On Wa-Wa Pedals and Space Castles: An Interview with William Gibson

Jack Move Magazine

By far Gibson's most nuanced work, Zero History is as removed from Neuromancer as 1982 is from 2010. That is to say: a lifetime. Oh, it's unmistakably his; but it's a book written by a man who's lived much longer than the kid who wrote the book on cyberspace. Tense, often claustrophobic, uber hip and completely beyond meta, Zero History is also very funny, and—wait for it—very, very tender.

I know that to a certain extent we’re already doing it, but how do you envision our having internalized the interface, as mentioned in Spook Country?
Well, I don’t know if this answers that, but every time I thought how one might realistically depict the moment to moment experiences of the really average person in a much more fully locative media environment, it’s kind of like---I don’t even know if it’s possible. I saw a video on YouTube a couple of years ago that actually got it. I think it might have been done for a Japanese electronics company. It was just a woman coming in and making a pot of tea in her kitchen. But the whole thing was, everything was desktop. Like, every surface was desktop and it was animated, and everything was giving her way more information than she needed to make a pot of tea, while it was trying to sell her stuff, and that was just visual; I wasn’t getting her audio. Her visual input, all the physical world, was completely covered with information. If you wanted it that way, you could have it that way.

It would have been hard to get this thing published, just because it would have been so weird. ...these chopped up conversations that people are having on these tiny little two-way radios...

I’m not making that point very well, but I think it’s an interesting way to look at it.

The genuinely new things are really hard to imagine. When you do imagine them, they’re very hard to relay in anything like a sense in which the people who are totally used to them would use them...there’s always this factor in future tech science fiction where somebody, be it the characters or the narrative voice, anyway, is really kind of wowed by future tech. Writing that, it’s kind of hard to avoid that. It’s a powerful impulse. You want the reader to get a wowie. But there’s a way in which it’s not naturalistic; it’s not a genuinely naturalistic vision of the future, because that would be one in which people take it utterly for granted. You can do it, but it’s kind of harder to do; it requires a second level of self-awareness in the writing.

One of the concepts that really stood out for me in Spook Country, which you also wrote about recently in the op-ed piece you did for The New York Times, was that of cyberspace everting.
Spook Country was kind of my biggest effort to explain that, but I’ve never been able to work it down to a sound bite, where you could say, “Oh, sure, it has.”

It seems like it’s more of an instinctual yes or no—either you get it or you don’t.
Yeah.

You have a keen interest in and aptitude for the details that tell a larger story; fashion, societal norms, weaponry, aside from technology...and just from the time I’ve read your Twitter feed, I know that there’s a certain extent to which you take note of these details as you go about your day...
Yeah.

Is it about absorbing them and letting them sort of cook in the machine? Or is it something that you actively take note of when you’re preparing for a novel?
No, no, it’s much more, I sort of have a built in hopper, or I’ve acquired one, into which I toss every bit of novelty that I encounter when I’m not writing, and it goes into the hopper, and then it just sort of cooks. It composts, or something and I pay absolutely no attention to it, until the day which, for some reason, it pops back out. When it pops back out, it’s been transfigured by somehow having melded itself with something that happened to be adjacent to it, and so it’s like, it’s kind of a made-up novelty, and that’s generally where the stuff comes from. Or, increasingly, like with this most recent setup, I haven’t had the need for it to transform. I can often just encounter it on the web and toss it directly into the narrative and let the narrative find its own use for it.

When you’re writing from the POV of a woman, which you do exceedingly well, I’m curious what approach you take.I don’t know! I mean, I don’t really have that much of a conscious approach. I tend, with the female point of view characters, they tend to evolve as people I’m comfortable spending 14 months with [laughs] because that’s about how long it takes me to do one of those books. Like, I’ve yet to do an unsympathetic, however interesting, point of view character. Particularly the women. They tend to be very sympathetic figures, and I think that’s just because otherwise I’d just go bats, you know, like, “Why am I stuck in here with this crazy bitch?” [Laughs] You know? Other than that, you know, it’s just, I like women, and I’m a lifelong observer of them. Trying to figure out what they think and why they think what they think, and that’s kind of it.

When I started to write science fiction, I didn’t think there was much happening, culturally, at least in American science fiction, but the one area that was really was radically feminist science fiction, and that had some effect on me at least insofar as it made me realize that it kind of  unempowered, passive women were one of the clichés of mainstream science fiction. So, okay, we’ve got to specialize in kick-ass female characters. Somewhat before it became the done thing. When Johnny Mnemonic was trying to get itself made, the studio scene didn’t want anything to do with it. You couldn’t have a hot chick kicking ass. It wasn’t that long ago they said, “No no no, the guy has to do that!” I kind of think those guys either all got sent to some educational camp or were fired, cause they wouldn’t have been able to operate in that new environment.

I came sort of late to your work. I started three years ago with Pattern Recognition, when a friend of ours told me I would love it. He said, It’s got a female protagonist, she’s in advertising, I think she’s a lot like you. I said I would give it a shot. And from the very first page I was absolutely hooked, and blown away, because I am very much like Cayce in a couple of ways, but the biggest way is her strange reactions to branding, which I had never even discussed with another human being, because I thought it was so weird. And from the first page, I was hooked. You had my full attention, it was like, Oh my God, somebody’s been inside my head. I worked my way backwards from Spook Country. I’m finding that Zero History seems to me your funniest, and also your most tender work to date. Do you see that, and if so, to what do you attribute the shift?
Well, let me see [chuckles], kind of from the top, you’re obviously like, you were my dream demographic when I wrote PR, because you’re a woman who hadn’t read Neuromancer. [Laughs] That’s kind of the window that I was holding up while I was doing that. “Okay, imagine there’s a woman, and she buys this book...” and it’s like having a fresh page, a totally fresh chapter to start with, and it obviously worked, so that’s great.

