The cyberspace element of it would be a completely abstract universe. So it will be the opposite of The Matrix. Except for some very discreet scenes we are not in a world that looks like our own. It’s the opposite. In fact, that’s serves the whole point, that the main character, Case, is what they call a Console Jockey, kind of a hacker, who in a sense, downloads his consciousness into this digital universe, and that’s where he’s happiest. That’s what makes the book so resonate and fascinating and timeless in a sense, in that Case is really enamoured with the immaterial world. He hates what he calls the Meat, his own flesh, his own body, and in the real universe, the last thing he’d want to do is go into a perfect duplicated version of the real world. All he wants to do is escape from our world.

…what makes William Gibson’s book so powerful, is that you feel that this is world that could exist. This is perhaps where we’re headed, and so my approach to it is to not make it too futuristic. In fact the real world is not that dissimilar to ours. We’re only a little bit in the future. It’s amazing to think that that book was written in 1984, because it so accurately imagined what lay ahead for us, and actually that’s why I think now is the time to make the movie, because even ten years ago, I think it would be hard for people to fully grasp the central conceit of it. Now it’s just part of our culture.

The volunteer service, which is available in the south-east of England, offers a free out-of-hours service to a number of NHS hospitals and can be asked to carry anything urgently needed from baby milk to blood products and X-ray results.

…

Steve said his two most unusual jobs had been getting a rabies vaccine for a hospital in Milton Keynes and getting frozen urine to a London ward for next-day testing.

All Serv volunteers are unpaid, receive no expenses whatsoever and give up a few nights throughout a month to be on call to respond to requests from hospitals.

…

The group is said to have begun after a motorcyclist had a serious accident and needed a transfusion. A friend volunteered to fetch the blood from the nearest hospital that held his blood type and Serv was born.

(((Really interesting point among many in this interesting interview. I don’t think it’s “cyborg culture” that has proliferated. It’s digital metamedia that’s proliferated, so that people who might have once been futurists or NASA theorists can enter the previously unknown technosocial niches of “design blogger” and “technology evangelist.”)))

(((This is an interview about a project with an extremely heavy science-fictional tinge that is in fact quite remote from science fiction. It lacks the look, feel, extrapolative techniques and sense of wonder payoff of science fiction. There’s no fiction in it, and it has scarcely a whiff of science. Basically, it’s a large clique of obviously intelligent and creative people who all more or less know each other through the Internet, and are all loosely riffing about cyborgs, and what-cyborg-means-to-them. A cultural artifact of this kind could not have existed without collapsed barriers-to-entry in publishing.)))

(((And it’s not even dull, fannish, or self-indulgent. It’s a little overwhelming in its volume and its focussed erudition, but it’s a very readable and illuminating “project” (whatever a “project” is). Certainly it’s far more interesting and gets much more to the core of the matter than, say, a comm

Gibson isn’t writing about the future anymore, as he did in Neuromancer. He is writing about the present as if it were the future — as if he were a time traveler to whom everything seems fresh and new and strange.