n person, author William Gibson is pleasantly soft-spoken about his work and the impact it has had on the world--not what one would expect from a person who almost single-handedly invented an entirely new literary genre. Beginning with his 1984 masterpiece Neuromancer, Gibson's "Sprawl" series introduced a generation of readers to the concept of "cyberpunk." The world he described with his incandescent prose was bleak, dangerous and saturated with dehumanizing technology.
Gibson set the plot arc of his post-Sprawl novels Virtual Light, Idoru and the recently released All Tomorrow's Parties in a timeline much nearer to the present day. Most of the action takes place in the San Francisco Bay area, so it is fitting that we should meet Gibson at a bookstore in downtown San Francisco for the interview.
In other interviews, you've talked about the nature of the book industry. Do pressures from the industry affect what you write or how you write it?
Gibson: No, I almost wish they could. I just don't have enough conscious control over what I do. I mean, I'd like to be able to make sound commercial decisions, but really the part of me that's talking to you right now has almost nothing to do with the actual generation of one of these texts. They're products of the unconscious, to the extent that they work at all. To the extent that they don't work--that's the part that I'm consciously responsible for! [Laughs.]
Sort of guiding the process?
Gibson: Well, E.M. Forster once said that if a novelist was in control of plot and character, he really wasn't doing his job. And I took that very much to heart. So for me the hardest part about writing is getting to the place where I completely give up and surrender, and admit that I can't do it. And that's when it starts to happen, and all I can do is watch it.
These pathways sort of open up on their own.
Gibson: Yeah, well I think that what happens is that in the course of writing on a very regular basis, the membrane between conscious and unconscious gets sandpapered down paper-thin, so there can be, like, ruptures. And then this stuff emerges that the conscious mind could never make up. For me, the trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind. I'm just not very interested in that.
So is it coming from collected personal experience, or is it coming from some sort of larger collective unconscious?
Gibson: I think it's just my unconscious, which probably isn't...it's unique but it probably isn't all that different from someone else's. I don't necessarily think that all unconscious minds are of a piece, literally--although there is a certain metaphorical truth to that, and you can sometimes navigate in life as though that were the case.
In this latest book you write a lot about the idea of obsession. A lot of your characters have these little obsessive tendencies, or they're completely obsessed by one thing--I'm thinking of Laney. Do you think the creative impulse itself is a form of obsession?
Gibson: I think there are definitely pathological aspects to it. Otherwise what would make someone sit in a basement and type for the majority of their waking hours? It's a very weird thing to do. It doesn't feed you or offer sexual gratification. [Laughs] It doesn't do any of those things. It's a cultural activity, in the sense of Brian Eno's definition of culture, which is all those things that we do which we don't really have to.
In one of your books, a character says something to the effect of "You can't let the little bastards generation-gap you." Do you feel pressure from newer writers or artists who are using material that you've obviously brought into the light, and now they're using that material with maybe less grace, or less subtlety?
Gibson: No. No, I don't. I think that if I can recognize the material, if it's still there in some undigested form, I just think that they're not really happening yet. That doesn't necessarily mean that they won't, in the future, happen. But they're still not really there. I believe completely that we're all plagiarists at some level, and that we're all omnivores, that we write out of everything we've ever read. But there's nothing more painful, really, than watching a young writer labor under a visible influence. Usually people who are doing that have a ways to go. What gets people really jumping is a new writer who has completely digested all his or her influences and is speaking with a new voice. That's what every editor wants. I think it's what readers want as well, although what readers want more than that is a writer they're already familiar with, who is speaking with the old familiar voice. That's kind of weird, though. The dilemma comes in for me because, you know, if I don't grow I'll die, and if I grow I'll change, and if I change I won't be writing what I was writing before. I've had 20 years of these wistful guys shuffling up after readings and asking "When are you going to do another Neuromancer?" [Laughs] And you know, what can I say?
Well, I don't think that would even be possible, because as you've said so many times, Neuromancer was about the '80s, and the conditions that--
Gibson: Yeah, it was an '80s book. I have no idea what Neuromancer for the '90s--well we're past that now. I mean, sooner or later I'll be walking through a bookstore, and I'll see a book that says "Neuromancer for the early 21st century!" And I'll go, "Wow!" I don't know if I'll buy it right off, but I'll ask if they thought it was any good. [Laughing.]
In your writing I sense this acute appreciation of these underlying patterns within complex systems, these huge unseen structures which are really driving events on the surface. It's kind of a Zen idea. What got you thinking about that--the larger patterns underneath?
Gibson: I think it's my very, very superficial and imperfect take on chaos theory and fractal geometry. What I know about that is as much as you could learn walking around in this bookstore and looking at the covers of books about it. That's really all there is to it. I sort of have a hunch that that's what the structure of reality is. There really isn't any more to it than that, except that it's very much mine. I'm just sort of writing from experience, and I've worked out a couple of science fictional metaphors to back it up. But it's not like I'm presenting it as a scientific theory or even a pseudo-scientific theory. It's just a sort of metaphor for how I experience reality. I think these books are all, for me, just metaphors of how I experience reality. Laney's probably a more conscious metaphor in that what he does with the nodal points is sort of like what I see myself really doing in that part of my work that some people regard as predictive. There are several places in these books where Laney says: "Look, I can't predict the future. But I am sensitive to some areas from which change is emerging." I think that's pretty much the best we can do these days, because change is both exponential and in some weird, either new or newly revealed way, out of control. You know, who's running the show? Well, nobody. That's why conspiracy theories are so popular. Conspiracy theories are big because they're comforting. Any conspiracy is infinitely less multiplex than the real deal, which is sort of multiplex to the point of being unknowable.
