From uncle Will to you

William Gibson is getting old and a bit scruffy in appearance, that clever lean face from the 80's still has the spark though...that vivid je ne sais quoi spark of what makes someone instantly interesting.

But nowadays he looks like someones favorite uncle, not my favorite uncle, but someones. (I mean, I like the man genuinely, but come on..all those brand names and neon-signs have convinced me that I am a differently related animal alltogether)
Still, sitting there and listening to him in Boulder today together with the geek, and many other geeks of different ages, it suddenly struck me who's favorite uncle he is.

He is your favorite uncle, dear, sweet, bleeding, girl. If he was where you are, he would knock on the metal in front of your heart and say: "uh-oh, something gone broke here, dear, and we need to set it straight".

He would say it with that southern drawl that still tolls almost unexpectedly by the end of his sentences in spite of him living in Canada for his entire grown up life.

So I got up from my chair in the full and rather cozy little room and made a bit of a spectacle of myself by running out to grab another copy of his latest book.



Which he then continued to talk about. Many men raised their hands and asked him tiresome questions about if Neuromancer would ever become a film or not and what actors he'd envision playing the main characters. He looked tired, and I thought that if only YOU'd been here, dear broken shiny girl, you'd really ask him something clever. Something about character development, or the relationship between man, artificial intelligence and machine.

Then one guy asked: You seem to have an affinity for Japan in your novels? (yeah, not really a question even, dude just had that particular need to look intelligent, as some guys around famous elderly scifi-writers sport)

Old Will suddenly looked a little bored and yet amused at the same time and said:
- I don't have a particular affinity with Japan, I just really like their STUFF!

So when I smirked at this, your favorite uncle continued telling us about how he'd learned to write the way he does. It turns out his High-School writing teacher was a man who earned serious money writing descriptions of technological objects for the military. One tiny gadget could very well earn 2-3 well written pages of description from this fellow. And Gibson became his primary acolyte, and he was really good at it. He told us that when he was young he was often disappointed in the "laziness" in descriptive Science Fiction writing, not only when it came to technology, but perhaps primarily that. Today he claimed to have balanced out the act with character development, plot and language..but still, that well-developed love for the form and design of an object, visualized in writing is still one of his trademarks.

Later, when I stood holding your book next to your uncle Will, I had written your name on a little yellow post-it note - not your birth name you see, but the name that we, your scifi blood sisters and blood brothers call you. Uncle Will took a look at it and then looked at me quizzically.

"It's not for me" I said, "it's for a friend, a great lady who's having a much harder time than she deserves". Upon hearing this, uncle Will looked at me over his round wire-rimmed glasses and then looked through me and saw you lying there in exhausted sleep on the other side of the world, with a borrowed dog for comfort, and he said:

"Tell her that man is a fool, and that everything will be alright".

And he looked very very kind, you know...like he knew something most others didn't grasp.

And then he signed your book for you.
It won't matter for a long long time, not when you hold it in your hand in a week or two (except that it might very well be a really good book), not in a month... but I think later, maybe in a year or two, you will look at that book and perhaps remember that uncle William told you that everything will be alright.