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- Your first successful story, "Rock On", included in the cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades", was the only story in the anthology which dealt extensively with music. Today the CYBER in cyberpunk is still discussed, but the PUNK has strangely disappeared. Or hasn't it? What is your connection to rock and/or punk culture as a writer ? Do you use it for inspiration?

P.C.: Actually, now that I live in England I really don't think that the punk is gone from cyber. In London, anyway, it seems like music and literature are moving closer together. There's a pub called Filthy McNasty's that sponsors something called Vox n Roll, where a writer reads from his or her work and intersperses the readings with hisher choices in music. Participants have included Kathy Acker and Mark Timlin perhaps not "classic" cyberpunk writers but certainly writers whose work falls into the category of "related." Sony music just signed a poet to a recording contract. A bit closer to my own experience I recently received a tape from a Swiss "musical collective" called The Table, with a cut on it called "Allie the Sphinx," which is how the German translation of Mindplayers renders "Deadpan Allie." I also came across a handsome young Goth on the web whose username, bless his heart, is Synner.

I think that it may be truer - in America, anyway - that cyberpunk is moving away from science fiction or at least science fiction in its classic form as a genre. This is not the sort of shift that writers can control - - rather it is steered by many elements, including (but not exclusively) the readership. Cyberpunk at least for me was never as much about sf the genre as it was about the impact of technology on culture and its people - or should I say cultures and their people. Yes, I probably should. SF was always the vehicle for me, the way to express my ideas about the future, technology, and the human race, not an end in itself.

My connection to rock and/or punk culture as a writer: well, even after all these years, even now that I am over 40, I find myself still identifying with it. I'm still angry; I'm still not satisfied; I still want to dance, I still go to gigs and concerts and when I saw Ian Hunter at Shepherd's Bush, I was raving like a 12 - year - old. So was Ian - that man is a classic example of the saying "You're never too old to rock n roll." Turn it up, play it loud, hope I die before I get old - as in no longer young at heart.

- As I learned from an interview, you grew up poor and your parents couldn't afford to buy books so you used the public library which hadn't a lot of the current fiction. What we read as kids has often quite an influence on our later reading, and maybe our personality. What are your most vivid memories about reading? And how did it influence your writing?

P.C.: Reading for me was always a sensory feast. When I remember the library, I remember that unique library smell - i.e., old books well kept. I remember the feel of the thick old pages, the cellophane wrappers over the dustjackets of the library editions, or the strange pebbly surface of the naked bookcovers themselves, often with strange, delicate line drawings of some scene from the story inside. I remember the sound of the stamp the librarians used to mark the due dates; I always wanted to use their equipment. I thought that taking care of books was a noble profession. The library itself was a refuge for me, in that people who were interested in giving you a hard time or beating you up weren't interested in reading, so they never went there. I could sit and do my homework in a quiet place, read the rest of the afternoon away, and then phone my mother and ask her to pick me up on her way home from work.

My mother had encouraged me to read from an early age - she read aloud to me when I was still an infant, so I read early and avidly. My mother always told me that if you were a reader, you never had to be lonely or bored or ignorant. She was right.

There are a number of people who seem to believe that computers and cd roms and all that will put an end to reading. I say bullshit. You have to know how to read - and type - to use a computer. If I tell you my 12 year old son regularly browses through our encyclopedia looking up various things that catch his interest, and has been doing so for years would that surprise you? If I tell you it's a cd rom encyclopedia, does that make it less good in some way? If I tell you it piqued his interest in classical music and learning to speak Japanese, and to look up all the flags of various countries around the world? My son's sensory experience of reading will be quite different from mine - is quite different - but it is, at the core, not that different at all.

How it influenced my writing: well, as soon as I understood that books were written by people, I knew that was what I waned to do with my life. When I write I aspire to make a difference to someone sitting in a library somewhere wanting something better.

- Earlier you have mentioned Isaac Asimov as someone who helped you to understand science. He was a scientist writing fiction. You are using science for finding ideas. For instance your research on Multiple Personality Disorder, a survival mechanism for people who have endured unspeakable things. Can we understand science by reading fiction? How do you see the current connection between science and fiction?

