“ I’ve never actually read Mayhew, but feel I’ve long had him, through brilliant osmosis, with Kellow Chesney’s Victorian Underworld, which is easily one of my favorite books ever. People assume, when I tell them that, that Chesney would mainly have influenced The Difference Engine, but actually this was very consciously the basis of the criminal society of Neuromancer, et al. It was a Victorian model, as I saw what’s since come to be called neoconservatism producing a neo-Victorian world. Not a bad call, either!
