How I became Jeff Somers

So for a few days in June, it appears I was actually two people at once. Not only was I Nick Harkaway, I was also chess-playing cocktail drinker, unicornist, and author, Jeff Somers, who wrote The Electric Church.

First and most obvious difference? Jeff has html Helper Monkeys. I need Helper Monkeys quite badly.

The confusion came about because SFX magazine had a moment rush of blood to the feet regarding the credit for The Digital Plague and awarded it to me instead. I haven't read it yet, but I liked The Electric Church. I'm glad to have been associated with the book, albeit briefly.

And with the Helper Monkeys. 

Anyway - second difference? I am in focus in my pictures. Jeff has this cool Hoboken thing happening where he is all blurry. This means that he looks sophisticated and ever so slightly like a thinking woman's Keanu, and I look like a literary Worzel Gummidge.

Third (and most significant) difference? Pants. I'm English, so in any case 'pants' means 'underwear', and I have no intention of inflicting an underwear discussion on you, but Jeff, as you can see in this elegant and sophisticated visual aid, is not truly happy when wearing what he refers to as 'pants'. I assume this means that he goes about the place in a state of creative untrouseredness. I myself, living in more prudish London, am constrained to wear clothing. Also, I have mediocre legs which I do not care to expose to casual scrutiny - or, as it would be in the UK, surveillance.

In the interest of scientific accuracy in reporting, I should concede the interesting point that while Jeff was at BEA in spirit but not in body, I was present in body, but as we have already seen, not in spirit. My spirit was somewhere between Dublin and Salt Lake, wearing happy clown shoes and singing the Marseillaise. Thus we have never been seen in the same room at the same time.

All the same, we have consulted with a number of reliable sources, and established that we are, in fact, two different people. Which is good, because I'm far from confident that I have enough energy to be both of us.

Note:  I was trying to find a way to connect this nonsense with Katherine Hayles's zinging "How We Became Posthuman", but I couldn't, which you should probably take as about a thousand points in her favour, because she's a serious thinker and I'm noodling about because I felt I should post something today and I really want to be writing my new book.

Note (II):  I just got my copies of the US edition of The Gone-Away World, and I have to tell you in all truthfulness that it is teh s3xy. Or for those of you who find l33tspeak alarming and irksome even in jest - it's a stroke-friendly, graphically brilliant, lust-inspiring object so splendidly assembled that no well-furnished room is complete without it even before you consider the benefits of actually reading it.

And I say this without any kind of bias at all.