Sunday, June 17, 2007



In the May 1986 Vancouver Magazine I had a feature article called Sequels of literary parents who had written about their offspring. When I asked William Gibson to be part of my project he not only posed with his son Graeme and a hard copy of his Hugo award, but he also wrote a beautiful little essay on a father's love for a son.
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"I was an only child, both parents dead. Kind of like being the sole survivor of some drowned Atlantis; nobody else remembers. The way back, it turns out, is to have your own kids. As a kind of bonus, you get to figure out all the kid stuff you might have missed on the way up. Like I'd only ever known how to make this one kind of paper airplane, a really clumsy one that didn't fly very well. So I started buying Graeme books with instructions for different planes. Now he knows about 20 different folds: darts, canards, flying wings, tiny little origami numbers that imitate swallows, step-discontinuity airfoils that I still haven't learned how to make...We fly them off the front porch, they get caught in trees, I knock them down with sticks. Truly the basic stuff of sanity."
William Gibson


My Father George