My first encounter with William Gibson was neatly printed on the flap of an envelope, a letter from my friend Colin. We had a habit of inscribing epigraphs on our letters to each other—this was 1990, three years before I had my first real email address—and on one letter he copied out the famous opening sentence of Neuromancer, a vivid piece of imagery that digital cable has rendered nearly as quaint as the paper letter it adorned: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
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