Via Neil Gaiman, I came across the NYT Magazine August 19 interview with William Gibson. The NYT Magazine isn’t one of my regular reads so it may just be the format, but the interview is not that insightful and maybe even just plain stupid. And I can’t escape the sense that the interviewer considered the assignment a bit beneath her. I get this sense, in large part, from juxtaposing a response to something Gibson says and a later question.

First, in explaining the main character of his latest novel, Spook Country, Gibson mentions that the only art magazine he reads is Juxtapoz, a magazine about the low-brow art movement. The interviewer replies, “I’m not sure that’s something to boast about.”

Now juxtapose that with the all too familiar question that interviewers who don’t read science fiction always ask the field’s major authors: “Do you feel that you’ve transcended the science-fiction genre in your work?” I’m waiting for the day when someone asks an author like Cormac McCarthy or Geraldine Brooks if they’ve transcended the literary fiction genre in their work.