About this sort of "Zen" slant, this holistic view of reality that you're bringing across ... this phrase that I really love from All Tomorrow's Parties, "Dirty is God." Is that a metaphor for this idea?
Gibson: I lifted it from somewhere, and offhand I can't remember where. It's probably a song title. It's either a song title or the name of a band. I'm aware when I write these books--that people will--it's sort of the nature of the mammalian mind to interpret this information as though it made sense. That's part of the pleasure of the text, when people read one of these books. But that doesn't mean that on my side of the fence it's going to make that kind of sense. I take perverse pleasure in plugging bits like that in, and giving maybe a passing thought to what someone will imagine it might mean. But it's really sort of surrealist-slash-naturalist texture. It's puzzling in the way the world is puzzling.
So what about cyberpunk? Is cyber still punk?
Gibson: No. Cyber can't be punk these days, because when cyberpunk was labeled that way, the statement "I'm a criminally intentioned Bohemian with a computer" would cause people to get goosebumps, right? But today that same statement has the same effect as "I'm a criminally intentioned Bohemian with a washing machine."
It's just not a scary concept any more; it's been co-opted?
Gibson: It's not that it's been co-opted, it's that computation has become so much more ubiquitous, that the "...with a computer" part doesn't do anything for anybody. Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over. I don't know what the equivalent would be, "biopunk," or something. You know, kids in the Haight doing their own genetic manipulation. [Laughs.] That kind of thing is closer. What cyberpunk has become, I think, is just kind of a tag for a particular flavor of popular culture. You can describe a video or a pair of trousers as "cyberpunk." It's not really happening. It's not really happening anymore.
In one part of All Tomorrow's Parties you suggest that alternative cultures are becoming co-opted before they can even be considered alternative. In a few years, do you think there are going to be any Bohemias left for the underground to escape to?
Gibson: I'm not sure there is one now, in the traditional sense. It's like straight people have become the endangered species. It's like at the end of the century, everybody's hip. That's kind of a new ball game. I'm very interested in that.
You write a lot about the street, how "the street finds new uses for things." All this stuff happening in this sort of murky underground. Where do you get the raw data to use? I mean, do you skulk around?
Gibson: Well, I had some experience of that, of an earlier equivalent of that, when I was younger. Some aspects of it don't change very much. As for keeping it current, I just keep my eyes and ears open. I take great pleasure in cities, and urban street life. I'm by nature a sort of observer of that stuff. I'm really lucky because these books give me an outlet for that. I'm always sort of storing up impressions of little things I've seen, and eventually they emerge from the hopper transformed into the worlds of these books.
Do you think that technological advancement is the next stage of human evolution? Or is that putting it too simply?
Gibson: I suspect that looking back from the future, that where we're living now, we're living in the very, very late pre-post-human epoch. I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either. Or, we just wouldn't understand, any more than my great-great-grandfather could understand what I'm about and what this world is about.
Do you think there's a limit to this acceleration and fragmentation of culture, this sort of exponential acceleration?
Gibson: I don't know. One possibility is that idea of the technological singularity, which I gleefully borrowed from Vernor Vinge via Stewart Brand. That's not really a limit. That's a point beyond which everything becomes unknowable, and which we just wouldn't be able to process. There's just no way of saying whether there's limits there or not. In terms of what we could understand, that would be a kind of absolute limit, like the lip of a black hole. Once human history goes over that, who knows? In any case, that's the point at which science fiction is over. [Laughs.]
I read that you were listening almost exclusively to The Velvet Underground while you were writing Neuromancer. From the title of the new book, can we infer that they are still your music of choice?
Gibson: No, it's just that I had always wanted to use that title as the title of a science fiction novel, and I thought this was a good time to do it. But I also thought that the narrative would reveal to me why it was called that, and it never really did [laughs]. So it's a little more enigmatic than my titles usually are.
You often reference different bands or songs in the course of your stories. I'm thinking of references to Judy's Jungle in Count Zero or Sweet Jane in Neuromancer. When I'm reading it, it almost acts like a soundtrack for the action that is going on in the book at the time. Is that an intended effect, or is it an artifact of the writing process?
Gibson: It's kind of an added bonus.... I mean, for people who are familiar with the songs that are being referenced, there's some connection. But I don't necessarily assume that that will be the case. In some cases it almost certainly isn't the case, because I'll reference something that very few people would even recognize as a song.
The motorcycle gang "The Deacon Blues," or something like that [a reference to Steely Dan in Mona Lisa Overdrive]?
Gibson: Yeah, or there's a chapter called "Vincent Black Lightning" that's referencing a Richard Thompson song. I don't know how many Richard Thompson fans read the book, but somebody turned up on the tour who got it. It's always kind of a kick when somebody "gets" it. Particularly if it's really, really obscure. And when Creedmore sings for the first time in All Tomorrow's Parties, he sings that Robert Johnson song that the Rolling Stones covered. And I had quoted it in the text, but the lawyers from the publishers said, "No, you know, we can't do that--we'd owe the Rolling Stones an inordinate amount of money." So I kind of just had to describe it, so that people would realize which song it was.
Last question: where did the name Henry Dorsett Case come from?
Gibson: Case is an old traditional brand of pocket knife. Case knives. "Case knife" was actually so ubiquitous a brand in 19th century America that it was synonymous in some places with "pocket knife." Henry I don't know, and Dorsett is the last name of a friend of mine who's one of the three or four guys I credit at the back of Neuromancer. I just stuck it in.
