Willam Gibson

"It’s taken me almost 20 years to wind up with that haircut," wisecracks William Gibson. "That’s a scary thing."

The most important science fiction writer of the last 20 years is peering at the receding buzzcut that adorns the skull of the cover illustration character on HP art director Simon Roche’s dog-eared 1986 edition of Neuromancer. I say wisecracks, but drollcracks would be more apposite.

Sitting in the incongruous surroundings of the Shelbourne tearoom, Gibson inscribes the battered volume and pronounces it just about ready for the compost heap. Apt, because Gibson has always written from the compost heap of the future, and Mr. Roche’s ragged paperback serves as handy metaphor for the writings within: blue neon prose from a downbeat street.

On the publicity trail for his eighth book, Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s innocuous appearance is as far removed from his work as William Burroughs’ was from his. That lightning fast mind expresses itself in a sleepy Deputy Dog drawl, and he moves as slowly as he talks. This prophet of all things virtual, this man who coined the term cyberspace and almost single-handedly saved sci-fi from spinning off into ever the decreasing circles of fantasy, this architect and archivist of unhappened history, well, he looks like a southern fly-fisherman on a sleepy afternoon.

Gibson has been relaxing in Dublin over the Easter weekend, seven years since he last spoke to hotpress on the back of Idoru. The differences in the city haven’t escaped him. For a start, we’ve now got Wagamama, his favourite noodle bar. And despite the exponential growth, the traffic snarls and the plush hotels sprouting up like gigantic, shiny mushrooms, he still finds the place an antidote to jet lag, or as he calls it in the new novel, "soul delay".

"Y’know, seven years ago people here were talking almost wistfully about the possibility of it becoming some kind of boom town," he recalls, "and they were saying, ‘I think it’s almost about to pop!’ And I sorta felt, ‘Well, gee, maybe it won’t,’ so I’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I think it’s definitely gonna pop!’ But now it’s like… post-something."

Post-everything, maybe. Now Dubliners are as likely to wax gnostalgic, hankering for a return to more spiritual values in the face of moral and economic panic.

"Yeah, I’ve seen that happen with other places," Gibson says. "Actually to some extent I saw it happen to Vancouver, which had been a kind of backwater place, pleasant but not much going on, didn’t figure much in the world press until we had the World’s Fair, and suddenly there was four billion dollars worth of Hong Kong flight capital overnight, because the Hong Kong people wanted a sort of a foot on the ground in North America in case Hong Kong went sideways after the changeover. So all that money came in and everybody was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really happening now!’ And it takes just a few years for people to start going: ‘My god, what have we lost?!!’

Has he ever considered putting Dublin in one of his novels?

"Well, you know, it’s probably on some kind of not very conscious short list, because the settings I can use are pretty much dependent on places I know to some extent, and I think that I could write a Dublin that would be reasonably convincing. Which is not the same thing as saying that I know it really well, but I know it well enough to fake it, so it conceivably could happen."

When Gibson was in Dublin in 1993 to participate in a U2 Zoo TV triplecast. He interviewed the band for Details magazine, and in the course of that exchange remarked that the concept of the future has become a historical phenomenon, and that science fiction is an exhausted category.

"I always said I wasn’t writing about the future," he said at the time. "The real challenge for me now would probably be this: to write the kind of novel I’ve always written and have it do all those same things, but set it in 1994."

It took a decade, but Gibson has risen to that challenge. Pattern Recognition is set in 2003, but such is the writer’s highly evolved prose style that one could get 100 pages into the book before realising it takes place in the here and now.

"That’s what I always thought would happen," Gibson affirms, "that it wouldn’t make any difference and that people wouldn’t notice right away. I assumed that what I had always been doing was taking whatever present I was working in and feeding it through some sort of technique that I had developed through the course of my career, and what came out the other side was your patented William Gibson future vibe. And I’d been thinking for at least a decade that I probably didn’t need to do that, that the world itself, the present, uncut, would be at least as weird, and (in) using the same techniques probably nobody would notice."

In a wry take on the anti-corporate mood of the times, Pattern Recognition’s main protagonist Cayce Pollard is an empath who is hypersensitive to the symbols of corporate branding (certain designer labels send her into anaphylactic shock). She works as a sort of freelance brand medium, hired by corporations to determine whether or not a logo will work in the marketplace. Pollard is also part of a web cult obsessed with a sequence of film clips being uploaded to the net, haunting images that are the work of some ‘garage Kubrick’, a gifted auteur. No one knows whether the clips are in or out of an intended sequence, whether they constitute the ongoing rushes of some masterpiece in progress, or whether this is the subtlest marketing ploy of all time. Things get interesting when Pollard’s employers hire her to find the source of the footage.

