Dans la première, il parle des livres numériques.
Will you mourn the loss of the physical book if eBooks become the dominant format?
William Gibson : It doesn’t fill me with quite the degree of horror and sorrow that it seems to fill many of my friends. For one thing, I don’t think that physical books will cease to be produced. But the ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing –- I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail. Often times they are remained or returned, using double the carbon footprint. And more electricity is used to pulp them and turn them into more books. If you look at it from a purely ecological point of view, it’s crazy.
Dans la seconde, il parle de son nouveau roman Zero History
Voici le début de la deuxième
Code : Tout sélectionner
Vice: I feel a little bad because I read your Twitter, and there were a couple of posts on there recently about how the process of doing interviews for new books is sort of torturous for you.
[b]William Gibson : [/b]That will come later, toward the end of the tour. But you’re at the front of the queue. [laughs] I’m saying things here more or less for the first time, and I still haven’t been compelled by repetition to pointlessly change what I’m saying.
Hopefully I’ll get this out before that time comes for you. In your last three books, you’ve developed this world where marketing is treated like espionage. There are agents and double agents and intrigue upon intrigue, but it will be in the service of something like a new denim line. Is this approach intended to be satire? Or is it closer to the truth as you see it?
[b]William Gibson : [/b]If something really is satire, I don’t enjoy it. It can’t be satire and be that good. What I like is something that’s closer to a useful, anthropological description that has a really, really sharp satirical edge. Satire, traditionally in our culture, pushes the exaggeration past where the edge really hurts, and you sort of just goof on it. But other cultures, like the British, totally get it. Where you want to be with satire is right on the razor’s edge, where it really hurts and you can’t tell whether you’re being put on or not.Le résumé : (piqué sur Wikipédia)
Zero History is a novel by William Gibson. It concludes the informal trilogy begun by Pattern Recognition and features Hollis Henry and Milgrim from Spook Country, the middle book, as the protagonists.
Both Hollis and Milgrim find themselves in London working for Hubertus Bigend, unaware that their lives previously crossed in Spook Country. Bigend's current interest is fashion, particularly the intersection between streetwear, workwear and military clothing. He asks Henry and Milgrim to investigate a secret brand called Gabriel Hounds, named after the English legend. At the same time, he becomes aware that a coup is being plotted within his company, Blue Ant. The cover synopsis is:
When she sang for The Curfew, Hollis Henry's face was known worldwide. She still runs into people who remember the poster. Unfortunately, in the post-crash economy, cult memorabilia doesn't pay the rent, and right now she's a journalist in need of a job. The last person she wants to work for is Hubertus Bigend, twisted genius of global marketing; but there's no way to tell an entity like Bigend that you want nothing more to do with him. That simply brings you more firmly to his attention.
Milgrim is clean, drug-free for the first time in a decade. It took eight months in a clinic in Basel. Fifteen complete changes of his blood. Bigend paid for all that. Milgrim's idiomatic Russian is superb, and he notices things. Meanwhile no one notices Milgrim. That makes him worth every penny, though it cost Bigend more than his cartel-grade custom-armored truck.
The culture of the military has trickled down to the street—Bigend knows that, and he'll find a way to take a cut. What surprises him though is that someone else seems to be on top of that situation in a way that Bigend associates only with himself. Bigend loves staring into the abyss of the global market; he's just not used to it staring back.
