Dear Mr. Gibson v.1

This is mostly a placeholder so I can flesh this out later, but- In case you couldn't tell from this website, my handle, or any of the other posts I've written on here: I'm a cyberpunk. And so it's with a certain sort of "imposter syndrome" that I write that it has taken me 35 years to get around to actually reading some of the seminal works in the genre. I mean, not for nothing, but it took me over 30 years to actually get around to watching Blade Runner... But that's not the thing I'm talking about right now.

Because it actually hasn't taken me 35 years to read Gibson. I just didn't really know it at the time.

See, let me lay out a quick history of myself. Skipping over all the stuff about falling to sleep listening to my mother dial into CompuServe to moderate forums (which I swear I've mentioned already - Though maybe it was my other site) and being young and sitting with my father while he used his work laptop to download cool space pictures from a crawler onto my own personal floppy disk, and teaching myself to program when I was 8 years old from a book on BASIC that I checked out of the elementary school library, and the picture my mother found while cleaning out my childhood home as they were going to sell it where I am standing in my tighty-whiteys and marveling at our first family desktop computer (a Christmas present)...

I was in middle school when I first saw The Matrix. My friend Damien (not his real name) showed it to me while I was at a sleepover at his house. Before we (him, our other friend Spreegem (also not his real name), and I) became the "1337 h4x0rs" of the high school, before I really knew what "cyberpunk" was... but in that moment I knew where I would wind up. I stole Damien's handle, and still have it to this day - shortened to "phr34k" or "phreak" even here - and I was hooked.

Until, of course, I decided that top hats and steam engines were cool, and a new music genre was starting to pick up steam (pun intended)... and then spent a very long time identifying more with the "steampunk" aesthetic. And that's where I first read Gibson - Not Neuromancer, not Johnny Mnemonic... It was "Difference Engine" of all things. Yeah, sure, it's still a cyberpunk story set in Victorian England, with "clackers" and so many other tropes you'll find in his other works, but swapping the neon and grit and grime for gaslight (and also grit and grime: I guess that part didn't change too much). But I remember reading it. Actually, I remembered reading it in an almost embarrassing fashion - I was in the first half of Neuromancer and thought "wait a second, this sounds familiar..." and the memory came back to me in that moment.

But that's, I think, what makes me want to write this post right now. As a profound and sincere "thank you" for writing novels which have come to almost define two major arcs of my life. Whether it was through inspiring so much of the technology that I turned into my life (would we have ever called it "cyberspace" without you?), inspiring the movies that brought me into the cyberpunk genre to begin with, following/leading me through the steampunk years, and still being there in 2020 as the world took its decidedly dystopian turn and I fell back in love with cyberpunk (credits due also to Maximum Mike and the CDPR team for their Cyberpunk games, though let's be real: they jacked a lot of it from Gibson anyhow).

I've always wanted to write a letter to authors who have inspired me, but unfortunately by the time I realized how much I wanted to, Heinlein and his wife had passed. So I figured I'd take this shot in the dark, posting it out in the open, just to air out how deeply I appreciate the stories you've told and how long they've truly been a part of my life. I wonder a little too, did you ever expect so much of it to come true? I suppose you must get asked that a lot, though, and I can probably find quotes one way or the other. Anyhow, this "placeholder" has turned into my characteristic ramblings so I think I'll click "submit post" and log off now, having said what I meant to say.

Someday I'll write a similar post about Neal Stephenson too, just swap "Difference Engine" for "Anathem" and "Snow Crash" for "Neuromancer"