William Gibson

I spent a year in Dublin in 1996/97 hoping to become a graphic designer, but ended up as a pretty bad web designer instead. As a huge William Gibson fan, I heard he was in town promoting his upcoming Idoru book. Armed with a mate's magazine as my cover — it came in a 10" record sleeve and looked like something straight out of Neuromancer — I managed to convince his publicist to grant us an interview.

We shot the 20-minute session at a friend’s production company off Fitzwilliam Square. I took my Sony Hi8 Handycam along as the 2nd camera, so what it lacks in picture and audio quality, it more than makes up for in nostalgic texture:

I returned to London in September 1997 and started Protein, but that year in Dublin – and this interview with Gibson – became foundational to how I think about the role of culture and technology in shaping today’s probable futures.

This largely forgotten recording had been in the Protein archive until Joe Muggs sowed We’ve Never Needed Sci-Fi More in SEED CLUB a few weeks back, which prompted me to dig it out. So, 29 years later, it feels appropriate to dust it off and finally publish it. Enjoy.

Interviewer: Can you tell us something about your literary influences?

William Gibson: My native literary culture is science fiction. That’s what I began with, that’s what really turned me on. I read the American canon. I read Bradbury, Sturgeon, everything I could get my hands on. And then when I was about 15-years-old I discovered William Burroughs, and that completely blew my mind, although I didn’t really have a clue what he was doing but I recognised he was using the toolkit of science fiction to do something very different than this genre stuff that I’d grown up with. I went on from Burroughs to Ballard to Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, that whole ’60s thing.

What about people like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hemmett, because there’s a kind of hard-boiled aspect to your writing...

Well, you know, I’ve never been a big Chandler fan. I’ve always sensed the author of these books was kinda a cold fish. The man himself was really quite puritanical. I admire the technical finish of the language, but I felt much more in sympathy with Dashiell Hammett. Hammett actually invented that riff, and Chandler came along and did very well with it, but Hammett was the first person to actually do that.

Japanese culture also seems to be a strong theme. Where did that come from?

I live in an Pacific Rim city: Vancouver probably does more trade with Japan than it does with eastern Canada. We are also a big tourist destination for the Japanese, and my wife taught English as a second language to mostly Japanese students for about 10 years. So I had a lot more exposure to Japanese youth culture than most North Americans would.

In other interviews you’ve said that you’re not particularly interested in computers or technology...

I’ve moved up to an obsolete Mac PowerBook these days, but it’s not connected to anything. I’m at the bottom of the food chain of computers in our house: when my son gets an upgrade, his sister gets his old machine, my wife gets her old machine and I get my wife’s old machine. They move from the upstairs bedroom to the basement. I’m really interested in what people do with the stuff and how it affects us. But I’m not into the gadget fetish aspect of it.

Was this mentality there from an early age?

I can’t literally remember a time when there was no television, but I can remember my father bringing our first television home from the shop. It was a big wooden box with a little round black and white screen. When we turned it on there wasn’t any signal, so we had this thing sitting in the living room for two months before the first broadcast started coming in. People would sit there all night and watch it anyway. I probably didn’t think that was unusual at the time, but it’s the sort of observation that leads to the kind of work that I do today. 

Are you better off not being too much in tune with it so you retain a fresh perspective on what this technology could do?

I think a relative lack of interest in real technology means I can see the forest for the trees. It gives me an overall picture.

Concerning contemporary social culture and the whole club scene and music scene – are they influences?

I like pop. I like watching pop cultures. I’ve lived long enough to see dozens of them rise and fall. I like bohemians. One thing I’m really interested in is whether we can still do bohemians now. Has the mechanism of recommodification become so fast and so sophisticated that we will never have anything like punk again? That scene in Seattle that they called grunge – it took two weeks to go from the streets of Seattle to the runways of Paris. The machine has never worked more quickly, and it killed it. It always kills it. It took about a year and a half for them to recommodify punk, in 1978, and it took them about two and a half years to do it to the hippies. When they did it to the hippies was when they actually invented the mechanism that does it, and it’s just been getting faster and more efficient all the time. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to have scenes like that anymore.

Is cyberpunk going the same way?

I never really bought into the idea that there was such a thing called cyberpunk... It was a funny drifting idea. I think what the word means today is another flavour of popular culture, so you can say, “did you see that video, it’s kinda cyberpunk.” Or you could say, “those are really cyberpunk trousers”. People would know what you meant. But I think that’s all you can really do with it these days.

Is it important as a writer to draw influences from contemporary culture?

When I’m writing these books, I become a major magazine addict. When my newsagent sees me coming, he gets a huge smile because I’ll buy hundreds of dollars worth of magazines, almost at random, and haul them home and start flipping through them, just looking for stuff, for texture, for things I can use.

In your previous books, before Idoru, the reality seemed to be very different.

Neuromancer is probably set around 2035, Virtual Light is probably set around 2005. It’s really our world with a lot of knobs turned up. I did that deliberately because I find it challenging and also I wanted to get away from the idea that what I’m doing is the traditional and supposedly predicative SF thing. When I wrote Neuromancer I had no Internet and no World Wide Web to extrapolate from, when I wrote Idoru, the web was there so I had something to base things on. I think that’s the difference. 

Is it strange to have reality catching up with you?

