William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No.

211 Interviewed by David Wallace-Wells Vancouver, British Columbia, sits just on the far side of the American border, a green-glass model city set in the dish of the North Shore Mountains, which encl ose the city and support, most days, a thick canopy of fog. There are periods in the year when it ll rain for forty days, William Gibson tells me one mucky day th ere this winter, and when visibility drops so low you can t see what s coming at you from the nearest street corner. But large parts of Vancouver are traversed by t rolley cars, and on clear nights you can gaze up at the wide expanse of Pacific sky through the haphazard grid of their electric wires. Gibson came to Vancouver in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old orphan who d spent the pa st half-decade trawling the counterculture in Toronto on his wandering way from s mall-town southern Virginia. He had never been to the Far East, which would yiel d so much of the junk-heap casino texture of his early fiction. He hadn t been to college and didn t yet intend to go. He hadn t yet heard of the Internet, or even it s predecessors arpanet and Telenet. He thought he might become a film-cell anima tor. He hadn t yet written any science fiction he hadn t read any science fiction sinc e adolescence, having discarded the stuff more or less completely at fourteen, j ust, he says, as its publishers intended. Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speak more what you would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the genre-vanquishing hero he has become since the publication of his first novel, the hallucinatory hacker thriller Neuromancer, in 1984. Gibson resists being cal led a visionary, yet his nine novels constitute as subtle and clarifying a medit ation on the transformation of culture by technology as has been written since t he beginning of what we now know to call the information age. Neuromancer, famou sly, gave us the term cyberspace and the vision of the Internet as a lawless, spe llbinding realm. And, with its two sequels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Over drive (1988), it helped establish the cultural figure of the computer hacker as cowboy hero. In his Bridge series Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomo rrow s Parties (1999), each of which unfolds in a Bay Bridge shantytown improvised after a devastating Pacific earthquake transforms much of San Francisco he planted potted futures of celebrity journalism, reality television, and nanotechnology, each prescient and persuasive and altogether weird. Neuromancer and its two sequels were set in distant decades and contrived to daz zle the reader with strangeness, but the Bridge novels are set in the near futur e so near they read like alternate history, Gibson says, with evident pride. With his next books, he began to write about the present-day, or more precisely, the recent past: each of the three novels in the series is set in the year before it was written. He started with September 11, 2001. Pattern Recognition was the first of that series. It has been called an eerie vis ion of our time by The New Yorker, one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century, by The Washington Post Book World, and, by The Economis t, probably the best exploration yet of the function and power of product brandin g and advertising in the age of globalization. The Pattern Recognition books are also the first since Mona Lisa Overdrive in which Gibson s characters speak of cyb erspace, and they speak of it elegiacally. I saw it go from the yellow legal pad to the Oxford English Dictionary, he tells me. But cyberspace is everywhere now, h aving everted and colonized the world. It starts to sound kind of ridiculous to speak of cyberspace as being somewhere else. You can tell the term still holds some magic for him, perhaps even more so now t hat it is passing into obsolescence. The opposite is true for cyberpunk, a neolog

ism that haunts him to this day. On a short walk to lunch one afternoon, from th e two-story mock-Tudor house where he lives with his wife, Deborah, he complaine d about a recent visit from a British journalist, who came to Vancouver searchin g for Mr. Cyberpunk and was disappointed to find him ensconced in a pleasantly qui et suburban patch of central Vancouver. Mr. Cyberpunk seemed wounded by having h is work pigeonholed, but equally so by the insult to his home, which is quite comf ortable, and his neighborhood, which is, too. We like it quiet, he explained. David Wallace-Wells

INTERVIEWER What s wrong with cyberpunk? GIBSON A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely a ssimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embra ced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could con tinue unchanged. INTERVIEWER What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do? GIBSON I didn t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic , a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of Americaas-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy f rom the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes. I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean tha t it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners. INTERVIEWER How do you begin a novel? GIBSON I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed. INTERVIEWER You won t have planned beyond that one sentence? GIBSON No. I don t begin a novel with a shopping list the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made

a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everythin g that wasn t a violin. That s what I do when I m writing a novel, except somehow I m si multaneously generating the wood as I m carving it. E. M. Forster s idea has always stuck with me that a writer who s fully in control of the characters hasn t even started to do the work. I ve never had any direct fiction al input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I m working optimally I m in the equ ivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds u p as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don t trust, as a reader, smell of homework. INTERVIEWER Do you take notes? GIBSON I take the position that if I can forget it, it couldn t have been very good. But in the course of a given book, I sometimes get to a point where the narrative flow overwhelms the speed at which I can compose. So I ll sometimes stop and make cryptic notes that are useless by the time I get back to them. Underlined three times, with no context Have they been too big a deal? INTERVIEWER What is your writing schedule like? GIBSON When I m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablut ions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pi lates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolut ely nothing is happening, I ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, genera lly, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break fo r lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are esse ntial to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on w aking. INTERVIEWER And your schedule is steady the whole way through? GIBSON As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it s a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour d ay. Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemica lly altered state that will go away if I don t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleepi ng becomes problematic. I m always glad to see the back of that. INTERVIEWER Do you revise?

GIBSON Every day, when I sit down with the manuscript, I start at page one and go throu gh the whole thing, revising freely. INTERVIEWER You revise the whole manuscript every day? GIBSON I do, though that might consist of only a few small changes. I ve done that since my earliest attempts at short stories. It would be really frustrating for me not to be able to do that. I would feel as though I were flying blind. The beginnings of my books are rewritten many times. The endings are only a draf t or three, and then they re done. But I can scan the manuscript very quickly, muc h more quickly than I could ever read anyone else s prose. INTERVIEWER Does your assessment of the work change, day by day? GIBSON If it were absolutely nk revision is hugely the higher creativity ho said that literary y improve himself. INTERVIEWER How much do you write in a typical day? GIBSON I don t know. I used to make printouts at every stage, just to be comforted by the physical fact of the pile of manuscript. It was seldom more than five manuscrip t pages. I was still doing that with Pattern Recognition, out of nervousness tha t all the computers would die and take my book with them. I was printing it out and sending it to first readers by fax, usually beginning with the first page. I m still sending my output to readers every day. But I ve learned to just let it liv e in the hard drive, and once I d quit printing out the daily output, I lost track . INTERVIEWER For a while it was often reported, erroneously, that you typed all your books on a typewriter. GIBSON steady I don t think it could be really good judgment. I thi underrated. It is very seldom recognized as a place where can live, or where it can manifest. I think it was Yeats w revision was the only place in life where a man could trul

I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, This changes everything! I said, What? He said, My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these thin gs! I said, Why? He said, Automation it automates the process of writing! I ve never gon back.

