I went to a talk that swedish crime novelist Leif GW Persson gave a few years back. He started talking about how his books have gotten longer since he started writing back in the seventies.

He said that back the he wrote on a typewriter and it was a pain in the ass to go back and change stuff and the very act of typing and changing papers limited the length of the book.. When he started using a word processor he could just let the text run on and on.

I think he has a point.

I´ve had Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History on my coffee table for a while now. Nerds old and new are drawn to it instantly. A great conversation starter.

I read it back in 1987-88 when it was first published in swedish. I had read a lot of classic SF like Heinlein and Clarke before that so I think thats why I picked up Gibson at my local library.

I mostly remember being blown away by the world he created. If I recall correctly my vision of cyberspace was heavily influenced by Tron. This was pre internet so that was probably the closest thing to Gibsons digital world i could reference.

I played a lot of RPGs back then and I remember trying to fit some version to cyberspace into my Traveller campaign. I never really got it to work sadly.