Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulfurblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today it's my pleasure and honor to speak with William Gibson, the author most recently

of Spook Country, a novel published by Putnam.

I suspect that many of my listeners know that he is the author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Burning Chrome, a bunch of other novels,

and that the last book we talked with him about was Pattern Recognition.

Now, this one is called Spook Country, and I notice that many of the characters in the book come from combined backgrounds.

There are Cubans who speak Russian.

There are, on another cultural level, rock musicians who are now journalists.

And I wondered about the polyglot monolization that we're talking about here.

Well, I'm a big believer in polyglot monogalization, not to mention

hybrid vigor.

And the bad guys, the bad guys in my books tend to be racial purists or or you know monocultural bigots so I think it's a

I think it's it's only natural although I was conscious of conscious of that. I don't choose consciously to do things like that, but in the course of writing a book,

I'll notice these things in the emerging narrative.

And sometimes I might turn them up a few clicks or turn them down a few clicks depending

on the sort of resonance that I'm feeling I need at that point in the narrative.

This book in particular introduces an art form called locative art.

...