Back in 1993, ‘cyberspace’ pioneer William Gibson didn’t have an email address

Gibson
(Credit: Frederic Poirot)
Click photo to hear interview.

Visionary science fiction author William Gibson is the guy who first published the word cyberspace, in his groundbreaking novel Neuromancer.

He’s the guy credited with coining the axiom “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” (which is what he says about 1:40 into this interview with me from 1993, only about two years after the internet had opened to the public).

But it’s funny now to hear William Gibson explain he didn’t have an email address, pleading a case of — and maybe thereby coining another phrase — “cyberagoraphobia.”

(He’s gotten over it. He now has a vibrant website and Twitter account, @GreatDismal.)

Here you go: A historic audio sitdown with a transformative writer — hearable here and now for the first time (by anyone but me, anyway) in almost a quarter-century.



Related listening: Greg Bear’s 1994 vision of the future of cyberspace, the time Ray Bradbury told me he didn’t believe in the Internet, and a funny sitdown with Monty Python’s Terry Jones and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams.

And don’t miss what’s next on this blog. Subscribe by email.