Vermillion

I went along to a book reading with William Gibson and Spider Robinson last night, and it was really quite excellent. I'd had a crappy day at work down amongst the advertising imps, so I nearly decided to skip the whole thing, but I'm glad I made the effort. Both authors were interesting and funny, although very different in manner and delivery. Spider was the loud one, cracking jokes, spinning yarns and dissing Microsoft Word with great gusto. Gibson was extremely softly spoken, chatting slowly and with a wit so amazingly dry it might accidentally absorb entire hurricanes from the Gulf Coast.

Gibson read from Pattern Recognition (a book I really don't like) and Spider read from Variable Star, an unfinished Robert A Heinlein novel that he's in the process of completing (wow!). Gibson actually made Pattern Recognition sound good, and Variable Star sounded cool, featuring a starship powered by a quantum drive that needs a team of relativists to meditate with it constantly to prevent it exploding into a star. They then answered questions from the moderator, an astrophysicist who turned out to be reasonably funny too, and finally had a short Q&A session with the audience.

Afterwards I got a copy of Neuromancer signed, and had a photo taken with Gibson. I didn't mention my low opinion of Pattern Recognition, because I could barely speak at the time. Neuromancer really blew me away when I read it years ago, and actually shaking the hand of its author was making my brain jump around like a bunny on a hotplate. I had a ball though, so if there are any other local readings from authors I even remotely like, I'll try and roll along.