But I had only been using a typewriter because I d gotten one for free and I was p oor. In 1981, most people were still writing on typewriters. There were five lar ge businesses in Vancouver that did nothing but repair and sell typewriters. Soo n there were computers, too, and it was a case of the past and the future mutual ly coexisting. And then the past just goes away. INTERVIEWER For someone who so often writes about the future of technology, you seem to have a real romance for artifacts of earlier eras. GIBSON It s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. W hat we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day befor e the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without t he television is more mysterious, because we ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone. My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison re cordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they sai d, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don t think about that when we re driving somewhere and turn on the radio . We take it for granted. INTERVIEWER Was television a big deal in your childhood? GIBSON I can remember my father bringing home our first set this ornate wooden cabinet th at was the size of a small refrigerator, with a round cathode-ray picture tube a nd wooden speaker grilles over elaborate fabric. Like a piece of archaic furnitu re, even then. Everybody would gather around at a particular time for a broadcas t a baseball game or a variety show or something. And then it would go back to a m andala that was called a test pattern, or nothing static. We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did some thing did everything to us, and that now we aren t the same, though broadcast televisi on, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence o f broadcast television, but I can t tell what it did to us because I became that w hich watched broadcast television. The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You ca n t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start us ing it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purpos es and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug deal ing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strateg y to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We re increasingly aware tha t our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination. INTERVIEWER

What was it like growing up in Wytheville, Virginia? GIBSON Wytheville was a small town. I wasn t a very happy kid, but there were aspects of t he town that delighted me. It was rather short on books, though. There was a rot ating wire rack of paperbacks at the Greyhound station on Main Street, another o ne at a soda fountain, and another one at a drugstore. That was all the book ret ail anywhere in my hometown. My parents were both from Wytheville. They eventually got together, though rathe r late for each of them. My father had been married previously, and my mother wa s probably regarded as a spinster. My mother s family had been in Wytheville forev er and was quite well-off and established, in a very small-town sort of way. My father s father had moved down from Pennsylvania to start a lumber company. Once t he railroads had gotten far enough back into the mountains, after the Civil War, there were a lot of fortunes being made extracting resources. My mother had had some college, which was unusual for a young woman in that part of the world, but she hadn t married, which was basically all a woman of her clas s was supposed to do. When she did eventually marry my father, he was the breadw inner. He had had some college, too, had studied engineering, which enabled him to wind up working postwar for a big construction company. My earliest memories are of moving from project to project, every year or so, as this company built L evittown-like suburbs in Tennessee and North Carolina. INTERVIEWER And as these projects were being built you would live in one of the houses? GIBSON We did, in these rather sadly aspirational ranch-style houses within brand-new, often unoccupied suburbs. It was right at the beginning of broadcast television, and the world on television was very much the world of that sort of house, and of the suburb. It was a vision of modernity, and I felt part of that. But my father was often away he traveled constantly on business trips. When I was about six, he left on one business trip and died. Within a week, my mother and I were back in Wytheville. INTERVIEWER How did he die? GIBSON It s odd the way families try to help people grieve it doesn t always work out. I was told at the time that he had died of a heart attack. Then later, I began to thin k, You know, he was young that s pretty scary! Twenty years later somebody said to m e, Actually, he choked on something in a restaurant. It was a Heimlich maneuver death prior to the Heimlich maneuver. It was a hugely traumatic loss, and not just because I d lost my father. In Wythev ille, I felt I wasn t in that modern world anymore. I had been living in a vision of the future, and then suddenly I was living in a vision of the past. There was television, but the world outside the window could have been the 1940s or the 1 930s or even the 1900s, depending on which direction you looked. It was a very o ld-fashioned place.

Towns like that in the South were virtually tribal in those days. Everything was about who your kin were. I was this weird alienated little critter who wasn t eve n that into his own kin. I was shy and withdrawn. I just wanted to stay in my ro om and read books and watch television, or go to the movies. INTERVIEWER What drew you to that stuff? GIBSON It was a window into strangeness. Any kind of foreign material got my interest, anything that wasn t from the United States I would walk around the block to see. Most of what you could see on television or at the movies was very controlled, b ut sometimes you could just turn on your television and see some fabulous random thing, because the local channels had space they couldn t afford to fill with net work material. They might show old films more or less at random, and they wouldn t necessarily have been screened for content. So there were occasionally coincide nces of this kind of odd, other universe some dark, British crime film from the 19 40s, say. My mother got me an omnibus Sherlock Holmes for a tenth-birthday present and I l oved 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 buil ding, I thought. I developed this special relationship with the facade of this b uilding, and when I was in front of it I could imagine that there was an infinit e number of similar buildings in every direction and I was in Sherlock Holmes s Lo ndon. Part of my method for writing fiction grew out of that fundamental small-town la ck of novelty. It caused me to develop an inference mechanism for imagining dist ant places. I would see, perhaps, a picture of a Sunbeam Alpine sports car and i nfer a life in England. I always held on to that, and it migrated into my early fiction, particularly where I would create an imaginary artifact in the course of writing and infer the culture that had produced it. INTERVIEWER Do you think fiction should be predictive? GIBSON No, I don t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is act ually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons. INTERVIEWER You ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always i nstead a treatment of the present. GIBSON There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolatin g a future history. My position is that you can t do that without having the prese nt to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary fut ures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a wo rk is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that fr

om the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into t he real future. There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champ ion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technol ogy today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulousl y different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they re going, a nd technology keeps emerging, we ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humani ty s attic. In my lifetime I ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn t think of themselves as sexually repress ed, and they didn t think of themselves as racist. They didn t think of themselves a s colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation. Of course, we might be Victorians, too. INTERVIEWER The Victorians invented science fiction. GIBSON I think the popular perception that we re a lot like the Victorians is in large pa rt correct. One way is that we re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it it s just become where we live. The Victorians wer e the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new way s. We re still riding that wave of craziness. We ve gotten so used to emergent techn ologies that we get anxious if we haven t had one in a while. But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They d traveled fifteen miles an hour, an d when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you re lo oking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called railway spine. Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk land scape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Bal lardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industr y. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought t he progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying. INTERVIEWER Were you hunting around for books as a kid? GIBSON I knew what day of the month the truck would come and put new books on those wir e racks around town, but sometimes I would just go anyway, on the off chance tha t I had missed something during the last visit. In those days you could have bou ght all of the paperback science fiction that was being published in the United States, monthly, and it probably wouldn t have cost you five dollars. There was ju st very little stuff coming out, and it was never enough for me.