I think that what is eventually going to happen – given that the world has become such a drastic science fiction scenario in its own right, and seems to get more so everyday day – is that I’ll be able to write a naturalistic mainstream novel that describes the real world. It will have exactly the texture of a William Gibson novel. But it won’t have to be science fiction, but it will feel like because so much of the world we live in today feels exactly like science fiction.

In the opening pages of Idoru you mention images of Kowloon Walled City and how important they are to you. What was so special about the photographs? 

[Ryūji] Miyamoto is a Japanese photographer who usually photographs ruins. He went into the Walled City and cut a deal with the heroin dealers who actually ran the place and got sections of it pretty much cleared out. He then shot black and white, incredibly slow exposures that might take two or three days. These pictures are so staggeringly evocative – it’s Blade Runner squared. They’re just fabulous. They stuck with me for years and I wound up buying all of the remaining stock of a small collection. I bought out the Japanese edition of his work, and I’ve been giving these books to friends for years. I think I’m down to a single one now. I always wanted to find a way to work with that material and those photos also inspired the bridge environment in Virtual Light.

The book also features a Tokyo that has been rebuilt after a massive earthquake, which is based on fact. Is it important blend reality with fiction when you write?

I pride myself on airbrushing the gaps between reality and fiction as smoothly as possible. The super science fictional toilets that Chia keeps encountering and disliking in Idoru are real. The Japanese have pretty much all of those features. I love decontextualising things like that, or recontextualising them and creating a science fiction facade out of something that's really just a piece of late 20th-century hardware.

And that gives a sense of reality to the books?

I like the idea that two different readers would have very different responses to this technology. Someone who had been to Japan would recognise this as a high-tech Japanese toilet and someone else might think, “Oh Gibson, he’s got a wild imagination”.

One character in the novel also mentions putting out a negative mental field. There’s new technology being developed to this effect...

That I haven’t heard of. They’re working on that?

Sony Research Labs are doing some work. Is it something you could see happening in the future?

Well, I don’t know, the future is wide open... I don’t like to say that anything is impossible. I love the idea that Sony is working on machines that produce negative mental fields, that’s very Gibsonian.

One of the main themes in Iduro is fame. In the last 12 years your lifestyle must have changed enormously. Has that been a big influence on the book?

I’m very lucky because I’m a writer – the level of celebrity that writers receive is very low compared to sort of celebrity that a rock star or film star has. In the last 10 years, I’ve met rock stars and film stars, so really this book comes from observation of real celebrities than it does from anything I’ve experienced myself.

There is also reference to the view from Bono’s house. He’s a rock star that you know at this stage, and fairly familiar with?

Yeah, well, he’s one. I’ve met a few. There’s rumoured to be a curse on rock and roll in science fiction books – none of them have ever done very well, so I wanted to stay away from trying to depict the music. I wanted to depict that sense of the machine that surrounds it. I wanted a rock star who has security men and accountants and managers and three million other people working for him.

The whole cyberspace thing almost being not a revulsion from the body, but in a way distancing yourself from it. It’s quite a puritan thing, really. Is that something that is quite consistent in your writing?

The take on of cyberspace in Neuromancer actually came from a reading of DH Lawrence that a professor of mine championed in university. He talked about that Lawrence mind-body dichotomy and what was essentially wrong with Western culture. In Neuromancer I think it’s actually put forward as a critique of something we do with our culture. I am no longer sure that’s what I think that is actually happening. The way the Internet is going is very different from anything I suggested in Neuromancer.

On the issue of the direction of the Internet, the whole corporate take-over bid for the Internet, do you think the Internet could be the Big Brother scenario of the future, and the whole idea of democracy on the Internet could disappear?

If the Internet becomes top-down hierarchical in the way broadcast television is top-down hierarchical, it won’t be the Internet anymore. It will be something else; at that point it’s going to stop evolving. Actually, I don’t think that can happen. I’m hoping that it’s nature prohibits that.

The whole democracy side of it is very important to you as well: not being elitist, not bering only available to the wealthiest section of society.

Anything that increases ubiquity of the Internet is a good thing. There’s talk of a $100 Nintendo-style box that you stick on top of your television set and it turns your box into a dedicated web browser, and I think it is definitely a step in the right direction. As long as computers cost the price of a small used car, this stuff can only spread so far. I think market forces will drive the price of computers down. I think one day they will give away computers to encourage the sale of software.

That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed access to it either, it just a way of getting there, but it can still become quite elitist. Do you think it could become feudal with the big companies in control?

I hope that it doesn’t become neo-feudal. It kinda delights me that big companies haven’t figured a way of making real money out of this stuff.

You celebrate the culture of the hacker – are they important? What are their relevance?

Neuromancer actually predated the culture of the hacker. I have to say I am not a champion of random vandalism. My son downloaded a Macintosh virus last week, this Trojan horse that ate his computer, that cost me a great deal of money.

In terms of immortality, people like David Zindell are writing about webware and downloading personalities onto computer chips. What is your attitude on this whole concept?

I’ve always found the downloading/immortality thing as vaguely laughable. I suspect people who download themselves will wind up running chip frying machines in the 23rd century. 

In terms of your capacity to anticipate the future, have you thought you would have been better off designing these products you write about? You would make more money than writing...

I actually have a lot of fun in Idoru, more or less deliberately spinning out a lot products that I would like to see designed. I’ve loved to have a virtual Venice; I would happily accept one from the first software company that puts it together. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.