Author william gibson biography of martin luther

What is it that you think you do especially well?

Observe other people doing things. Mostly with things; not necessarily so well with other people, though I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve got better at that.

Why has that been a particular fascination?

I don’t know.

It just seems to be the way I’m made.

When I was a child, I moved very abruptly at the age of eight to my mother’s home town in the very ungenteel south-west of Virginia, where her family had been forever.

Author william gibson biography of martin luther king

The culture I moved into was dense and peculiar – it was like moving into a Welsh village if you aren’t Welsh. I was foreign to it and didn’t understand it.

I think at that point I began consciously to decipher the various codes that were going on in society around me.

I think that was a formative experience. Most children learn the codes naturally and take them for granted, but I had an experience of dislocation in a culture that was inherently xenophobic. Well, ‘xenophobic’ is not quite