A couple of times I found big moldering piles of old science fiction in junk sho ps and bought it all for a dollar and carted it home. These magazines were proba bly eight or ten years old, but to me they were ancient it felt like they were fro m the nineteenth century. That there could be something in one of these magazine s that was completely mind blowing was an amazing thing. INTERVIEWER What was so affecting about it? GIBSON It gave me an uncensored window into very foreign modes of thought. There was a lot of inherent cultural relativism in the science fiction I discovered then. It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to ques tion anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own c ulture s most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of where else could I have go tten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick s brain! That wasn t the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-adverti sement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about scienc e! It didn t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J.?G. Ballard. And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn t know, your parents didn t know . Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn t have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that litt le world I lived in. INTERVIEWER Who were the writers that were most important to you? GIBSON Alfred Bester was among the first dozen science-fiction writers I read when I wa s twelve years old, and I remember being amazed, doing my own science-fiction-wr iter reconnaissance work a decade or two later, that someone I had discovered th at young still seemed to me to be so amazing. Bester had been doing it in the fifties a Madison Avenue hepcat who had come into science fiction with a bunch of Joyce under his belt. He built his space-opera f uture out of what it felt like to be young and happening in New York, in the cre ative end of the business world in 1955. The plotlines were pulp and gothic and baroque, but what I loved most was the way it seemed to be built out of somethin g real and complex and sophisticated. I hadn t found that in a lot of other scienc e fiction. INTERVIEWER What other writing interested you then? GIBSON Fritz Leiber was another culturally sophisticated American science-fiction write r unusually sophisticated. Samuel Delany, too. I was a teenager, just thirteen or fourteen, reading novels Delany had written as a teenager that was incredible to m e.

I started reading so-called adult science fiction when I was eleven or twelve, a nd by the time I was fourteen or fifteen I had already moved on, into other kind s of fiction, but somewhere in that very short period I discovered British scien ce fiction and what was at that time called British New Wave science fiction, le d, it seemed to me, by J.?G. Ballard. There was a kind of literary war underway between the British New Wave people an d the very conservative American science-fiction writers who probably wouldn t even have thought of themselves as very conservative saying, That s no good, you can t do t hat, you don t know how to tell a story, and besides you re a communist. I remember being frightened by that rhetoric. It was the first time I ever saw an art movem ent, I suppose. When I decided to try to write myself, in my late twenties, I went out and bough t a bunch of newer science fiction I hadn t been reading the stuff for a long while. It was incredibly disappointing. That window to strangeness just didn t seem to b e there anymore. It was like, when I was twelve there was country blues, and whe n I m twenty-six there s plastic Nashville country it was that kind of change. My inte nt, when I began to write, was to be a one-man science-fiction roots movement. I remember being horrified that critics who were taken quite seriously, at least w ithin the genre, habitually referred to the category of all writing that was not science fiction or fantasy as the mundane. It didn t make any sense to me. If there was mundane literature, then certainly a lot of it was science fiction. You kno w, if James Joyce is mundane but Edgar Rice Burroughs isn t I m out of here. INTERVIEWER When did you encounter the Beats? GIBSON More or less the same time I found science fiction, because I found the Beats wh en the idea of them had been made sufficiently mainstream that there were paperb ack anthologies on the same wire rack at the bus station. I remember being total ly baffled by one Beat paperback, an anthology of short bits and excerpts from n ovels. I sort of understood what little bits of Kerouac were in this thing I could read him but then there was William S. Burroughs and excerpts from Naked Lunch I thought, What the heck is that? I could tell that there was science fiction, som ehow, in Naked Lunch. Burroughs had cut up a lot of pulp-noir detective fiction, and he got part of his tonality from science fiction of the forties and the fif ties. I could tell it was kind of like science fiction, but that I didn t understa nd it. INTERVIEWER Was Dick important to you? GIBSON I was never much of a Dick fan. He wrote an awful lot of novels, and I don t think his output was very even. I loved The Man in the High Castle, which was the fir st really beautifully realized alternate history I read, but by the time I was t hinking about writing myself, he d started publishing novels that were ostensibly autobiographical, and which, it seems to me, he probably didn t think were fiction . Pynchon worked much better for me than Dick for epic paranoia, and he hasn t yet written a book in which he represents himself as being in direct contact with Go d. I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.

INTERVIEWER Why not? GIBSON When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir det ective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century natural ism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impuls e went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money an d power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing somet hing very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I al ways had a feeling that Chandler s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quit e as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marl ow as a narrator. He wasn t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn t find him sympathe tic in large part because Chandler, whom I didn t trust either, evidently did find h im sympathetic. But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler s ancestor , even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammet t invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a wa y Chandler never seems to me to be. But I don t think that writers are very reliable witnesses when it comes to influe nces, because if one of your sources seems woefully unhip you are not going to c ite it. When I was just starting out people would say, Well, who are your influe nces? And I would say, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Those a re true, to some extent, but I would never have said Len Deighton, and I suspect I actually learned more for my basic craft reading Deighton s early spy novels th an I did from Burroughs or Ballard or Pynchon. I don t know if it was Deighton or John le Carr who, when someone asked them about Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for year s. I was really interested in that idea. Here s Fleming, with this classist, late Br itish Empire pulp fantasy about a guy who wears fancy clothes and beats the shit out of bad guys who generally aren t white, while driving expensive, fast cars, a nd he s a spy, supposedly, and this is selling like hotcakes. Deighton and Le Carr come along and completely reverse it, in their different ways, and get a really powerful charge out of not offering James Bond. You ve got Harry Palmer and George Smiley, neither of whom are James Bond, and people are willing to pay good mone y for them not to be James Bond. INTERVIEWER Were you happy in Wytheville? GIBSON I was miserable, but I probably would have been anywhere. I spent a year or two being increasingly weird and depressed. I was just starting to get countercultura l signals. It s almost comical, in retrospect 1966 in this small Southern town, and I m like a Smiths fan or something, this mopey guy who likes to look at fashion ma gazines but isn t gay. I was completely out of place, out of time. None of it was particularly dramatic, but I m sure it was driving my mother crazy. Pretty soon I had become so difficult and hard to get out of bed that I let myself be packed o ff to a boys boarding school in Tucson. INTERVIEWER

