First appeared in the Boston Globe.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/19/qa_with_william_gibson
SCIENCE FICTION WRITER William Gibson has a reputation for
forecasting the future that dates to his first novel, "Neuromancer"
(1984), in which characters used computers to "jack" into a virtual
world Gibson dubbed the matrix, a term that seemed ready-made for the Internet explosion
soon to envelop us all. "Neuromancer" won science fiction's top
prizes -- the Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Hugo awards -- and was followed by
"Count Zero" (1986) and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (1988), to complete
Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy. These books continued to explore a futuristic
matrix while bringing disparate, even supernatural, elements into play.
"Count Zero," for example, invokes the voodoo deity Legba -- the
"master of roads and pathways, the loa [god] of communication" -- as
a lord of cyberspace.