Damage Time Released in the UK
Damage Time is officially out in the wild today, although a few rogue copies cut the wire earlier this week and scrabbled out under the noses of the guards — Donna and Matt saw copies on their travels in Bath yesterday, while Cybermage has already posted a really nice review. The US will see copies creeping out from the 26th of this month.
And there was a nice piece of serendipity with the William Gibson talk that I attended down at the Watershed last night. Gibson spoke eloquently, if a little raggedly (I dread to think how many of these presentations he’s done) on a number of subjects, one of which is how much faster the world evolves now than -say- forty or fifty years ago. “The only novels from that period who even came close to predicting the exquisitely fucked-up complexity of 2010 are [John Brunner’s] Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up,” he said.
Those novels cover different topics; while Brunner’s works cover over-population and pollution, I’ve chosen as themes a lurching toward post-technology. But the similarity is in the narrative style; I’ll freely acknowledge that the sidebar chapters owe a lot to Brunner’s montages, especially in the magnificent Stand On Zanzibar.
I’ll blog more on the Gibson talk on another day.
Congratulations! I’ll buy a copy off you next time I see you. By the way, was it you last night who said you needed a jpeg of the Bristolcon header? Or was it Gareth?