William Gibson interview: time travel, virtual reality, and his new book — theverge.com

How do you write something that could be called a time travel story without getting stuck in exposition or explanation of how it works? I always liked a story that two friends of mine published in the '80s, in which they got rid of the paradox angle by proposing that each time the past is contacted, it splits into another timeline, so it's actually an alternate reality story rather than a time travel story, and that frees you of the head-hurting or pleasurable, depending on how you look at it, paradoxes of imagining time travel. And in the case of my friends' story and The Peripheral, it frees the future to try to outsource the past. In that story — which is called "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling — the uncaring future is exploiting physical resources from any number of alternate realities with no care for what happens to the inhabitants of those worlds. And I didn't want to do that either, because I didn't want it to be directly physical. I wanted it to be emailing the past and taking it from there.

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