Off to see Cory Doctorow interview William Gibson. http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/will...

He was wearing a black flight jacket. You just know it's a Japanese copy of a USAF jacket with all the logos removed.

Some random quotes (some actually by Stirling and Doctorow)
- Bigend finds his own uses for the things from the street
- Is there a Bigend who is going to commodify 4Chan and Anonymous?
- Bohemia is the Dreamtime of Industrial Societies. But if we're post-industrial, is there still a Bohemia?
- 95% of the objects in this room were made in China. Japan has moved upmarket and China has now completely taken over the downmarket
- Singapore = Disneyland with the death penalty
- Don't let the little fuckers generation-gap you
- If you want to be anonymous wear camo, military black or special forces chic. If you're a real operative, be the grey man by wearing a striped polo shirt and a khaki chinos
- SciFi is nearly always about now, not about the future.
- The future is hard to see because now is no longer 4 years long, it's more like 4 days long.
- The real lesson for now is to think about how we will be seen in 50 years time. What will the 2010s look like from the perspective of 2060?
- The Difference Engine was written on the first private word processors. It made it possible to use Burroughs style cut up techniques on Victorian literature and air-brush or photoshop away the seams.
- Milgrim's birth came from a stick figure providing the narrative viewpoint for Brown lockpicking Tito's room. And I gave him a benzodiazepam habit because I didn't want to create a drug cult around his addiction.
- Write every day and if you're lucky the writer thing will sneak in through the back door. Some times the writer thing visits every day for weeks.
- My problem is I find everything increasingly interesting.
- I'm just a non-futurist civilian

The question I wanted to ask. "Do you still get nostalgic for retro-futurism or did The Gernsback Continuum help you get over that? And so, if SciFi is about now, now, is there a place for creating the dreamtime for today's teenagers so they've got some future to aspire to? Where's the 2001 for impressionable young people in 2010?"

I asked Cory why his recent books were becoming so angry. He seemed genuinely taken aback by this and said, how can I be angry with a 2 year old kid. And then pointed out that Makers was written before Little Brother. Then the queue moved on and he was talking to the next person holding a book to be signed. So why do I find both Makers and FTW to be angry and uncomfortably violent? As well, I really wish he hadn't felt the need to write some rather uncomfortable sex scenes in both books.