That’s a thumbnail synopsis, but as any Gibson devotee will tell you, the real allure has as much to do with the holographic glow of his hi-tech/hard-boiled language. Plus, his characterisation is always impeccable. Pollard – a minimalist dresser who pulls the designer tags from her togs – is the latest in a long line of young female Gibsonian manga-type sensitives, which begs the question: does he write riot girls in order to counterbalance the nerdy boys’ own aspect of his genre?

"I think maybe it started with that," he admits. "I had some kind of private deficit list for science fiction when I started, and the boys’ own thing was a big part of that. Y’know, a lot of more conventional people in science fiction thought that I was crazy to do that because I would wind up with these female protagonists who kick more butt than the male characters, and it’s funny, in the time I’ve been writing that’s become like a mainstay of video games, people take that absolutely for granted. When I started doing it, people would say to me, ‘You don’t wanna do that, the boys won’t buy it.’ But it turns out the boys buy it big time. And so do the girls. You’ve got a whole generation that grew up with Lara Croft."

And Halo Jones. And Tank Girl. But if every novelist gets to play god with their characters, then Gibson, in his capacity as a diviner of notions of the near future, also gets to do it with culture. His antennae are almost infallible. To date he has visioned the internet, hacker espionage, virtual celebrities, surgical implant/body piercing fads and the rise of the corporate godhead. Mind you, he’s keen to play down the precognitive angle, perhaps wary of being treated like a PT Barnum prophet conjuring his next trick.

"I never bought into it so I never really worried about it," he says. "I just took it for granted that whatever I was doing wasn’t really predictive and wasn’t really prescient, but as far as I was concerned was worth something, so I just kept doing what I was doing, and whenever I had the opportunity in an interview I would say, ‘Well, y’know, I’m not really here to predict the future, maybe I’m here to let you get some kind of glimpse of the unimaginable present you already live in.’"

Fellow SF writer Bruce Sterling wrote something interesting in the preface to Gibson’s excellent short story collection Burning Chrome, claiming that if poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. "We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public," he noted. "We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation."

In other words, Gibson gets to read the entrails mainstream writers toss in the garbage.

"Well, these days I don’t know where the mainstream is," he says. "If I imagine someone setting out to write a naturalistic novel set in the industrialised west, say, in the year 2003, anyone who does that is going to be dealing with this bizarre and overwhelming overlapping of at least a dozen real life scenarios that look to me exactly like science fiction. If you were writing some sort of sweeping realistic novel of the early 21st century, you’d have to deal with the global AIDS epidemic, genetic manipulation of humans and just about everything else, global warming, globalisation – any one of those things would’ve been enough for a 1980s science fiction novel."

Forget the future for a moment; here’s a case history. William Gibson was born on the coast of South Carolina in 1948, his father employed by a construction company responsible for building some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities ("paranoiac legends of ‘security’ at Oak Ridge were part of our family culture," Gibson says in his biog).

When William was six, his father choked to death in a restaurant, and his anxiety-ridden depressive mother took him to live in a small town in Southwestern Virginia. Exiled to the boonies, the boy buried himself in sci-fi novels and magazines, and at the age of 15, in an Arizona boys’ school, discovered the Beats through Burroughs. Three years later his mother died, and Gibson left school without graduating, drifting through the late ’60s fallout. He moved to Canada to avoid the draft and stayed there ever since, marrying a Vancouver girl and earning an English degree.

Facing first time parenthood and turning 30, he found himself returning to the science fiction he loved as a child. At the same time, punk rock was happening in New York and London. Taking this as an omen of some sort, "the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society’s flank a decade earlier", he began to write.

"1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment," Gibson says now. "My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself. And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me, it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material.

"Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. Blondie did have a big rock career, but most of those people vanished or took too much heroin or wound up pumping gas, which is actually a more traditional fate for young artists at that time. There wasn’t that, ‘I’m striking an ironic pose . . . now I’m striking a doubly ironic pose!’ They didn’t have that, they hadn’t been to art school by and large."

The parallels between Gibson and the punks were more than stylistic tics. The old guard of sci-fi novelists – even magicians like Ray Bradbury – were surprisingly right-wing in their politics. Gibson’s sensibilities were more compatible with the writers featured in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 Dangerous Visions anthology. Reversing the current, the punks had a natural affinity with Burroughs, Lynch’s Eraserhead and JG Ballard (from whom Joy Division took the title ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’).