Were you close with your mother? GIBSON She was difficult. She was literate she was actually a compulsive reader, and real ly respected the idea of writing and she was very encouraging of any artistic impu lses I might have had. Writers were her heroes, and that made her kind of a clos eted freak in that town. She was one of maybe ten people who had a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. But she was also an incredibly anxious, fearful, neurotic person, and I would im agine she was pretty much constantly depressed, except that depression didn t exis t in those days, people were just down or difficult. But she was a chronically depre ssed, anxiety-ridden single parent who wanted nothing more than to read novels, chain-smoke Camels, and drink bad coffee all day long. There are worse things a parent can do, but it was still hard. INTERVIEWER Were you in Arizona when she died? GIBSON I was still in school, but not for much longer. I was sufficiently upset, after she died, that they wound up sending me home after a couple of months. But I did n t get along with my relatives, so my mother s best friend and her husband finally took me in. This was a woman who d been my mother s literary buddy all her life. She was the only other person in town who cared about modern literature, as far as I knew. It was lifesaving for me, because it gave me somewhere I could be where the people I was with weren t trying to figure out how to get me into the army. INTERVIEWER Had you already decided to avoid the draft? GIBSON I m not sure what would have happened if I had been drafted. I was not the most ti ghtly wrapped package at that time, and I think it would have depended on the da y I got the draft notice. I suspect I would have been equally capable of saying, Fuck it, I m going to Vietnam. I never did get drafted, but I went off to Canada on a kind of exploratory journ ey to figure out what I might do if I ever was drafted. I got to Toronto early i n 1967 and it was the first time I had been in a big city that was pedestrian fr iendly, not to mention foreign, so I just stayed there. I figured if they drafte d me I was already there. But I found that I couldn t hang out with the guys who d b een drafted. INTERVIEWER Why not? GIBSON I didn t belong. I hadn t made their decision. And I found them too sad, too angry. Some of their families had disowned them. They could feel, I guessed, that they d brought dishonor on their families by resisting the draft. Some of these were pe ople who had no intention of ever leaving the United States. There were suicides , there was a lot of drug abuse. Nobody knew that a few years down the road it w

ould all be over and that all would be forgiven. And that wasn t my situation. I w as there because I liked it there. It was 1967, and the world was in the middle of some sort of secular millenarian convulsion. Young people thought everything would change in some Rapture-like w ay. Nobody knew what it was going to be like, but everybody knew that pretty soon everything would be different. INTERVIEWER Did you? GIBSON I do remember thinking that the world I was seeing around me probably was going to be very different in relatively short order. But I didn t assume that it would necessarily be better. I had become interested at some point, before I got to Toronto, in popular delus ions and the madness of crowds. Science-fiction writers had long accessed popula r delusions as a source of material intentional communities where people all belie ve something nobody else in the world believes, groups of people under some sort of great emotional stress who decide that something is about to happen, people who commit suicide en masse, people who invest in Ponzi schemes. When the sixtie s cranked up, I felt already familiar with what was happening. Moving to the woo ds always creeped me out so I just stayed in cities and watched the whole thing congeal. INTERVIEWER Congeal? GIBSON Like bacon fat in the bottom of the pan. It was ghastly the nuked psychic ruins of 1967. INTERVIEWER And how were you passing the time? GIBSON I was one of those annoying people who know they are going to do something in th e arts, but never do anything about it. But then, in 1967 and 1968, if you were a part of the secular millenarian movement, even on the fringes, you basically d idn t do anything, you just got up in the morning and walked around, and figured o ut what you had to do to make that happen again the next day where you were going to sleep and what could be done to pay the rent. Soon, the hippie rapture would happen and it would all be okay. In the meantime you just hung out. While I susp ected that wasn t really sustainable, I couldn t think of anything else to do. I had been hugely fond of Toronto as I first found it in 1967, but by 1972 I had lost that fondness. Montreal had always been the business capital of Canada, an d when the Quebecois separatist movement got problematic enough for the country to be placed under martial law, all of the big companies fled to Toronto the stock market even moved there and the mood of the place changed very quickly. INTERVIEWER You met your wife in Toronto, didn t you?

GIBSON I took her coffee one morning. I was staying at my friend s place, and he had spen t the night with some woman and didn t want to get out of bed, so he called to me and asked me to make them some coffee. I said sure, I made them some coffee, bro ught it up on a tray, and there was my wife. After we had been together for a while, I began complaining about the weather in Toronto. I told her, I can t do this winter, I forgot how bad this is. She said, I know an easier way come with me to Vancouver. We ve been here ever since. INTERVIEWER That s when you went back to school. GIBSON Those days it was fantastically easy to get a degree at UBC. I discovered very q uickly that they were in effect paying me for studying things I was already inte rested in. I could cool it for four years, and I wouldn t have to worry about what I was going to do for the rest of my life. But my wife started to talk about having a child. She already had a job, a real job at the university. Everyone I had known during that four-year period was als o trying to get a job. It startled me. They hadn t really been talking about getti ng jobs before. But some part of me I had never heard from before sat me down an d said, You ve been bullshitting about this art thing since you were fifteen years old, you ve never done anything about any of it, you re about to be shoved into the adult world, so if you re going to do anything about the art thing, you ve got to d o it right now, or shut up and get a job. That was really the beginning of my career. My wife continued to have a job afte r she had the baby, so I became the caregiver guy, the house husband guy, and si multaneously I found that it actually provided ample time to write. When he was asleep, I could write, I knew that was the only time I would have to write. Most of the short fiction I wrote at the beginning was written when our son was asle ep. INTERVIEWER You wrote your first story for a class, didn t you? GIBSON A woman named Susan Wood had come to UBC as an assistant professor. We were the same age, and I met her while reconnoitering the local science-fiction culture. In my final year she was teaching a science-fiction course. I had become really lazy and thought, I won t have to read anything if I take her course. No matter wh at she assigns, I ve read all the stuff. I ll just turn up and bullshit brilliantly, and she ll give me a mark just for doing that. But when I said, Well, you know, we know one another. Do I really have to write you a paper for this class? She said , No, but I think you should write a short story and give me that instead. I think she probably saw through whatever cover I had erected over my secret plan to be come a science-fiction writer. I went ahead and did it, but it was incredibly painful. It was the hardest thing I did in my senior year, writing this little short story. She said, That s good. Y ou should sell it now. And I said, No. And she said, Yeah, you should sell it. I went and found the most obscure magazine that paid the least amount of money. It was

