William Gibson SOMEONE EXPRESSES SURPRISE
At my having remarked yesterday (with an evident sense of discovery) on something (the mediated persona) that I dealt with, extensively, as far back as IDORU.
Keep in mind that anyone who's read a novel of mine has read it much more recently than I have. I can't recall ever having reread anything of my own, in its entirety, after publication.
But, also, now I think about it, IDORU was the last of my full-on I-don't-do-the-Internet freestyle extrapolations. When I wrote IDORU, I was still faxing my daily pages to friends for comment, and probably wasn't at all sure what websites *were*. ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES was the first book I wrote as an email-using, web-searching, spam-accreting human. So I suspect that my unlikely-seeming wonderment at the democratization of mediated personae is about that awareness arriving, for me (as opposed to my Man Behind The Curtain) only just now.