William Gibson To Visit Second Life

How cool is that? I'm gonna be lazy and copy and paste from the publisher.

In Cyberspace everyone can hear you scream

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

In 1984 William Gibson invented the word cyberspace in his seminal novel Neuromancer and today, nearly 25 years later, a growing and significant number of people are spending increasing amounts of time and money inside 'computer generated constructs', whether they be perhaps the most analogous to Gibson's idea of cyberspace (Second Life), game-like (World of Warcraft) or social (facebook).

So when we first started dabbling in Second Life we quickly realized that something interesting Penguin could do would be to bring William Gibson into this strange new place, a place he seemed to have predicted and described years ago (though he disputes this). Unsurprisingly many of the older residents of Second Life are hardcore sci-fi and cyberpunk fans and dotted around the virtual landscape are a number of sims with a suitably dystopian theme. And perhaps now we have a great opportunity to connect an author and his fans in a totally new, and in this case totally appropriate, environment.

Per New World Notes, Gibson will be at Nexus Prime. The appearance is slated for August 2. To attend, IM Jeremy Neumann or join the SL group "Penguin Readers".