called Unearth. I submitted it to them, and they bought it and gave me twenty-s even dollars. I felt an enormous sense of relief. At least nobody will ever see it, I thought. That was Fragments of a Hologram Rose. INTERVIEWER How did you meet John Shirley? GIBSON Shirley was the only one of us who was seriously punk. I d gone to a science-ficti on convention in Vancouver, and there I encountered this eccentrically dressed y oung man my age who seemed to be wearing prison pajamas. He was an extremely out going person, and he introduced himself to me: I m a singer in a punk band, but my day job is writing science fiction. I said, You know, I write a little science fic tion myself. And he said, Published anything? And I said, Oh, not really. This one s tory in this utterly obscure magazine. He said, Well, send me some of your stuff, I ll give you a critique. As soon as he got home he sent me a draft of a short story he had written perhap s an hour beforehand: This is my new genius short story. I read it it was about some one who discovers there are things that live in bars, things that look like drun ks and prostitutes but are actually something else and I saw, as I thought at the time, its flaws. I sat down to write him a critique, but it would have been so m uch work to critique it that instead I took his story and rewrote it. It was rea lly quick and painless. I sent it back to him, saying, I hope this won t piss you o ff, but it was actually much easier for me to rewrite this than to do a critique . The next thing I get back is a note I sold it! He had sold it to this hardcover hor ror anthology. I was like, Oh, shit. Now my name is on this weird story. People kept doing that to me, and it s really good that they did. I d give various f riends stuff to read, and they d say, What are you going to do with this? And I d say, Nothing, it s not nearly there yet. Then they d Xerox it and submit it on my behalf, to places I would have been terrified to submit to. It seemed unseemly to me to force this unfinished stuff on the world at large. INTERVIEWER Do you still consider that work unfinished? GIBSON I had a very limited tool kit when I began writing. I didn t know how to handle tra nsitions, so I used abrupt breaks, the literary equivalent of jump cuts. I didn t have any sense of how to pace anything. But I had read and admired Ballard and B urroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a cer tain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard. INTERVIEWER What was the effect? GIBSON A more genuine kind of future shock. I wanted the reader to feel constantly somew hat disoriented and in a foreign place, because I assumed that to be the highest pleasure in reading stories set in imaginary futures. But I d also read novels wh ere the future-weirdness quotient overwhelmed me and simply became boring, so I t ried to make sure my early fiction worked as relatively solid genre pieces. Whic h I still believe is harder to do. When I started Neuromancer, for instance, I w

anted to have an absolutely familiar, utterly well-worn armature of pulp plot ru nning throughout the whole thing. It s the caper plot that carries the reader thro ugh. INTERVIEWER What do you think of Neuromancer today? GIBSON When I look at Neuromancer I see a Soap Box Derby car. I felt, writing it, like I had two-by-fours and an old bicycle wheel and I m supposed to build something th at will catch a Ferrari. This is not going to fly, I thought. But I tried to do it anyway, and I produced this garage artifact, which, amazingly, is still runni ng to this day. Even so, I got to the end of it, and I didn t care what it meant, I didn t even know if it made any sense as a narrative. I didn t have this huge feeling of, Wow, I j ust wrote a novel! I didn t think it might win an award. I just thought, Phew! Now I can figure out how to write an actual novel. INTERVIEWER How did you come up with the title? GIBSON Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped por tmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pl easurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled. I believed that this could be induced at a number of levels in a text at the micro level with neologisms and portmanteaus, or using a familiar word in completely u nfamiliar ways. There are a number of well-known techniques for doing this all of the classic surrealist techniques, for instance, especially the game called exqu isite corpse, where you pass a folded piece of paper around the room and write a line of poetry or a single word and fold it again and then the next person blin dly adds to it. Sometimes it produces total gibberish, but it can be spookily ap t. A lot of what I had to learn to do was play a game of exquisite-corpse solita ire. INTERVIEWER Where did cyberspace come from? GIBSON I was painfully aware that I lacked an arena for my science fiction. The spacesh ip had been where science fiction had happened for a very long time, even in the writing of much hipper practitioners like Samuel Delany. The spaceship didn t wor k for me, viscerally. I know from some interviews of Ballard s that it didn t work f or him either. His solution was to treat Earth as the alien planet and perhaps t o treat one s fellow humans as though they were aliens. But that didn t work for me. I knew I wouldn t be able to function in a purely Ballardian universe. So I neede d something to replace outer space and the spaceship. I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids p laying those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a ve

ry primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. E ven in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physical ly involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, w ithin the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them i t had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world. The only computers I d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holdin g a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger th an a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and eve ryone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe. INTERVIEWER And you knew at that point you had your arena? GIBSON I sensed that it would more than meet my requirements, and I knew that there wer e all sorts of things I could do there that I hadn t even been able to imagine yet . But what was more important at that point, in terms of my practical needs, was to name it something cool, because it was never going to work unless it had a r eally good name. So the first thing I did was sit down with a yellow pad and a S harpie and start scribbling infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, Oh, that s a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essent ially hollow. What I had was a sticky neologism and a very vague chain of associations between the bus-stop Apple IIc advertisement, the posture of the kids playing arcade ga mes, and something I d heard about from these hobbyist characters from Seattle cal led the Internet. It was more tedious and more technical than anything I d ever he ard anybody talk about. It made ham radio sound really exciting. But I understood that, sometimes, you could send messages through it, like a telegraph. I also k new that it had begun as a project to explore how we might communicate during a really shit-hot nuclear war. I took my neologism and that vague chain of associations to a piece of prose fic tion just to see what they could do. But I didn t have a concept of what it was to begin with. I still think the neologism and the vague general idea were the imp ortant things. I made up a whole bunch of things that happened in cyberspace, or what you could call cyberspace, and so I filled in my empty neologism. But beca use the world came along with its real cyberspace, very little of that stuff las ted. What lasted was the neologism. INTERVIEWER Where did you get the prefix cyber? GIBSON It came from the word cybernetics, which was coined around the year I was born b y a scientist named Norbert Wiener. It was the science of feedback and control s ystems. I was familiar with the word through science fiction more than anything else.

