ongoing legacy. I suppose I am. That’s one of the strange things about the creative personality. If you’re the sort who likes to rest on his laurels and be satisfied with what he’s done, you’ll never get anywhere. When I look back, what I see are all the opportunities missed, things done I shouldn’t have done, things left undone, and things I could have done better. I can’t complain, really. Being “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’” has opened a lot of doors for me, and presented me with a lot of opportunities I would not otherwise have had. But it does seem just slightly unfair. There were a lot of people working with similar sets of ideas in the early 1980s, and some of them were very, very good. I just had the good fortune to be the guy who wrote the story that named the beast. One thing does make me proud is when some young software engineer says, “Wow! You were writing stories about grid computing, ereaders, botnets, and the Internet as a software ecosystem before there even was an Internet!” Your next major project was the novel, Maverick, written from an outline by Isaac Asimov, and after that came arguably your most successful book to date, Headcrash, in 1995, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award. Can you tell us something about the book? Actually, I can tell you two things. One is that Headcrash should be coming out on Kindle, Nook, and a plethora of other e-reader platforms sometime in December. And the other is... Well, people keep asking: “After you finally got out of the Cyberpunk contract, why didn’t you just turn around and write the novel you intended Cyberpunk to be?” The answer is that Headcrash is the book Cyberpunk was originally intended to be, albeit in evolved and mutated form. In 1999 your novelization of the Will Smith movie, Wild Wild West, was published. This is something you don’t seem entirely proud of. What’s the problem? Wild Wild West was the wrong book, done at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. I was trying to
sell a completely different book to my U.S. publisher, and they came back with the counter-offer that they’d be willing to look at my next original novel, but only if I did a media tie-in for them, first. The project was a catastrophe from Day One and somehow Wild Wild West went from being the pretty cool and fairly serious steampunk western I’d originally signed on for to being a campy Will Smith summer action/comedy vehicle. In the end, the movie stunk up the theaters, the book flopped in the stores, and when I went back to my U.S. publisher to resume talking about the book I was trying to sell them at the start of this discussion, they informed me that they were no longer interested in publishing new novels written by me, as I clearly was incapable of writing a commercially successful novel. After Wild Wild West, you seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth. Were you abducted by aliens? Standard Operating Procedure in this situation is for the writer whose career is coughing blood to either change pen names, jump genres, or else go back to doing short stories for a while until the stench from the failed novel airs out. I, however, had a third option, unavailable to most writers, which was to go back to my much-better paying career in software development. And the question every writer hates but always gets asked... Where do you get your ideas? You know how I’ve always wanted to answer this one? Ideas are all around you, everywhere, all the time, free for the taking. Rather than asking where I get my ideas, you should be asking yourself: why don’t I get ideas? Almost everything I write is comedy, on some level. I really have to work at putting on a straight face and maintaining it for any length of time. It’s a basic philosophy-of-life thing. I laugh, because the alternative is to scream. Okay, so you dig computers. What do you think the near future holds for society as a whole? I never answer that question in public. My answers frighten people. What is The Friday Challenge? We usually call it an online writing workshop, because that’s a term people find familiar and comfortable, but the truth is a bit trickier. One of the things that goes along with being a successful author is that you continually hear from people who want to write, but don’t seem to know how to get started. Not in a purely technical and mechanical sense, of course; they can type, and understand the rudiments of grammar. But it’s as if they’ve been hobbled by