They didn’t think Flynn’s brother Burton had PTSD but that sometimes the gone haptics would glitch him, they said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he had worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction, what range, so they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer by the creek. An alcoholic uncle had lived there before, a veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother.

There’s a relatively recent video out there with William Gibson at the New York Public Library, reading the first chapter (entitled The Gone Haptics) of his upcoming novel The Peripheral, and what you just hopefully read in the blockquote is the first sentence. Or the first few, depending on how exact the transcript is. The Gone Haptics also confuses me, bringing me back to wasp nets, military implants and post-war trailer reality oozing Agrippa and that’s a good sort of confusion, something very similar to the feeling when I first read Neuromancer when I was thirteen. Go figure.

Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Walmart amber.

This video comes from IO9 and if you want more, hop on to the NYPL event page where you have an hour-long video of the whole event (with downloadable audio, video and transcript links) that’s going to give you some great insight on Gibson’s life and also some teasers on The Peripheral – two timelines shifting in the book, one being cca thirty years from now, the other terribly far ahead, consequently very hard to write? As I said, watch the whole thing.