Gibson published his first story ‘Fragments Of A Hologram Rose’ in that new year zero of 1977. There followed over the next five years a volley of classic short fictions including ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, ‘New Rose Hotel’ and the electrifying ‘Burning Chrome’. By now he was making his name as the leader of a whole slew of radical new SF blades, including Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Neal Stephenson. His first novel, published in 1984, was the Marquee Moon or Horses of science fiction.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." The opening line of Neuromancer at once telegraphed the imminent revolution in sci-fi while containing the viral strains of his antecedents: the raw energy of the blank generation, Naked Lunch nihilism, the laconic tone of pre-war pulp. It hit the bookstands just after the release of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? This was an exciting convergence of ideas: Blade Runner’s drizzly cityscape could’ve been drawn from any of Gibson’s series of Sprawl stories.

"Blade Runner came out while I was still writing Neuromancer," he wrote in his online diaries a couple of months ago. "I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) Blade Runner, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film. But that didn’t happen. Mainly I think because Blade Runner seriously bombed in theatrical release, and films didn’t pop right back out on DVD in those days. The general audience didn’t seem to get it, relatively few people saw it, and it simply vanished, leaving nary a ripple. Where it went, though, was straight through the collective membrane… where it silently went nova, irradiating everything from clothing-design to serious architecture. What other movie has left actual office-buildings in its stylistic wake?"

As Gibson indicates, Scott’s film had a huge subterranean influence on everything from Japanese youth culture to Sigue Sigue Sputnik to urban planning. The reverberations are still being felt – in Pattern Recognition the writer describes a Roppongi Dori expressway in Tokyo as being "Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution". As much as anything in the book, this drives home the point of how fast we’re hurtling into our imagined futures: in order to freeze-frame the present, Gibson employs retro-futuristic visual shorthand.

If Ridley Scott and Gibson shared any theme, it’s that the future will be dirty. Neither exactly pioneered the idea – John Carpenter’s 1974 movie Dark Star was the first film to portray astronauts as mercenary scuzzbags, and co-screenwriter Dan O’ Bannon later recycled this idea for Alien five years later. Gibson, incidentally, wrote a very early draft of David Fincher’s controversial Aliens 3 ("There were something like 27 drafts before they made the film"). The key in writing a viable future, Gibson reckons, is in the details, the nitty-gritty.

"That was part of my conscious agenda when I started," he says. "It was one of the things that bugged me, I just thought that was a conventional inadequacy in science fiction, and actually for me that turned into the idea that specificity of imagination was what was lacking, because once you brought sufficient naturalistic specificity to the material, you got the dirt. ’Cos otherwise you’d have to specify exactly why there was no dirt! Y’know, little nano-bots eating the dirt so everything was always very clean? (That’d be) one way to cover it!

"So for me this imaginative hyper-specificity eventually came to cover the whole prescription for what was wrong with science fiction. You just had to make your imagination work overtime and not fill in whatever bits you conveniently could with generic props that you’d seen in some movie – you had to make up the actual texture of the thing."

Can he remember at what point the term ‘cyberpunk’ started getting bandied about?

"I don’t remember the year, but I know that the circumstances were that a journalist or critic who was writing about what was happening in science fiction, it probably would’ve been ’82 or ’83, used the term ‘cyberpunk’ to describe what I and maybe half a dozen other writers in the United States had been doing for a couple of years. And when I saw that I reacted with horror and dismay and said to these other guys, ‘Wow, we’re fucked now, it’s really over. Look, they’ve stuck one of these bogus labels on us; this is always the beginning of the end.’ And then I realised that these other writers, all of whom were probably at least ten years younger than I was, they were high-fiving one another and clapping one another on the back and they were just delighted to be called cyberpunks, they wanted to go out immediately and get the t-shirt."

Not just writers either. Gibson was getting namechecked by everyone from Billy Idol to U2.

"Yeah. Well, I was thinking of sort of mainstream science fiction guys going for it, but it bugged me because it made it sound as though I was working to that sub-genre of science fiction, and I didn’t even like the idea that I was working in a genre. I just wanted to be writing novels. Pattern Recognition is actually the first novel I’ve published, particularly in America, where I didn’t feel like it was critically marginalized to someextent, y’know, I didn’t feel like they were saying, ‘This is pretty good, but of course it’s just science fiction’. They couldn’t seem to wrap that around it."

