In the 1980s, a young writer, William Gibson, came up with a word to describe the hallucinatory world of visualized information he was creating for “Burning Chrome,” his latest short story. The word was “cyberspace.” He wrote it down with a red felt tip marker on a small pad of yellow paper and underlined it. And the language to describe the Information Age was born.
He didn’t just coin the term “cyberspace.” Gibson also pioneered the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. His first novel, 1984’s Neuromancer, introduced a strange new world of mega-corporations, sprawling neon-lit cities, and obsessive computer hackers with an ability to store RAM in their heads; concepts expanded in novels like Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, and Idoru.
Gibson now sits perpendicular to me at the Westin Harbour Castle, ready to talk about his 10th novel, Zero History. Gibson strikes me as someone who keeps it all in perspective. Relaxed, in his blue jacket, checkered shirt, and black slacks, his eyes hint at a mix of deep thought and playfulness.
In Zero History, a European plutocrat named Hubertus Bigend employs Milgrim, a reformed drug addict, and Hollis Henry, a broke former rock star, to sniff out an underground military fashion label called Gabriel Hounds. Bigend has appeared in Gibson’s previous two novels. In 2003’s Pattern Recognition, he sent Milgrim to track down the origin of a series of viral videos and, in 2007’s Spook Country, sent Hollis Henry to report on a new form of aesthetic expression called locative art — all in the name of cashing in on cool. I ask about this theme of trend-spotting in Zero History. Gibson instantly tunes into the laid-back philosophical speaking style he’s known for.
“It seems to me that a lot of what we do now, is that we have economies of information and trend-spotting is, in its various forms, a central part of any economy of information,” he explains. “One of the things you can reliably get rich on knowing is what the next popular thing is going to be, and you can make a good living telling people what the next popular thing’s going to be regardless of whether you’re right about it.”
This makes me decide to ask Gibson about the role of trend-spotter conferred on him by reviewers.
“You’ve been previously characterized as a prophet, though I know that’s a designation you’re uncomfortable with. As a science fiction novelist have you always been writing about the present? Have you just been showing people things they should be seeing anyway?” I ask.
“In a sense, yeah, absolutely. Um, I think, you know, anyone can use science fiction as a narrative strategy. Margaret Atwood has used science fiction as a narrative strategy a fair bit recently and she’s done it extremely well. But she’s not a science fiction writer.” He continues: “We build an imaginary future in front of the present when we write the kind of fiction I was writing when I started out. It can only ever be about the present, because it’s made out of, it’s faked out of the present. That’s why imaginary futures in science fiction are obsolete the moment you write them.”
This makes me think back to one his early short stories, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which the main character experiences revulsion at the science fiction aesthetic of the 1930s, something that Gibson seems to still share.
“They start to acquire a quaint patina of old-timey futurism as they move along the timeline and that can only increase with time. […] There’s some incredibly lucky shots where we get a part of an imaginary future that will last awhile and I’ve had a couple of those, but I’ve had lots more things that are just not what happened.”
I ask for an example. “Well in Neuromancer there are no cellphones. There’s a scene in Neuromancer that hinges dramatically on a line of payphones ringing in sequence and the thing that’s calling is an artificial intelligence. […] That’s incredibly archaic in 2010,” he says. This brings Gibson back to his earlier point about creating the future out of the present:
“I think an interesting thing to think about is if a science fiction writer had been able to foresee cellphones and in 1980 had written about it in a novel set in 2010, with cellphones the way we have cellphones now, I just don’t think anybody would have been able to read it.”
I make the point that people were also weirded out by the concept of cyberspace in the 80s and Gibson ponders this for a moment before answering.
“You know I was really lucky with that one. Though what I depicted is really not much like what has happened.”
“What about Second Life?” I inquire. “They have a community called Caledon where you can live a steampunk lifestyle and I’m sure there’s another where you can live a cyberpunk one too. Don’t you think people are creating consensual hallucinations like you described?”
From a technical perspective Gibson sees the Internet as a much more complex mechanism than his original conception of cyberspace.
“The real [technology] is infinitely more complex than any prose model of a [technology] can ever be. G.K. Chesterton said that the funny thing about the future is that when we arrive there it’s inevitably as small and unremarkable as the past.”
Gibson’s quietly profound and humble musings hit overdrive when I start the next set of questions. In one passage in Zero History, Milgrim reflects on the nature of addiction and the “gradual dire alchemy” that causes it to start making crucial life decisions for you. I ask Gibson whether he thinks technology could be considered addictive.
“I don’t think I would say that myself because to imply that technology is addictive is to imply that technology is a pathological entity. […] Technologies are us. We were the only species, that we know of, that evolved in such a way that it began to create prosthetic forms of human memory that could survive the death of the person who encrypted the information.” Gibson takes a more biological view of technology, that we have always been augmenting our reality in order to make the environment suit our needs.
“I don’t see any point where […] we doomed ourselves to some sort of endless addictive pathology of technology. I think the Ipad descends directly from the Acheulean hand axe, where if we hadn’t gotten that hand axe we would still be sitting in the trees eating bananas,” he explains. “Technology seems, to me, to be in our nature.”
But is it possible to have any consistency with all of this change? I ask Gibson if the title Zero History is something that could apply to the characters in his novels since we cannot get a grasp of their interior history.
“I sometimes doubt that we have selves. I think our idea of self is very much a cultural artifact,” he says calmly. He qualifies his statement with a general observation of our society: “We live in this vast LED soup of messages offering to help us define ourselves.” I think of the advertisement on Facebook that’s trying to sell me cyberpunk-themed t-shirts and can’t help admitting that he’s right.
“Why don’t we ever get inside the heads of Milgrim and Hollis, but instead get these impressionistic slices of the world around them?”
“The tool I am using to depict those characters is what novelists usually call closed third person. […] When you write fiction and you have characters, you have to model the characters to how you think real people operate. I don’t trust my understanding of human beings sufficiently enough to go further than I go because then I am actually making it up. The people in Zero History pretty much behave the way I think human beings actually behave for the reasons I think human beings actually behave.”
I recount the famous story of his writing Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. Gibson explains that it was more of an “accident of history.”
“I didn’t write Neuromancer on a typewriter in order to be technologically austere, because in 1980, 1981 when I wrote it, there were virtually no personal computers anywhere. They were very, very thin on the ground.”
He explains the advantages of not being deeply involved with the technology itself.
“I think it’s made me able to see the forest for the trees. And I’ve always been much more interested and excited to see what people do with emergent technologies than I would doing it myself,” he says. “Often what people choose to do, no one anticipated. The people who invented cellular pagers never thought it would change the face of urban crime, but it did.”
So what now? What future projects lie on the horizon? Gibson thinks for a moment and says that he hopes to write another book, though he’s satisfied he’s been able to ring out all the ideas he can with his latest trilogy.
“For me, it’s actually a really good feeling. It’s great. The drafty dirigible-hanger in which I construct these things is totally empty. […] It’s all potential. I can build anything in there. I just have to see what comes about.”
