Maybe everyone else in Christendom has already read this, but I don’t read Slashdot as a rule, so I hadn’t. Via Rachel Caine, I read a great interview with Neal Stephenson, which happens to include one of the funniest answers to a question I’ve ever read. I had tears in my eyes:
#4: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?
You don’t have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.
The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head.
Read the whole thing. Trust me.
I read Slashdot, but only a small percentage of stories, and I must have overlooked that one. Yeah, that was great! Thanks!