The story of Timothy Leary’s conversation with William Gibson is here. This is most of the text as it was published in the first edition of MONDO 2000 magazine
TIMOTHY LEARY: If you could put Neuromancer into one sentence, how would you describe it?
WILLIAM GIBSON: What’s most important to me is that it’s about the present. It’s not really about an imagined future. It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live. I’m anxious to know what they’ll make of it in Japan.
TRAPPED
WG: Oh, god. I’m starting to feel like Edgar Rice Burroughs or something. I mean, how did Edgar Rice Burroughs finally come to feel about Tarzan in his own heart, you know? He got real tired of it. Wound up living in Tarzana, California.
TL: You’ll end up living in a space colony called Neuromancer.
WG: That would be OK. I don’t think we’re going to have this kind of future. I think this book is so much nicer than what seems to be happening. I mean, this would be a cool place to visit. I wouldn’t mind going there.
TL: Where?
WG: To the Sprawl, to that future.
TL: Go up the well?
WG: Yeah. Go up the well and all of that. A lot of people think this is a bleak book but I think it’s optimistic.
TL: I do, too.
WG: I think it’s actually gonna be more boring. I think some kind of Falwellian future would probably be my idea of the worst thing that could happen.
TL: Yeah. That was a wonderful scene where you have those Christians who were gonna mug those girls in the subway.
WG: It’s not clear whether they’re going to mug them or just try to force some horrible pamphlet on them or something. Personally, I have a real phobia about guys like that coming up to me on the street . . .
TL: That’s a powerful scene! And you describe the girls as like hoofed animals wearing high heels.
WG: Yeah. The office girls of the Sprawl.
TL: Yeah, and they’re wearing vaginas, and — Oh, God! That’s a powerful scene.
WG: I like the idea of that subway. That’s the state-of- the-art subway. It goes from Atlanta to Boston, real fast. Read more “High Tech High Life: William Gibson & Timothy Leary in Conversation (1989)”
