GIBSON:

I had a very limited tool kit when I began writing. I didn’t know how to handle transitions, so I used abrupt breaks, the literary equivalent of jump cuts. I didn’t have any sense of how to pace anything. But I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.

INTERVIEWER:

What was the effect?

GIBSON:

A more genuine kind of future shock. I wanted the reader to feel constantly somewhat disoriented and in a foreign place, because I assumed that to be the highest pleasure in reading stories set in imaginary futures.