gibson, sterling and stephenson in three-way deathmatch

Excellent wide-ranging Neal Stephenson interview on /. today!

4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle...

Also: "literary" vs. "commercial" writers, writing code, the Singularity, and i love bees. Of course it's slashdot, so some of the comments are gems as well. To wit, this threadlet:

"The best interview with a writer I've read in a long time. I have never read any of Stephenson's books (only "In the Beginning was the Command Line"), but will run out and buy the three Baroque cycle books. "

"Run? I thought people who read Slashdot more sort of...waddled..."

"By "run out" he means "Open a new browser window and type 'amazon'"."

Heh. Now if I could just find time to drag myself through the rest of Quicksilver...

Posted by Gene at October 20, 2004 02:33 PM | TrackBack