William Gibson, On Inventing Words and His Early Science Fiction

00:08 [William Gibson] The sort of invention of—that persistent act of neologism is more characteristic actually of my earlier work. It's something I was doing very deliberately to

00:30 induce cognitive dissonance in the reader. I wanted—part of my early technique, early conscious technique, involved setting up a situation in which the reader of a work of fiction was experiencing the fictional world in the way that one initially experiences a foreign culture, and I thought that

01:00 if I could do that it proved something, particularly because I was writing science fiction. In a way, I think I was making a point about the sort of science fiction one frequently picks up today which would be set two centuries ahead and it feels exactly like the present. In the way that somehow the world of "Star Trek" is exactly like the present, or maybe the past

01:30 at this point. But it's this very American world, the underpinnings and subtexts are very much those of the world as we like to think we once knew it. I was shooting for the opposite. The neologisms were very, very carefully positioned and the explanation of what they meant was never

02:00 positioned very far from the initial use of the word. You were supposed to be completely baffled the first time unless you could get it by context, but within a page or two I would try to gloss it in a way that wasn't obvious, which I think can provide the satisfaction for the reader of getting it, because we all like to get it.