Having found his metier with Neuromancer, Gibson wasted no time consolidating his position over the next 15 years, delivering Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties with little apparent strain. He also diversified, co-writing The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling, penning lyrics for Debbie Harry, taking a walk-on part in Wild Palms and scripting an episode of The X-Files. His collaboration with director Udo Kier on the film version of Johnny Mnemonic was, to say the least, unsatisfactory, botched by studio intervention and the unfortunate casting of Keanu Reeves in the title role. Abel Ferrara’s more recent adaptation of New Rose Hotel starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento was somewhat better, although it was hardly blockbuster material either.

So far, Gibson’s visions remain largely unrealised on the big screen – his ideas seem fated to infect the culture through more circuitous channels.

Be that as it may, one lasting legacy he has bequeathed science fiction is the admittance to the party of the kind of misfits who’d been missing from the hero sagas and space operas of the past 50 years. On the information superhighway, it doesn’t matter if you’re a tie-dyed troglodyte with three feet of hair living in a basement so long as you can operate a computer and pimp your skills, in Cayce Pollard’s case determining what aspects of fringe culture can be co-opted and marketed to the mainstream.

"A lot of the things that I did at the beginning were based on deliberately buggering the expectations of what I took the mainstream science fiction audience to be," Gibson explains. "So I probably had the idea that a lot of people who read science fiction would be really disturbed and irritated by the idea of these freelance freaks making lots of money, and in some ways running the world. I had this attitude like, ‘Well they’re not gonna like what I write anyway, so they could really not like this’. And the thing that surprised me more than anyone else, was that (it was) like there was some pre-existing back market that I never would’ve guessed was there. They’re must have been more people like me than I could’ve imagined, people who said, ‘Shit yes, that’s really good! Give us some more of that!’"

I remember the black hipster critic Greg Tate commenting on Neuromancer’s Rasta spaceship pilot blasting dub in deep space. This just wasn’t the stuff of sci-fi novels.
"Yeah, I met him a couple of times," Gibson says. "Y’know, when I was 15 or 16 my favourite science fiction writer was Samuel Delaney, as far as I knew the first black American SF writer, and I don’t even think I knew that. I also didn’t know that he was only about three years older than I am, so I was like a 15 year old reading some black 18 year old from Harlem. I always thought that had a lot to do with how great his stuff was, because he was coming from another place. You know, that was just so rare."

At the same time, it’s funny how many black musicians had an affinity with sci-fi imagery, from Sun Ra to Hendrix to George Clinton.

"Yeah, although Delaney’s like a college professor now, he’s as far from George Clinton as you can get! But science fiction, by the time I was 18 years old myself, seemed like such a white-bread kinda thing that I wasn’t even really interested. In the early and mid 60s it seemed like it was unable to describe the present I was living in, things had gotten so weird so fast. I just thought, ‘Aw, science fiction, that’s kids’ stuff’. I knew that I was leaving some good stuff behind like Delaney, Ballard and those guys, but I just kinda put it away with childish things, I didn’t think of it as a viable pop form for a long, long time.

"And then in the late ’70s when I was looking for something I could do, I rediscovered it. And rediscovering science fiction at that point for me would be like a musician discovering real country music that nobody had been playing for 20 years. I felt like the only guy in the world who knew about Hank Williams in a world of Nashville country. And for me it was like a roots thing, it was like, ‘I remember Hank Williams’."

Or as Ginsberg said, remember the future. If William Gibson could know anything about the times ahead, what would it be?

"Well, I think if I could have access to any one narrow set of information from the real future, I would ask what they think of us. I’d wanna see the future’s history of this period because I think that would tell me the whole story, probably way more than I would want to know. We’re sitting here and we’re somebody’s distant past. What are they gonna to think of us?"

The sound of beyond

What’s Willam Gibson listening to?

“I got the latest Nick Cave, Nocturama. I really like Nick Cave. I’ve been listening to Walter Becker’s solo album from about 12 years ago that for some reason I completely missed. Becker’s half of Steely Dan; that’s like finding a great lost Steely Dan album. The other new thing is the new episode of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings (American III – The Man Comes Around) with that incredible Nine Inch Nails cover (‘Hurt’). I’ve seen the uncut video for that, it’s on the Internet, Google the director’s name (Mark Romanek) and you get to his site where you can download the version before MTV messed with it. They cut a lot more gory Jesus action and considerable attitude.”