Science fiction had long offered treatments of the notional space inside the com puter. Harlan Ellison had written a story called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scre am, which was set in what we would call a virtual world within a computer. You co uld even go back to Ray Bradbury s story The Veldt, which was one of his mordantly c autionary fables about broadcast television. So I didn t think it was terribly ori ginal, my concept of cyberspace. My anxiety, rather, was that if I had thought o f it, twenty or thirty other science-fiction writers had thought of it at exactl y the same time and were probably busy writing stories about it, too. There s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which i s what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce s tories about the same idea. It s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from buildi ng big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough met alworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to d o it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it s steam-engine t ime for this one, because I can t be the only person noticing these various things . And I wasn t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism. INTERVIEWER Were you hoping to make cyberspace feel unfamiliar when you were first writing a bout it? GIBSON It wasn t merely unfamiliar. It was something no one had experienced yet. I wanted the reader s experience to be psychedelic, hyperintense. But I also knew that a m ore rigorous and colder and truer extrapolation would be to simply present it as something the character scarcely even notices. If I make a phone call to London right now, there s absolutely no excitement in that there s nothing special about it. But in a nineteenth-century science-fiction story, for someone in Vancouver to phone someone in London would have been the biggest thing in the story. People i n the far-flung reaches of the British Empire will all phone London one day! Giving in to this conflict, I inserted an odd little edutainment show running on television in the background at one point in Neuromancer Cyberspace, a consensual realm. Partly it was for the slower reader who hadn t yet figured it out, but also it was to get me off the hook with my conscience, because I knew I was going to hit the pulp buttons really big-time and do my best to blow people out of the wa ter with this psychedelic cyberspace effect. Of course, for the characters themselves, cyberspace is nothing special they use i t for everything. But you don t hear them say, Well, I ve got to go into cyberspace to speak to my mother, or I ve got to go to cyberspace to get the blueberry-pie re cipe. That s what it really is today there are vicious thieves and artificial intell igence sharks and everything else out there, swimming in it, but we re still talki ng to our mothers and exchanging blueberry-pie recipes and looking at porn and t weeting all the stuff we re doing. Today I could write a version of Neuromancer wh ere you d see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldn t be science fiction. W ith the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldn t have been able to do tha t, and, of course, I didn t know what it would be like. INTERVIEWER What was needed that you were missing? GIBSON

I didn t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows no middle. It s taken me eight books to get to a p oint where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationshi ps with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let s go r ob a Chinese corporation cool! I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew who were actu ally involved in the nascent digital industry were exciting. I wondered what it would be like if they were exciting, stylish, and sexy. I found the answer not s o much in punk rock as in Bruce Springsteen, in particular Darkness on the Edge of Town, which was the album Springsteen wrote as a response to punk a very noir, very American, very literary album. And I thought, What if the protagonist of Da rkness on the Edge of Town was a computer hacker? What if he s still got Springste en s character s emotionality and utterly beat-down hopelessness, this very American hopelessness? And what if the mechanic, who s out there with him, lost in this em pty nightmare of America, is actually, like, a robot or a brain in a bottle that nevertheless has the same manifest emotionality? I had the feeling, then, that I was actually crossing some wires of the main circuit board of popular culture and that nobody had ever crossed them this way before. INTERVIEWER How did the Sprawl, a megalopolis stretching from Atlanta to Boston, originate? GIBSON I had come to Vancouver in 1972, and I wasn t really trying to write science ficti on until 1982. There was a decade gap where I d been here and scarcely anywhere el se to Seattle for the odd weekend, and that was it. I was painfully aware of not h aving enough firsthand experience of the contemporary world to extrapolate from. So the Sprawl is there to free me from the obligation to authentic detail. It had always felt to me as though Washington, D.C., to Boston was one span of s tuff. 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 j ust tacked on Atlanta out of sci-fi bravura, to see how far we could push this t hing. Sometimes in science fiction you can do that. The reader really likes it i f you add Atlanta, because they re going, Shit, could you do that? Could that be p ossible? If you re visiting the future, you really want to have a few of the shit, could they do that? moments. INTERVIEWER Do readers often ask you to explain things about your books you yourself don t und erstand? GIBSON The most common complaint I received about Neuromancer, from computer people, was that there will never be enough bandwidth for any of this to be possible. I did n t want to argue with them because I scarcely knew what bandwidth was, but I assu med it was just a measure of something, and so I thought, How can they know? It s like saying there ll never be enough engines, there ll never be enough hours for thi s to happen. And they were wrong. INTERVIEWER Why did you set the novel in the aftermath of a war?

GIBSON In 1981, it was pretty much every intelligent person s assumption that on any give n day the world could end horribly and pretty well permanently. There was this v ast, all-consuming, taken-for-granted, even boring end-of-the-world anxiety that had been around since I was a little kid. So one of the things I wanted to do w ith Neuromancer was to write a novel in which the world didn t end in a nuclear wa r. In Neuromancer, the war starts, they lose a few cities, then it stops when mu ltinational corporations essentially take the United States apart so that can ne ver happen again. There s deliberately no textual evidence that the United States exists as a political entity in Neuromancer. On the evidence of the text America seems to be a sort of federation of city-states connected to a military-industr ial complex that may not have any government controlling it. That was my wanting to get away from the future-is-America thing. The irony, of course, is how the world actually went. If somebody had been able to sit me down in 1981 and say, Yo u know how you wrote that the United States is gone and the Soviet Union is loom ing in the background like a huge piece of immobile slag? Well, you got it kind of backward. That war was really a conscious act of imaginative optimism. I didn t quite believ e we could be so lucky. But I didn t want to write one of those science-fiction no vels where the United States and the Soviet Union nuke themselves to death. I wa nted to write a novel where multinational capital took over, straightened that s hit out, but the world was still problematic. INTERVIEWER The world of the Sprawl is often called dystopian. GIBSON Well, maybe if you re some middle-class person from the Midwest. But if you re livin g in most places in Africa, you d jump on a plane to the Sprawl in two seconds. Ma ny people in Rio have worse lives than the inhabitants of the Sprawl. I ve always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dys topian. I suspect that the people who say I m dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than my inventions, places that the denizens of the Sprawl would find it punishment to be relocated to, and a lot of those places seem to be steadily getting worse. INTERVIEWER There s a famous story about your being unable to sit through Blade Runner while w riting Neuromancer. GIBSON I was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was ri ght to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. Later, I notic ed that it was a total box-office flop, in first theatrical release. That worrie d me, too. I thought, Uh-oh. He got it right and nobody cares! Over a few years, though, I started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it affect ed the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office build ings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishin gly broad aesthetic impact on the world.

