The New Yorker's profile of William Gibson: "Droll, chilled out, and scarily articulate"

I first met Bill Gibson in 1999 when I was profiling him for the Globe and Mail as part of a review of his book "All Tomorrow's Parties." Since then, we've become friends and colleagues, and I genuinely treasure every chance I get to sit down with him, because he's both fantastically clever and incredibly nice.

Joshua Rothman's long, intimate insightful profile of Gibson was tied to the release of Agency, the forthcoming sequel to 2014's astounding The Peripheral -- a book that was repeatedly delayed when world events overtook its action (it was rewritten at least twice: once for Trump and once for Cambridge Analytica).

Rothman digs deeper into Gibson's personal story than I've seen before -- getting him to talk about the deaths of his parents when he was young -- and into the racist Confederate revisionism that Gibson was spoon-fed as a child. He also connects deeply to Gibson's fascination with material culture -- fashion, technology, and ephemera, and devotes generous space to describing Gibson's library, basement and attic.

All of this atmospheric and biographical material forms a spine for a fantastic bibliographic journey through Gibson's many modes -- young, poetic cyberpunk; contemporary war-on-terror chronicler; far-future dystopian. It's a fantastic build-up for Agency, which I offered some modest advice on during its drafting, and which is also Bill's best book since Neuromancer.

Gibson has a bemused, gentle, curious vibe. He is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light.