And...the thing about it being funny, the book...I always was, like, I thought there was a lot of really funny stuff in Neuromancer, but it couldn’t ever be reviewed that way, because when you review a book you can’t have more than one book, particularly in genre reviews. So you can’t do punk dystopian dryly humorous. It just gets too complicated for what book reviews usually do. And that will affect the dialogue that sort of grows up around a book or an author’s body of work, and when I got to the bridge books, I deliberately made the humor in those books a little broader. There’s a kind of Keystone Kops element to those books, where people are crashing around. Rydell is like up front, a tragic comic protagonist. You can like him, but you just have to perpetually groan at what he doesn’t get, and the ridiculous shit that he gets himself into. He’s sort of like a Candide figure. He’s sort of just trying to do right in this hopelessly flawed and snakey world that he inhabits, and I guess the experiment I did with those books that I never talked about when they were being written and being published is that I wrote them as though they were imagined near futures inhabited, for the most part, by people from the year in which I wrote them. Like, Rydell is not a future guy at all. Somehow the Nashville he’s arrived in through that narrative seems like nineties Nashville. I didn’t touch the transform button that a science fiction writer has to have to like make the character part of the environment. And I didn’t know exactly why I did it that way, but it was part of getting to the next set of books. And it was sort of part of the humor allowing itself to show a little bit more. If I had gone from Neuromancer to writing a comic/satirical novel for my second book, it would have been kind of a tough sell. I didn’t have that consciously in mind, but I think I understood it intuitively. Like, after NM, okay, we’re not going to make the reader laugh too loud at the environment or setting. We have to keep the wa-wa pedal going, you know, the “O-o-o-o-o-o-o!”---the theremin. We have to keep the theremin going in the background. This is science fiction, after all, and I’ve sort of been shifting out of that. Maybe only temporarily, I don’t know. It was part of a semi-conscious program to widen, kind of get some elbow room from the genre I had started in.

As for it being a more tender book, it’s part of some progress from when I started writing. Like, Neuromancer’s a book where people don’t have parents. It’s a completely adolescent book. I wasn’t physically adolescent when I wrote the book, but I had like my inner adolescent was still breathing heavily over my shoulder [laughs] most of the time, and I sort of let him go for it, I sort of bounced things off my inner adolescent: Cyberspace! Cowboys! Butt-kicking chicks in black leather! Rich people in space castles! Yes! It drives the book, but the emotionality is very weird and narrow and stylized. And pulpy, for the most part. I think I knew that I didn’t know how to do anything else. I got it as wide and deep as I could get it, and then with the subsequent books, it’s increased. The range increases, people may have parents, they have feelings about their parents, and eventually they have relationships that are more emotionally complicated. It’s an odd process. And it fills me with a kind of anxiety when I do anything that widens the emotional bandwidth in a way that I notice it, I go, Ohhh, I don’t know, it’s not safe! I don’t know where that comes from, but I keep doing it in spite of myself. [Although] every once in awhile, my wife would say, “I like Milgrim, but I don’t see what Fiona would see in him.”

I had the same thought! I love Milgrim to pieces. I liked him in Spook Country and I adored him in Zero History, but I kept thinking, What the hell does she see in him?
Well, my guess is that she’s grown up in a somewhat toxic environment. I think that her family origin has predisposed her at some point to look for the opposite of what was bad news at home, at least to some extent, in relationships, so basically she’s not her mother. I don’t want to look to deeply into it; it would be really sad if it at some level she’s doing it to piss her mother off. But that’s a matter of happy endings being mainly about when we choose to roll the credits. I know some people will read that book and go, “Oh, that’s an awfully happy ending.” But you know, who knows where any of them are headed. We’re leaving the story feeling hopeful. That kind of thing always makes me feel quite miserable [laughs]—don’t be too hopeful!

A lot of where fiction happens is in the reader’s projection on the text and part of the secret of learning to do it is that you learn where to leave it open for the reader to project their own meaning and ideas of what something looks like. That’s why it’s really counterproductive to over describe a main character. Some people think Cayce is incredibly beautiful. They’re able to have that conviction because I was incredibly stingy with descriptors. She doesn’t think she’s good looking at all.

Any more plans to work with clothing designers?
Not particularly. I’m kind of a groupie for that stuff, but the sort of thing I like is such a narrow testing field, most clothing designers...nothing to talk about, really. It’s more fun for me if it actually doesn’t produce artifacts. I love being able to sit there and listen to people talk about what they do and how they do it.

Explain the appeal of Samuel Pepys.
It’s like there’s this guy, and he’s walking around having this deeply and sort of sometimes pathetically recognizable life. And he’s tweeting about it, but he’s tweeting about it from the 17th century. [Laughs] Every now and then I find myself thinking, “I wonder what Peps is up to.”  He went to some trouble to have his diary bound in boards and put them in his library. He enjoyed the idea that one day people would read it.

What’s next?
Just the book tour. Other than that there’s nothing going on. In some weird way that I don’t understand, I get the beginning of the idea for the next book when I’m on the book tour. At the end of the book tour I’m so grateful that starting to write a novel seems like a good idea.