I met Ridley Scott years later, maybe a decade or more after Blade Runner was re leased. I told him what Neuromancer was made of, and he had basically the same l ist of ingredients for Blade Runner. One of the most powerful ingredients was Fr ench adult comic books and their particular brand of Orientalia the sort of thing that Heavy Metal magazine began translating in the United States. But the simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner wa s to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn t been obvious to mainstream Am erican science fiction that cities are like compost heaps just layers and layers o f stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally a djacent. In Europe, that s just life it s not science fiction, it s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every squ are inch of it. INTERVIEWER Cities seem very important to you. GIBSON Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn t really get i nteresting as a species until we became able to do cities that s when it all got rea lly diverse, because you can t do cities without a substrate of other technologies . There s a mathematics to it a city can t get over a certain size unless you can grow , gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can t get a ny bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don t have efficient sewa ge technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera. INTERVIEWER It seems like most if not all of your protagonists are loners, orphans, and noma ds, detached from families and social networks. GIBSON We write what we know, and we write what we think we can write. I think so many of my characters have been as you just described because it would be too much of a stretch for me to model characters who have more rounded emotional lives. Before we moved to Vancouver, my wife and I went to Europe. And I realized that I didn t travel very well. I was too tense for it. I was delighted that I was there , and I had a sense of storing up the sort of experiences I imagined artists had to store up in order to be artists. But it was all a bit extreme for me Franco s Spa in is still the only place I ve ever had a gun pointed at my head. I always felt t hat everybody else had parents somewhere who would come and get their ass out of trouble. But nobody was going to come get me out of trouble. Nobody was going t o take care of me. The hedonic risk taking that so many of my peers were into jus t made me anxious. A lot of people got into serious trouble taking those risks. I never wanted to get into serious trouble. INTERVIEWER The protagonist of Count Zero, Bobby Newmark, has a comparatively mundane life he lives with his mother. GIBSON One of the very first so-called adult science-fiction novels I ever read was Sta rship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. I d gone away on a trip with my mother and I had nothing to read, and the only thing for sale was this rather adult-looking pape

rback. I was barely up to the reading skill required for Starship Troopers, but I can remember figuring out the first couple of pages, and it blew the top off m y head. Later, when I managed to read it all the way through, I got the feeling that I was more like the juvenile delinquents who got beat up by the Starship Tr oopers than I was like the Starship Troopers themselves. And I remember wonderin g, Where did the juvenile delinquents go after they got beaten up by the Starshi p Troopers? What happened to them? Where did they live? Bobby is sort of the ans wer. They lived with their mothers and they were computer hackers! INTERVIEWER In Mona Lisa Overdrive, your third novel, Bobby ends up in a peculiar contraptio n called the Aleph. GIBSON I think I was starting to realize that the only image I had for total artificial intelligence or total artificial reality was Borges s Aleph, a point in space tha t contains all other points. In his story The Aleph, which may be his greatest, Bo rges managed to envision this Aleph without computers or anything like them. He skips the issue of what it is and how it works. It just sits there under the sta irs in the basement of some old house in Buenos Aires, and nobody says why, but you have to go down the stairs, lie on your back, look at this thing, and if you get your head at the right angle, then you can see everything there is, or ever was, anywhere, at any time. I think I was probably twelve years old when I read that, and I never got over t he wonder of that story, and how Borges in this very limited number of words cou ld make you feel that he s seen every last thing in the universe, just by sonorous ly listing a number of very peculiar and mismatched items and events. If Bobby w as going to go somewhere, that was probably going to be it. INTERVIEWER What interested you about Joseph Cornell? GIBSON Beginning with Count Zero I had the impulse to use the text to honor works of ar t that I particularly loved or admired. With Mona Lisa Overdrive, it s heavily Jos eph Cornell, especially his extraordinary talent to turn literal garbage into th ese achingly superb, over-the-top, poetic, cryptic statements. Gradually, Cornell became a model of creativity for me. I ve always had a degree o f impostor syndrome about being or calling myself an artist, but I m pretty sure t hat there s some way in which I m an outsider, and what I m doing has to be outsider a rt. I felt that I ve worked with found objects at times in a similar way because I valued bits of the real world differently than I valued the bits I created myse lf. When I was going to start writing All Tomorrow s Parties, John Clute suggested to me that all of my books had become Cornell boxes. The Bridge in Virtual Light, h e said, was my biggest Cornell box. It really spooked me. I think that s why I wou nd up burning the Bridge. INTERVIEWER Tell me about the Bridge. GIBSON

The Bridge is a fable about counterculture, the kind of counterculture that may no longer be possible. There are no backwaters where things can breed our connecti vity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight -Ashburys. We ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the c oncept of counterculture. I wanted to create a scenario in which I could depict s omething like that happening in the recognizably near future. I woke up one morning in San Francisco and looked out the window and had this gr eat archetypal San Francisco experience there was nothing but fog. Nothing but fog except this perfectly clear diorama window up in the air, brilliantly lit by th e sun, containing the very top of the nearest support tower of the Bay Bridge. I couldn t see anything else in the city, just this little glowing world. I thought, Wow, if you had a bunch of plywood, two-by-fours, you could build yourself a li ttle house on top of that thing and live there. The Bridge novels were set just a few years into the future, which is now a few years in the past, and so they read almost like alternate-history novels the presen t in flamboyant cyberpunk drag. And the Bridge itself, a shantytown culture impr ovised in the wake of a devastating Bay Area earthquake, is a piece of emergent technology. INTERVIEWER Many readers have argued that the Bridge books offer a theory of technology. GIBSON More like a rubbing like rubbing brass in a cathedral or a tombstone in a graveyar d. I m not a didactic storyteller. I don t formulate theories about how the world wo rks and then create stories to illustrate my theories. What I have in the end is an artifact and not a theory. But I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent tec hnologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emer gence it actually seems to be quite a random thing. That s a vision of technology th at s diametrically opposed to the one I received from science fiction and the popu lar culture of science when I was twelve years old. In the postwar era, aside from anxiety over nuclear war, we assumed that we were steering technology. Today, we re more likely to feel that technology is driving us, driving change, and that it s out of control. Technology was previously seen a s linear and progressive evolutionary in that way our culture has always preferred to misunderstand Darwin. INTERVIEWER You don t see technology evolving that way? GIBSON What I mainly see is the distribution of it. The poorer you are, the poorer your culture is, the less cutting-edge technology you re liable to encounter, aside fr om the Internet, the stuff you can access on your cell phone. In that way, I think we re past the computer age. You can be living in a third-wor ld village with no sewage, but if you ve got the right apps then you can actually have some kind of participation in a world that otherwise looks like a distant S tar Trek future where people have plenty of everything. And from the point of vi ew of the guy in the village, information is getting beamed in from a world wher