P.C.: Not just science per se but its ramifications as well. Or so I like to think. Science fiction piqued my interest in science, and had I not been a writer all the way through to the bone, I would have gone into science as a profession in some way. Not being as brilliant as Asimov, I couldn't do both. Asimov was not only brilliant, he was passionate, about science and about writing - his work often guided me in both areas. But I'm not the only one - I can't count how many scientists of all sorts have told me they went into their fields because of sf.

- You write about virtual reality in your books and you have stated elsewhere that the virtual reality we have today will not replace anything, will just be one more reality. This is a more optimistic view than you give us in your novels. In your first novel, "Mindplayers" from 1987, your heroine Allie was able to control her movements in cyberspace. Yet in "Fools" , published in 1992, everything gets pretty much out of hand. Are you still optimistic about our handling of virtual reality in the near future?

P.C.: Let's face it problems make more fascinating reading than the opposite case. Writing about people getting into trouble by way of their use of VR makes a story; basically, it's the story of the human race's life - we never solve all our problems with technology and quite often we manage to make new ones instead of solving the ones we set out to take care of. I.e., nuclear power was supposed to give us cheap and limitless power; we got plutonium and meltdowns. As Vonnegut would say, "So it goes." My first novel Mindplayers is not exactly set in cyberspace. This is because I wrote the original story back in 1981 before I had ever heard the word. Originally, I was thinking that Allie would actually enter other people's minds. Then I decided to have the two minds meet in some neutral territory that neither had complete control over. Mindplayers is an odd book because there is no real villain in the story - all the characters are their own worst enemies. People either triumph because of their good qualities or fail because of their weaknesses. Of course, one might say the same thing about Fools as well, but more happens in Fools. In fact Fools is a better book because it has a stronger identity than Mindplayers. Mindplayers is a piece of rather fanciful speculation; Fools is a crime story. Personally I am no more or less optimistic about the future than I ever was - i.e., we're going to get some things wrong and other things right, but regardless, we won't know if it's too late or not until we're long past the point of no return. I'm optimistic in general, but that doesn't mean I think we're necessarily in for a happy ending. where everything is neatly and permanently solved in the best possible way, world without end amen. I do believe that Anne Frank was right - that people are basically good at heart. My optimism has to do with the human spirit - that no matter what happens, it will still bring out the best in those people with the capacity to rise to the occasion whatever it may be. But I also never forget that all stories eventually end the same way - to wit, in the end, everybody dies.

- Before you started to make some money from writing, you worked for ten years writing greetings cards for Hallmark. There you had to write six - line rhymes targeted at specific sociotypes and do personality tests. Did that work spark any questions which you would later write about in your novels?

P.C.: The truth is Mindplayers was my attempt to project the commodification of human emotion into the future. Especially after the office got computerized and we had a four digit code assigned to various kinds of emotions! Hallmark was the very embodiment of mundane popular culture and I still draw heavily on what I learned there about human behavior, consumerism, and the media.

- Last year you moved to England, having so far lived only in the States. Your books have been very urban and Californian in their setting. Does your moving to Europe have an affect on your writing and on your view of the States?

P.C.: I have to chuckle when people describe my books as Californian, because I've only set one book there and I've never lived there. The urban qual ity really comes out of where I grew up rather than where I've lived for the past twenty years. Where I now live in North London is very much like where I grew up in many ways - the ethnic groups are different but frankly people are people and an Italian grandmother has enough in common with a Turkish grandmother that the language barrier almost doesn't exist. How it will affect my writing: positively I hope, since I've been producing enormous amounts of work lately! Re my view of the States: well I probably won't make many American friends with this answer but I think I've always been a Brit trapped in an American body. I feel far more at home in London than I ever did anywhere in the States, including the area where I grew up. I didn't travel outside the States until I was in my late thirties and I knew that my experience was fairly limited, even insular - but I had absolutely no idea how much, until I left the North American continent. I'm sad to say that there is some truth to the stereotype of the ugly American, overfed, wasteful, selfcentered and completely insensitive. Of all the countries America often seems to be one of those that knows least about the rest of the world - indeed there are times when America might be a separate planet. But, in America's defense, rather than point out the relative geographical position of the country as well as its size and all the problems that go along with those elements, I would remind people that America is not a country where one dominant ethnic group was born and developed into a civilization with a language as old as its people - it is a nation populated by the descendants of immigrants from just about every other country in the world. So I think that I can also say that when the world looks at America, it should be mindful that it is looking at a reflection of itself, filtered through many years and events. The people who are Americans embody qualities no better and no worse than any people anywhere else in the world - there are qualities, good and bad, that are unique to Americans, and the same is true for the French, the British, the Italians, the Nigerians, the Mongolians, the Norwegians, and so forth. However, those qualities are human qualities, so when you look at another nationality with hate, you are really hating yourself.

