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now.
     
    Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram that has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know—stolen credit cards—a burned-out suburb—planetary conjunctions of a stranger—a tank burning on a highway—a flat packet of drugs—a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
     
    Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape—is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
     
    She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
     
    But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    William Gibson
     
     
    I
    n 1999, The Guardian called William Gibson “probably the most important novelist of the past two decades.” The undisputed father of the cyberpunk genre, having inspiring legions of authors, artists, and musicians from U2 to Sonic Youth, Gibson also teamed up with Bruce Sterling to help found steampunk with The Difference Engine, which remains the genre’s best-known work. His debut novel, Neuromancer, was the first ever to win science fiction’s “triple crown”—the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards—and by 2007 had sold more than 6.5 million copies, as well as been named one of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923 by Time magazine. He has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and awarded numerous honorary doctorates.
     
    Yet to call William Gibson a science fiction author, or an author at all, is to fundamentally miss the point. Though prose is his medium, Gibson is a cultural lightning rod. Like many of the authors in this collection, he can be credited with predicting any number of modern conventions (such as the rise of reality television). Yet Gibson did not merely predict. Instead, the wild imagination and tremendous popularity of his work at a crucial time in the development of the Internet and Internet culture ran so deep as to make the jump from prediction to causation, in fact shaping the very future he sought to envision. Terms like cyberspace, netsurfing, jacking in, ICE, and neural implants, as well as concepts from cybersex and online environments to meatpuppets and the matrix—all were initially introduced by Gibson. In envisioning the Internet and the information age, he gave us a language and iconography with which to express ourselves, and the digital world we know is a direct outgrowth of his art.
     
    And he did it all without a modem or email address, on a typewriter from 1927.
     
    In “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” the first story he ever finished, Gibson’s now-famous themes are already firmly in place, a dystopia of sprawling high-tech slums and recorded stimulus. But no one, least of all Gibson, could ever have predicted the indelible mark his tentative efforts would leave on modern society.
     
    Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?
     
    This was not only the first story I published, but the first I completed. I literally hadn’t yet learned how to move a character through simple narrative space. That resulted in the invention of the memory-recording technology, but it also forced me to work with the character’s interiority. The capacity for written depiction of character-interiority is what distinguishes prose fiction from plays, screenplays, etc. So my