William Gibson, On Research and Science Fiction

00:08 [William Gibson] I do less, almost nothing in the way of deliberate research, and regard my moment to moment existence in the world as being primarily emission of research. The

00:30 looking-for-stuff machine is always on, and I don't have to monitor it. It's like those bug zappers in roadside restaurant. Occasionally there's, like, a blue flash and I know that something's been caught, and that it will be in the hopper. I worry sometimes that that's

01:00 too memory-dependent, and that as I get older and my synapses gum up with various things I won't have that sort of recall. But so far it works. And also there's a certain stage in the completion of a narrative where I more actively, but no less randomly, start looking for missing pieces. And

01:30 I have this odd faith that the missing piece will simply be provided. It will be dialed in from elsewhere by the act of taking the narrative to a certain point and being unable to complete it. At this point in my career, I have a lot of  sort of credit built up, in that there are people who take some pleasure in

02:00 providing me with weird bits and pieces of stuff. People who are sufficiently privy to the process that if they find something weird, they think, well, I'll throw this in Bill's hopper, and maybe nothing will happen, or maybe it will emerge transformed, transformed by the weirdness of his process as something new in one of his books.