Bring Back the Gatekeeper, Please

WHEN WILLIAM GIBSON was starting out as a short story writer, he made a point of avoiding what he later called the “paper Internet”—the fanzine ecosystem where novices could place their work for free. As he explained in his 2012 book Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson felt he needed the go-ahead of a proper gatekeeper. “Either someone whose rent was paid by their job of selecting stories, someone for whom it actually mattered, could be induced by my words on a page to buy my story, or they couldn’t,” wrote Gibson, who sold his first piece to a magazine for $23 in 1976. “This seemed like magic to me, and still does.”