Gibson says he's no techno expert
0:05 AM 2/16/04
William R. Wineke Wisconsin State Journal

Author William Gibson's briefcase sports a pink map of the Tokyo subway system - it's actually a smart card that allows Gibson to pass through the system's turnstyles. <

That seems just right for the man credited with inventing the term "cyberspace" two decades ago and imagining a system he called the "Matrix" long before Al Gore "invented" the Internet. <

He forecast the development of the digital world in his book "Neuromancer," published in 1984, which won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards for science-fiction writing. No fiction writer in the land is more associated in the public mind with the digital world than is Gibson. <

His latest book, just released in paperback, is "Pattern Recognition" (Berkley: $14). It tells of Cayce Pollard, a market researcher who spends her time trying to recognize cultural and social patterns corporations can turn into cash. She becomes intrigued with a series of anonymous Internet video clips that have become an underground sensation. <

Her efforts take her to Tokyo (hence Gibson's subway pass; he went to Tokyo to research the book) where she learns of a code embedded in the chips. <

Gibson was in Madison recently to promote his book and to talk about writing - not, he stressed, cybertechnology. <

"I'll bet I spend about 60 percent of my time in public trying to disabuse people that I have prescience about the future of technology. What people don't remember about my first book is that, while it envisioned the Internet, it didn't anticipate the development of the cell phone," he said. <

Actually, Gibson continued, he isn't particularly competent in computer technology. <

"I don't learn more about it than I absolutely have to, so I'm always several generations behind," he said. "I figure if I wait a couple of years, something will come along to make things faster and easier, so I don't have to learn today's technology." <

He is contemplating purchasing a lap top computer with wireless Internet access so he can work in airports, but, for electronic devises in general, Gibson said "whenever I see the newest technical device in a retail outlet, I try to imagine it covered with dust under a card table at the flea market five years from now." <

His venture into the realm of writing about cyberspace began with his youth in a Virginia mountain community. <

"Science-fiction magazines were my first experience of getting outside the community in which I lived," he said. "I learned there were people in the world who felt a little bit the way I did, people who didn't feel comfortable with where they were in the world." <

When he started writing science fiction, he said, "I noticed something about what was happening that no one else seemed to be picking up. I wrote at a time when it was possible to see plainly scattered bits and pieces of the world we all live in - but the science-fiction writers I knew didn't seem to get it." <