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Friday was a super-sad day. But one really nice thing: at the airport on the way to our friend’s memorial, we got to pick up a copy of The New York Times with a mention of Max’s latest.

“The Brooklyn artist Maximus Clarke addresses a surveillance society in ‘Render,’ three panels with human figures that have to be viewed through 3-D glasses — and, in keeping with the theme, park rangers will be milling around.”

See it at the the old fort on Governor’s Island, as part of the Governor’s Island Art Fair, in September!

In my absence here’s Maximus Clarke — aka the guy I’m married to — on, and in conversation with, William Gibson, one of his favorite writers. Gibson reads from his new book, Zero History

William Gibson rose to prominence a quarter century ago with a unique hybrid of science fiction, noir, and grimy realism, set in an amoral, multicultural, commercialized, networked future. Gibson developed his distinctive vision (dubbed “cyberpunk” by others) in a series of short stories written in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I remember discovering his writing around that time in Omni magazine, and realizing, young as I was, that this guy was operating on a whole different level from the conventional SF authors I’d grown up reading.

Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer (1984), won science fiction’s three most prestigious awards, but was soon acclaimed well beyond the confines of the genre. Neuromancer deviated sharply from traditional “space opera” in its subject matter, portraying the cutthroat struggles of global conglomerates, street gangs, and computer jockeys who hack into online systems brain-first. But it was Gibson’s virtuosic style that gained him literary respect.

As an introverted teen, he’d been an equally avid consumer of pulp sci-fi and the writings of William S. Burroughs and friends. As a writer, Gibson developed a blend of clipped, hard-boiled language and dense, sometimes overwhelming imagery. His work has often featured allusions to Asian, European and Caribbean cultures, street-level snapshots of decaying cityscapes, and fragments of consumer technology and broadcast media. Narratives tend to emerge gradually, from the perspectives of multiple protagonists.

Neuromancer and its two sequels were followed by The Difference Engine (an alternate-history tale of a computerized Victorian England, co-authored with Bruce Sterling), and a trilogy of novels revolving around a near-future version of San Francisco. But as the 21st century unfolded in ways that neither Gibson nor anyone else had quite foreseen, he turned his attention to writing about the present.

Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and the recently released Zero History are, Gibson told me, “speculative novels of last Wednesday”: adventures in the stranger-than-fiction contemporary world, as seen through a science-fiction lens. Instead of making alien futures familiar, these stories show us the familiar present in an alien light. They remind us that our age of fetishized fashion, shadowy capital flows, digital art, devious marketing, and military contractors run amok is a deeply weird time to be alive.
 

MC: In your fiction, certain physical objects have extraordinary presence — they become more than just plot devices. The Cornell boxes in Count Zero, the