id="id00021" style="margin-top: 2em">Have you written any film scripts before, besides this and the ill- fated drafts for "Alien3"?

Yeah, I have done a couple of screen adaptations that never got made. One was "Burning Chrome" (ED.Kathryn Bigelow was involved in it for a while) and the other was "Neuro-Hotel".

What happened ?

I don't really feel like talking about them. Let's just say that these projects have been… developed to death. It was getting more and more frustrating, and I didn't like that.

Have you ever been involved in any other movie or TV project before that ?

I was gonna write a story for the "Max Headroom" series, but the network pulled the plug. My friend John Shirley did a couple of scripts for them. He's the one who convinced me I should have written one, too.

The only thing which was left of your script for "Alien3" was the prisoners with the bar code tattooed on the back of their necks. What do you think in retrospect of this misadventure ?

My script for "Alien3" was kind of Tarkovskian. Vincent Ward
(ED.the director of "The Navigator") came late to the project
(ED.after a number of other directors had been unsuccessfully
approached), but I think he got the true meaning of my story.
It would have been fun if he stayed on. (ED.he eventually quit.
"Alien3" was finally directed by David Fincher)

You seem very detached from your previous experiences in movies.
"Johnny Mnemonic", on the other hand, seems very personal to you.
Why is that ?

I wrote the original story in 1980. I think it was perhaps the second piece of fiction I ever wrote in my life. It held up very good after all these years. "Johnny" was a start for many creative processes: it was in fact the root source of "Neuromancer" and "Count Zero". It is only fair that the first script of mine that goes into production should come from that, from my early career.

The world of "Johnny Mnemonic" takes for granted the Berlusconi completion process, I mean the media baron becoming one of the Country's leaders. I think the distinction between politicians and media is gonna disappear. It already has, in effect. It is very sad.

It's like saying that the theories you imagined in your science fiction stories are becoming real…

Yeah, but people shouldn't look at science fiction like they look at "real" fiction. They shouldn't expect that this is what the future is gonna look like. We (ED. science fiction writers) are sort of charlatans: we come up with a few ideas and we make a living out of that.

When I wrote "Neuromancer", I would have never imagined AIDS and the collapse of the USSR. We never get the future right. I always thought that USSR was this big winter bear that would always exist. And look at what happened. In 1993 I wrote an afterword for the Hungarian version of "Neuromancer". I wrote that nothing lives forever, and that it's time that the winds of democracy blow over the East. But now, after the arrival of people like Zhirinowsky, I have second thoughts again and I fear for them.

Now you also write "geo-anthropological" reports…

That's right. I did a portrait of Singapore for "Wired Magazine".
That place gave me the creeps.

You are considered the true father of cyberpunk. What do you think of how this word has spread in the world and has gained new meanings ?

It depends whether you believe in such a thing. "Cyberpunk" has become a historical word, one of these words which you use to describe a definite period of time. The risk is that it