An unexpected connection from Conversations with William Gibson:
"My mother got me an omnibus Sherlock Holmes for a tenth-birthday present and I loved it. I remember casting one particular brick building that I walked by every day as a building in Sherlock Holmes’s London. That could be in London, that building, I thought. I developed this special relationship with the facade of this building, and when I was in front of it I could imagine that there was an infinite number of similar buildings in every direction and I was in Sherlock Holmes’s London. Part of my method for writing fiction grew out of that fundamental small-town lack of novelty. It caused me to develop an inference mechanism for imagining distant places. I would see, perhaps, a picture of a Sunbeam Alpine sports car and infer a life in England. I always held on to that, and it migrated into my early fiction, particularly where I would create an imaginary artefact in the course of writing and infer the culture that had produced it."
