Because I’m nothing if not slightly obsessive, I attended my third William Gibson signing at the Columbia bookstore yesterday. Chris and I joined Johan and Meg for truly amazing quantities of Japanese food before the signing itself - I was decieved by a bento diagram on the menu that really wasn’t even a little bit to scale, and ended up with a lunch box the size of a coffee table. The meal was fantastic, it’s true, but I spent the reading and discussion portion of the event in something of a food coma which was only exacerbated by the fact that more friends showed up just before and we decided to get milkshakes afterward. Milkshakes! Death in a cute retro glass.

Signings (or readings, or discussions - author events in general, really) usually offer a good chance to observe the Serious Fan in his or her natural habitat. I’m not excluding myself from that group, of course, at least not when it comes to Gibson. I was definitely out of my fandom-depth at the Andy Serkis thing, though. There are people who collect events like that - they can rattle off a list of every time they’ve been within a hundred feet of someone involved with the production of the LOTR films, and are proud of how much money they’ve forked over for movie memorabilia found on eBay. I sit among them in nervous silence, waiting for someone to discover that I’m only there because hey, Gollum was pretty cool.

There were some Serious Fans at the Gibson thing as well, of course - fans much more serious than I am even when I’ve just finished rereading Neuromancer for the five billionth time. Most notable was Beige Trenchcoat Man, whose valiant attempt at doing Darth Vader in a seriously gothy way (from the dyed black hair to the pants tucked into boots) was spoiled by - you guessed it - a huge, belted beige trenchcoat that looked like he borrowed it from his mom’s closet. He explained to Meg that you don’t mess with William Gibson - he’ll erase you from history, man.