William Gibson, On Becoming a Science Fiction Writer

00:08 [William Gibson ] It's funny, I came to science fiction from [pause] in an odd sort of way, very late in the century. It had been my native literature, you know, like my native coat. It's what I had. I had science fiction and rock and roll for, like, culture. That's all the culture I had

00:30 when I was fifteen years old. And then I sort of went out and found the rest of the world and came back to it when I was turning thirty with a lot of different experiences, with a whole bunch of life experience. And I don't know to this day why I decided to try it out

01:00 as a viable form, but I sort of picked it up. It seemed to me like a pop form that had been in effect abandoned, at least in America, by the sort of practitioners who had originally interested me in it. It seems bankrupt in some way, and I thought that was a good thing because it was like I had a container that I could then fill. Sort of a

01:30 recognizable container that I could fill with a bunch of stuff that wouldn't be that recognizable necessarily to what I thought of as the science fiction readership.