- In 1993 you said: "I am not a political writer." Yet last year, in an interview at "Virtual Futures 96" you talked about the politics in the States regarding governmental access to information. You said the government does not need more access to the net to trace right wing terrorists, because what they are doing is right in front of everybody. In "Fools" one can already find this sense of awareness about the politics of technology. Are you today more interested in exploring these questions?

P.C.: In 1993, I was a bit younger and a whole lot more foolish, and I didn't realize that to say, "I am not a political writer" was akin to saying "I am not a feminist." Which is to say, to be a writer is to be political, whether you like it or not. Writing is a political act, publishing even more so. By the time Virtual Futures 1996 rolled around, I was keenly aware that claiming I wasn't political was like trying to duck my responsibilities while grabbing for all my privileges. I made that statement at VF 96 because, less than two months previous, I had been a speaker at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a good many people came at the subject of computers, freedom, and privacy from as many angles. One of the speakers was a representative from the White House, who tried to make a case for government snooping by claiming that if the government didn't have a way to investigate or keep track or otherwise keep an eye on potentially harmful elements, we might see a lot more horrors like the bombing in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where so many people, a lot of them children, died. Since I had been l iving in the area at the time of the bombing and the bomber's arrest, I was much closer to the story in many ways, and I knew that there was no way the government could have picked up on Timothy McVeigh even if they had wiretapped everyone within a thousand miles of the incident. McVeigh's day - to - day behavior sent out warning signals but electronically, he didn't raise a blip. People like this, I argued at CFP96, fly under the radar - while everyone else is wiretapping and emailing and encrypting, they drive an anonymous rented truck into town loaded with fertilizer, park it in front of some building and blow up the mainframe.

Incidentally, my argument was borne out a few weeks later when the Unabomber, a man who has been getting away with blowing up various people and places for almost twenty years, was finally caught - not through some clever electronic snooping technique, but because his own brother turned him in. All the clipper chips in the world would not have found the Unabomber, because a clipper chip can't recognize a writing style. In fact, a clipper chip can't work at all if the suspect in question lives in a shack out in the wilderness with no telephone and no electricity, as the Unabomber did. He traveled by bicycle, except when he was going to plant a bomb - then he took a bus. No credit cards, no way to track this man at all. And the answer is not simply to force everyone to be accessible to electronic tracking; the solution begins by understanding that the solution does not depend on devices, or techniques, or any other inanimate object, no matter how shiny and advanced and well - intentioned.

Well. Anyway, now with porn and sexual predators having reared their ugly heads as Internet threats, I find myself even more politicized. It's not that I think I can save the world, or that I think I have the answer, or that I even think I know what the answer is. But it's like the man said: "Then they came for me, but by then, there was nobody left to spe ak up."

- You have always underlined that you are more interested in the question than the answer. And you want to find new questions. Do you have some new questions for your readers in your newest book?

P.C.: I have always underlined that I am more interested in the question than the answer because asking questions is a way to try to get more information - giving answers means you've stopped asking. Well, maybe it doesn't always mean that, but I have noticed that people who tend to have all the answers hardly ever question themselves. Finding a new question is an exercise in lateral thinking, which I tend to think of as flexible thinking. You can't let your thought patterns solidify. Of course, when I'm asking questions, I'm interested in what the answer is, but I'm not interested in stopping at the answer - I'm interested in turning the answer into yet another question. Because every answer does have another question in it, of course.

New questions for readers in my new book: well, I'm going to wiggle out of this one by saying that you have to read the book to divine the questions, and they may not be the same for each person. Some of the general issues I deal with in it are what it means to be of a nation and a nationality after the nation in question no longer physically exists. And I'm not talking about the dilemma of where to hold the elections.

- When talking about inspiration for your writing you like to quote Kurt Vonnegut - - "We become what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be." Who do you pretend to be at the moment?

P.C.: What do I pretend to be at the moment? Is that a trick question?