I wish I would’ve known about this one before it happened, I will post the Second Life URL if they have something that we can watch after the fact. William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and many other books, promoted his latest offering in Second Life, giving an actual reading and answering questions from the crowd.

William Gibson holds a special place in the hearts of geeks of a certain age. His writing communicated something urgent and important about the way technology was going, and still colors the way we think about the virtual spaces that are called cyberspace. His decision to promote his new book in Second Life was therefore heavily freighted with meaning. It did not disappoint, as it perfectly captured the beguiling appeal and horrible frustrations of current virtual worlds technology.

First of all, like budding fans of Harry Potter, you had to get there early. Because only about sixty people can attend an event held on a single simulator, or server, in Second Life, it was clearly going to be full up. I logged in about two hours early in order to bag a seat. The event’s organizers, virtual worlds services company Rivers Run Red and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin books, kindly arranged a screening of a film about Gibson’s work, “These maps have no territories,” to while away the time.

The need to camp out early actually added a nice, Harry Potter-esque frenzy to the whole proceedings which I for one rather enjoyed. The crowd of avatars swapped gags and Gibson references, friends caught up – just as you would waiting in line in the real world. Then things got exciting: an error message appeared telling everyone that we were going to be forced to leave. We were all thrown into the air and left hovering over the water outside building we’d been sitting. We rushed back inside to recapture our seats, but alas some people lost their places, and had to go across to a simulcast at the Sky News building. (Hold that thought: that’s people logging in to a virtual space, and having to go to another virtual space to get a virtual world re-broadcast.) Source: William Gibson brings Spook Country to Second Life

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