"Mike Rogers - gibson interview" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson Walter)

like these should be memories of the forties. It's, you know, It's kind
of a backward... It's kind of a backwater place and by making Rydell,
you know, a Southerner I also made him a hick to some extent. So he's
the, you know, he's... he's the hick from Hickograd adrift in the big
city and consequently he gets to wonder about things and ask questions
and that's very convenient for the science fiction writer because it
gets you over the expository lumps quite smoothly. I mean, when you...
In science fiction watch for these naive characters. They're pretty
common because they serve such a convenient purpose for the author.

MR: What struck me was the different portrayal between _Virtual Light_ and
the Sprawl novels in the portrayal of the underground, the computer
underground. Especially the hackers. In _Virtual Light_ you didn't seem
to like them and in fact you threw them into ridicule.

WG: Well, they're both based on... the same... you know, to some extent.

MR: Also... The culture of the bridge. That's seen from the outside. Even
Chevette is to a large extent an outsider. And yet with, say, Sam
Delany in, say, Dhalgren, he had his naive characters walk around as
part of the underground. He's from... he writes from an urban...
environment. You and he are from different milieus. His urban
characters never seem as put upon. They survive a lot easier. He's more
sympathetic.

WG: Well, he grew up in New York and my formative, my first real experience
of a real city was living in Toronto in the late sixties from about
'67 on and, yeah, it's given me a different take on urbanism. It's a
very different sort of city. In those days it was more different still.
It hadn't been quite developed into the new neo-Toronto.

MR: They use it for New York movie backdrops nowadays.

WG: Yeah. Neo-Toronto is sort of... It more parallels... you know, the
Docklands in London? It's a bit, you know, it's very expensively built
empty space.

MR: They're doing that here with German money. Temple Bar. It's quite
extraordinary... They take all the cobblestones from the, like, ghetto
and move them to almost gated streets.

WG: So down in the poor neighbourhoods they now have tarmac?

MR: Yeah, it's like a move up in the world. After hundreds of years they
finally get to have tarmac, flat roads. And the rich people get cobbles
and all.

WG: Isn't that something.

MR: Set in shiny new tar, yeah.