From the moment in 1984 when William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, was published, the soft-spoken Southerner—who relocated to Canada in the late '60s to avoid Vietnam—has been a hero to the kinds of science-fiction readers who favor mind-expanding ideas over two-fisted action. His early work dealt with the possibilities and travails of a hyper-technological future, but over the past decade, Gibson has primarily been setting his novels and short stories in a time closer to our own, where the technology we already live with is regarded with a sense of alien wonder. Gibson recently spoke with The A.V. Club about growing up in Virginia, becoming renowned as a science-fiction seer, and the process of writing his latest novel, Spook Country.
The A.V. Club: People often point to your early books as being prophetic regarding the coming technology, but do you think it's possible that the technicians read your books and then tried to make them a reality?
William Gibson: Oh, absolutely. I know it to be the case, to some minor extent. There was a time in the late '80s, early '90s, when every government in the world decided to have a huge, lavishly funded virtual-reality conference, and I got invited to all of them. So I met lots and lots of the players in the goggles-and-gloves school of virtual reality. None of them actually became the man who invented television, which is what I think all of them expected to become. But to a man or woman, they all allowed as how I had really helped them out. They had this idea, but they'd never been able to explain to anybody what it was. Once they had Neuromancer, they could just go around with a suitcase full of copies, and when people said, "I just can't fathom what you're talking about," they'd say, "Read this. It's sort of like this." [Laughs.] I don't think they were just flattering me; I think they were actually doing that.
What has emerged in the world today doesn't have very much to do with what I was thinking of in the '80s at all, except in some organic way. Except for my having given people something to call what we call "cyberspace." And in Spook Country, in a kind of a low-key way, whenever people are sitting around having coffee in diners and things, they're talking about how that's all over. "Cyberspace" as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix "-electro" to make things cool, because everything was electrical. "Electro" was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think "cyber" is sort of the same way. The things that aren't cyberspace seem to comprise a smaller set than things that are.
AVC: One of the themes of the book seems to be that with all this new technology, it's simultaneously harder and easier for people to remain anonymous. Everybody is tagged to a certain extent, but you can also create a whole different identity for yourself and sort of disappear.
WG: Yes, this is true. And it's harder to keep secrets. Or maybe harder and easier simultaneously.
AVC: In your books, you don't necessarily take a "danger of technology" stance, nor do you take a "technology is great" stance. Your position seems to be to be, "This is what is."
WG: I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite, or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible. We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that. The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that. Which is good for me, anyway. [Laughs.]
AVC: As a writer whose work requires certain leaps of imagination on the readers' part, do you fight yourself over how clear you want to be in your writing, vs. how much you'd rather create a sense of disorientation in the reader?
WG: I know what you mean, but I don't usually have to fight anything. I'll give you an example. Something that I'd never done before, I did with this book. I shifted the original opening chapter, so that the book opens with the character Hollis rather than Tito. I decided that there was some unconscious level at which I am, frequently, with the opening pages of a book, attempting to get rid of readers that I wouldn't be interested in. I'll open with three or four pages of such high and wordy weirdness that people who can't hack it or aren't clever enough to keep reading will just go away and leave me alone with the readership I like to imagine I have. [Laughs.]
I made a conscious decision, with this book, to flip those two chapters, so that I open with a character who I thought was more user-friendly, and less metaphysical and metaphorical than the strange clouds inside Tito's head. That's a real example of me doing exactly what you just asked me about, but it's a rare example. Generally, I trust the part of me that actually writes these books—the part I don't have very much conscious contact with—to keep it pretty much on the rails. When I'm writing, I show the pages on a daily basis to a couple of people I trust, to see if any of them say, "Wait a minute. What happened? What is this?" But that actually is very rare. They're more likely to tell me that I've repeated myself. They'll say, "You did exactly the same thing 24 pages ago." The rest of it gets caught in the edit.
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