I was travelling with Bruce Sterling on our mutual Difference Engine tour and he became aware from the experience of travelling with me that I would distinguish among the shoes in a perfectly normal fashion, but form him it was a revelation. There's a very lyrical passage in Holy Fire about old wealthy European men and their shoes, and how beautiful their shoes are, and how there have never been shoes as beautiful. I think that that was probably as close as Bruce will ever get to homage in my direction. I made him aware of footwear fashion.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.