go, Bill has aged well. In her intro, Ms. Lederman mentions that he was born in South Carolina in 1948, which seems wrong, somehow - in my mind, William Gibson will always be the tousle-haired alt-rock dissident in Harry Potter glasses who spawned the cyberpunk genre in 1984 with the publication of Neuromancer, his breakout novel.

Nonetheless, there he is at the age of 72: the tousled hair has receded and been cut short, his posture is stooped and his pace a bit slower, but the signature round glasses remain, along with the unique view of the world that makes his writing so distinctive.

Agency, his 14th novel, is the sequel to his 2014 novel The Peripheral, in which Flynne, a woman living in a near-future version of the United States, discovers that rather than working in a virtual environment, she and her brother Burton have been operating remote devices - peripherals - in the future.

The future to which they’ve become connected is a hundred years later than their own, a world in which a series of cataclysmic events ironically referred to as the Jackpot have eliminated 80% of the population.

Agency continues to explore alternate timelines – referred to as stubs - and maintain dual storylines in the near and far future. It's set in an alternate universe (which is aware that there are alternate universes) in which Hillary Clinton won the 2017 election and the United Kingdom voted against Brexit.

Gibson does a brief reading from Agency, mentioning that he was adding them up on his way to the theatre, and that this would be the 15th and final reading from the Agency launch tour, a prospect which he seems to greet with some relief.  He explains that the reading is set in what London has become about a hundred years in the future and that the characters are discussing an alternate "stub" timeline that forks away from their history - which is our future. It occurs to me that this is the most explanation that I've ever received for a Gibson storyline, even while reading one.

In the conversation he reads, one of the characters comments, "They're still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least," which gets an appreciative if slightly nervous laugh from the audience.

After the reading, Gibson joins Lederman at a pair of centre stage seats, and she starts the conversations by asking if Agency is written as a warning.  Gibson considers this, and says no, but explains that when he began writing The Peripheral, he didn't realize how staggering the Jackpot would be, and that it floored him when Wilf, one of the characters from future London, described the full extent of the Jackpot, because he had never seen it all at once.

Lederman questions this: "You make Wilf sound like he's separate from you!"

In response, Gibson explains that before he began writing fiction as an undergrad, he read Aspects of the Novel  - he blanks on the author's name, although he's convinced it will come to him later. 

"It said that a novelist wasn't fully doing their job as long as the characters weren't entirely in control. That impressed me.

When I started to write - try to write - I discovered that the only way I could do it was to get to a point where I was sort of watching the characters doing what they were doing and listening to them saying what they were saying and taking it down, with very little sense of where it's going. That's where that comes from.

"I don't think I could do it in any other way. For one thing, if I knew how it was going to end, I'd be so bored."

Lederman discusses the dichotomy between the technological changes after the Jackpot and the changed, emptied world that it left behind, asking if this reflects his view of technology, "this bifurcated experience that makes life easier but creates destruction?"

"It's become apparent to me since I've been working with sort of material** is that often the most powerful changes driven by new technology are unanticipated consequences as far as the inventors and developers of the technology, and people who embrace it, they have no idea.

I can almost remember the world before completely ubiquitous plastics. In my earliest baby pictures, the toys I'm playing with are for the most part wood and metal.

So I can remember my mother showing me a letter opener that the Fuller Brush Man*** had given her when he’d come to the door. It was shaped like a Fuller Brush man, so it was kind of a ... trippy thing. And she said, 'Look at this, it's made of plastic.' it was really novel, it was this lightweight, slightly flexible, slightly fragile material and that was why he had given it to her, to capture her imagination, because it was plastic.

No one imagined at that point that tiny fragments of the Fuller Brush Man literally would be killing shoals of coral. Even today, like all of that stuff wound up in the ocean.

It took about five years for everything I was playing with to be made out of injection moulded plastic, for the most part, and another five years for them to invent plastic bags. And no one looked at plastic bags and expected the deaths of uncounted species.”

When asked about the problems caused him by the election of Donald Trump, he speaks ruefully regarding the demise of the book that he was originally working on when Trump won the presidency, a book set in California in the near future, where Hillary Clinton is president of the United States.

"It was going slow in part because I was watching the buildup to the US presidential election out of the corner of my eye.

And when Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy my simulation node or whatever it is sort of went "ENNNHHH!"**** But the editor that’s attached to it said, “Forget it, that’s ridiculous. That’s not going to happen.” So I thought, okay, and I went back to work.

But then the UK voted YES on Brexit, and when I saw that I thought ‘Whoa, if the United Kingdom can vote for something that STUPID and that self-destructive, the United States might be able to elect Trump.’ But then I thought, ‘No…’

So when I woke up after November 16th and looked at the laptop where my manuscript was, I thought, ‘Well that's dead.’

So on top of everything else I had to be unhappy with, I was unhappy that my book seemed to have been ruined.”

Trump's election left Gibson with a feeling of "complete unreality."  But this feeling allowed him to immediately take the world he’d been creating and use it as one of the stubs from The Peripheral, and after writing some short pieces to test the idea, found that it worked as a concept and took that as a starting point for Agency.

Lederman comments on how unrealistic the present situation would seem to someone from 2013, and Gibson relates having a luncheon in London during the Agency book tour at which he and a group of fellow writers had “a mutual grumble and sigh of exasperation: what do they expect us to do with this material??”

“It made me realize that part of whatever it is that I do** is I sort of measure what Wilf in the book calls ‘the Fuckedness Quotient’ of the world.

I measure that, then I work out ways to increase it slightly to induce the level of cognitive dissonance that I think would be part of my pleasure in the text that I was writing.

Doing that in this world is incredibly difficult because - okay, I've got it set here, and you wake up the next day, and the FQ is up HERE."

After discussing the influence of current events and internet sources such as Google and Twitter on his work, Lederman  points out that Gibson has "been pretty famously influenced by music, and music has been pretty famously influenced by you."

Apparently Gibson doesn’t feel that Billy Idol’s 1993 Cyberpunk album is the best example of this type of cross-polination, but he acknowledges that Flynne’s half of The Peripheral owes a large debt to a band called Drive By Truckers, which put Gibson back in touch with his small town South Carolina and Virginia origins.

When asked if it’s "kind of a thrill" to have music like Zooropa by U2 or Idoru by Grimes that is in part was inspired by his writing, his response is “It...varies.”

He mentions having a huge cardboard box of cassettes in his basement that he’s been sent over the decades by people who aren't famous: " 'Here, I based this on your work.' That’s kind of more fun in a way than the big guys."

(In an attempt to keep this readable, I've split this posting into two - the second half can be read here.)

- Sid

* I attended a reading by a trio of authors at Toronto's Harbourfront back in the 90s where Nancy Baker, who was reading first, started with with "I realize you're all really here for William Gibson."

** Gibson is oddly reluctant to describe himself as a science fiction writer. His responses are peppered with this sort of euphemism.

*** The Fuller Brush Company used to do door-to-door sales in the United States. This is before my time as well, just for the record.

**** Full disclosure, I struggled with this sound. I illicitly recorded the talk – don’t worry, Vancouver Writer’s Fest, I have no plans to release a William Gibson bootleg album – so I was able to play the sound for my wife Karli. We agreed that it wasn’t indifference, it wasn’t panic, it was more sort of a slightly surprised sound with just a soupçon of distaste. I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not more E’s, N’s or H’s would have better conveyed that intonation.