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But I’ve seen stills of the bar and the audience, and those aren’t the people I saw. They’re spliced in very well, morphed enough that no one would recognize them unless she or he had been among them as I had, but it’s not the audience from the purported night. That audience is the original, from the very first Little Latin Larry feature, Rocky’s Roadhouse Presents: Little Latin Larry! It’s OK with me; they were a good audience. Carola’s ancestor must have been in the springtime of his delusions then, and able to imagine, or hallucinate, very strongly.

But as for the rest of it, I have no explanation at all. I don’t know why the damned thing disappears after one session. I know Carola blames me, says that I did something that makes Larry vanish. You’ll notice, however, that I’ve never even been charged with malicious destruction of property. Maybe Carola just doesn’t know how to stabilize blood products properly. I’ve been asked discreetly—i.e., behind Carola’s back — if I’ll analyze a sample, but I’ve refused. I don’t want to know. I suspect it may have something to do with delusions having a shorter shelf-life than real things.

And if that’s so, I don’t want to know. Because what if I have to find out that, say, my man Dylan is actually someone’s delusion and not the man who said that we all had to sing in our chains that everyone must get stoned? Yes, that would be a pretty thorough delusion — but so was Larry. I got all the way into those remakes, that music, those performances. I had a place for them in my mind, and, yeah, in my heart. I feel as robbed as anyone would. It made me think how fragile knowledge can be, especially when you have to glean it from people themselves. Memory recovery is great biotechnology but there’s a need for plain old non-sentient records, the kind of brute hardware that doesn’t have an opinion about everything and doesn’t personalize whatever it touches and records. Something sturdy, too. The kind of thing that can survive the collapse of civilization as we know it and then pop up with, say, accurate maps and—

Well, that’s my new calling. That, and Sky High Theatre. Sky High Theatre is what I’m really excited about. It’s a complete departure from everything I’ve done before. Get this: in Sky High Theatre, there’s one stage, one cast, one performance, which cannot be stopped, paused, or rewound because it is live. And the audience, rather than being individuals within a session rig, are all together in one big room the size of a parking garage, and they sit and watch the live performance without being able to alter it or personalize it in any way. Everyone sees the exact same action at the exact same time.

Don’t laugh. This could catch on.

Kessel to Sterling, 4 June 1986:

“I think your discussion of the novelty of Gibson and the ideational content of this kind of sf is cogent. It strikes me that you and he could do a lot worse than to pursue this line of literary attack. I also agree that sf has open to it opportunities and approaches to writing that are different than those of traditional lit because of sf’s outcast and low-class status, and that these approaches may offer the chance for the production of something genuinely new.

Only time will tell how this will play out. I certainly don’t know. The one thing I do know, however, is that a writer has to follow his own instincts, and I get pretty indignant when somebody presumes to tell me that my honest desire to write what interests me is really just an attempt to toady up to the literary establishment… I do think that there is support for the view that [cyberpunk] is not some wholly new invention exclusive to the sf demimonde…that sf writers, like it or not, are part of the broader world of fiction, though certain kinds of sf may have to be judged by standards different form those of traditional fiction….

A couple of letters ago you said ‘We cannot have it both ways. Either I control my own creations or I don’t.’ I don’t agree