It had always felt to me as though Washington, D.C., to Boston was one span of stuff. You never really leave Springsteenland, you’re just in this unbroken highway and strip-mall landscape. I knew that would resonate with some readers, and I just tacked on Atlanta out of sci-fi bravura, to see how far we could push this thing. Sometimes in science fiction you can do that. The reader really likes it if you add Atlanta, because they’re going, Shit, could you do that? Could that be possible? If you’re visiting the future, you really want to have a few of the “shit, could they do that?” moments.

— William Gibson in David Wallace-Wells, William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211, The Paris Review, 2011 (via)