e people don t have to earn a living. They certainly don t have to do the stuff he h as to do everyday to make sure he s got enough food to be alive in three days. On that side of things, Americans might be forgiven for thinking the pace of cha nge has slowed, in part because the United States government hasn t been able to d o heroic nonmilitary infrastructure for quite a while. Before and after World Wa r II there was a huge amount of infrastructure building in the United States tha t gave us the spiritual shape of the American century. Rural electrification, th e highway system, the freeways of Los Angeles those were some of the biggest thing s anybody had ever built in the world at the time, but the United States really has fallen far behind with that. INTERVIEWER Is computer technology not heroic? GIBSON I do think it s a really big deal, although the infrastructure is not physical. Th ere s hardware supporting the stuff, but the digital infrastructure is a bunch of zeros and ones something that amounts to a kind of language. It looks to me as though that prosthetic-memory project is going to be what we a re about, as a species, because our prosthetic memory now actually stands a pret ty good chance of surviving humanity. We could conceivably go extinct and our cr eations would live on. One day, in the sort of science-fiction novel I m unlikely ever to write, intelligent aliens might encounter something descended from our c reations. That something would introduce itself by saying, Hey, we wish our huma n ancestors could have been around to meet you guys because they were totally fa scinated by this moment, but at least we ve got this PowerPoint we d like to show yo u about them. They don t look anything like us, but that is where we came from, an d they were actually made out of meat, as weird as that seems. INTERVIEWER When did you decide to write about the contemporary world? GIBSON For years, I d found myself telling interviewers and readers that I believed it wa s possible to write a novel set in the present that would have an effect very si milar to the effect of novels I had set in imaginary futures. I think I said it so many times, and probably with such a pissy tone of exasperation, that I final ly decided I had to call myself on it. A friend knew a woman who was having old-fashioned electroshock therapy for depr ession. He d pick her up at the clinic after the session and drive her not home bu t to a fish market. He d lead her to the ice tables where the day s catch was spread out, and he d just stand there with her, and she d look at the ice tables for a rea lly long time with a blank, searching expression. Finally, she d turn to him and s ay, Wow, they re fish, aren t they! After electroshock, she had this experience of unut terable, indescribable wonderment at seeing these things completely removed from all context of memory, and gradually her brain would come back together and say , Damn, they re fish. That s kind of what I do. INTERVIEWER What is GIBSON pattern recognition ?

It is the thing we do that other species on the planet are largely incapable of doing. It s how we infer everything. If you re in the woods and a rock comes flying from somewhere in your direction, you assume that someone has thrown a rock at y ou. Other animals don t seem capable of that. The fear leverage in the game of ter rorism depends on faulty pattern recognition. After all, terrorist acts are rare and tend to kill fewer people than, say, automobile accidents or drugs and alco hol. INTERVIEWER Had you already begun to write Pattern Recognition before 9/11? GIBSON I had but as soon as that happened just about everything else in the manuscript dried up and blew away. INTERVIEWER Why did the September 11 attacks have such an effect on you? GIBSON Because I had had this career as a novelist, Manhattan was the place in the Unit ed States that I visited most regularly. I wound up having more friends in New Y ork than I have anywhere else in the United States. It has that quality of being huge and small at the same time and noble. So without even realizing it, I had co me to know it, I had come to know lower Manhattan better than any place other th an Vancouver. When 9/11 happened it affected me with a directness I would never have imagined possible. In a strange sort of way that particular relationship with New York ended with 9/ 11 because the post 9/11 New York doesn t feel to me to be the same place. INTERVIEWER Are you glad you wrote a book that had so much 9/11 in it? GIBSON I m really glad. I felt this immense gratitude when I finished, and I was sitting there looking at the last page, thinking, I m glad I got a shot at this thing now, because for sure there are dozens of writers all around the world right this mi nute, thinking, I have to write about 9/11. And I thought, I m already done, I won t have to revisit this material, and it s largely out of my system. INTERVIEWER Alongside that public narrative runs a very private one, with Cayce chasing thro ugh the maze of the Internet after the source of some mesmerizing film material she calls the footage. GIBSON Having assumed that there were no longer physical backwaters in which new bohemi as could spawn and be nurtured, I was intrigued by the idea and the very evident possibility that in the post-geographic Internet simply having a topic of suffi cient obscurity and sufficient obsessive interest to a number of geographically diverse people could replicate the birth of a bohemia.

When I started writing about the footage, I don t think I had ever seen a novel in which anybody had had a real emotional life unfolding on a listserv, but I knew that millions of people around the world were living parts of their emotional li ves in those places and moreover that the Internet was basically built by those pe ople! They were meeting one another and having affairs and getting married and d oing everything in odd special-interest communities on the Internet. Part of my interest in the footage was simply trying to rise to the challenge of naturalism . INTERVIEWER You ve called science fiction your native literary culture. Do you still feel that way, having written three books that are set in the present? GIBSON Yes, but native in the sense of place of birth. Science fiction was the first li terary culture I acquired, but since then I ve acquired a number of other literary cultures, and the bunch of them have long since supplanted science fiction. INTERVIEWER Do you think of your last three books as being science fiction? GIBSON No, I think of them as attempts to disprove the distinction or lve the boundary. They are set in a world that meets virtually being science fiction, but it happens to be our world, and it the author to make the technology just fractionally imaginary has, to my mind, the effect of science fiction. attempts to disso every criteria of s barely tweaked by or fantastic. It

If you d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel t hat consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they d have read your proposal and said, Well, it s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn t even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really ex cellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction novels, but you can t have them all in one novel. INTERVIEWER What are those major plot drivers? GIBSON Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet s climate, with p ossibly drastic consequences. There s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexua l disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled t hroughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists , who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United State s in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. INTERVIEWER And you haven t even gotten to the technology. GIBSON You haven t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the In

ternet, they d be showing you the door. It s just too much science fiction. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-williamgibson