“VITALE: The story is scrolling at a fixed rate from the bottom of Penn’s screen to the top like the introductions to the ‘Star Wars’ films. It takes 20 minutes to reach the end, and Jillette can’t stop it.

JILLETTE: Yes. No, we can’t—we’ve already started. We can’t go back.

VITALE: And once the story has scrolled through to the end, a built-in computer virus destroys it.

WILLIAM GIBSON (AUTHOR): There’s something very satisfying I think for a writer—the idea of a—a form that allows you, in effect, to say, ‘OK, sit down and pay attention. We’re only going to say this once.’

VITALE: New York publisher Kevin Begos claims ‘Agrippa’ has never been printed out on paper, only transferred from computer memory to computer memory. William Gibson says the story is then simply transferred from the computer’s memory to the reader’s memory. . . .”

Article offers a substantial interview with William Gibson, with particular emphasis on the evolution of the cyberpunk genre.

“Inside a specially crafted oversized book illustrated with Ashbaugh’s evocative engravings is a 3 1/2-inch computer disk containing a long poem by Gibson addressing his feelings about his father, who died when the author was very young. The trick comes when you read the poem from the disk: an encryption program, functioning like a virus, devours the text, so you can read it only once. Published in a very expensive limited edition, Agrippa caused fierce argument in the art world and also among museums and libraries. The text’s disappearing act challenged ideas about the permanence of art and literature, and raised serious problems for archivists interested in preserving it for future generations.”

Interview with Gibson, with emphasis on Agrippa.

“So, the result of the thing for me, in a funny way, was that I produced a sort of monument to my father, because the piece is a long three-verse poem about my relationship with my father who died when I was very young and I didn’t get to know him very well. And it wound up being this permanent ghostly presence on the inter-net, which I couldn’t erase if I wanted to. Which is interesting too. There is no place to go and pull the plug on this thing. It sort of lives there. So, it worked out really well. It was quite startling the amount of press it generated on its own. It generated as much commentary as a book.”

This article features an interview with William Gibson at the height of his cyberpunk fame.

“I really don’t think of myself as a futurist. I’m just trying to make sense of contemporary reality. I think the world we live in is so hopelessly weird and complex that in order come to terms with it, you need the tools that science fiction develops…”

“I’ve had a fantasy for years about phoning myself somehow in 1968 or, more remotely, phoning my father back in the 1950s and having a conversation. If you think about phoning yourself in 1968…The things you would have to explain.”