from College Crier:

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T. Virgil Parker: Your early Sci-Fi commented obliquely on contemporary issues, but it gave you a very unique set of strategies that you’re using to explicate the present.

William Gibson: Well, I don’t actually think they’re unique because I acquired them through the course of working in the genre of science-fiction, but I also acquired a conviction that what they’re actually good for, maybe the only thing that they’re really good for, is trying to get a handle on our sort of increasingly confused and confusing present.

TVP: Do you think that from your perspective, reality caught up to science fiction in certain ways? Just by creating so surreal a contemporary landscape that it parallels Sci-Fi?

WG: Well, in a sense, although I think when I started, one of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940’s is the 1940’s. George Orwell’s 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can’t be about the future. It’s about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can’t envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.

I also started with the assumption that all fiction is speculative. That all fiction is an attempt to make a model of reality and any model of reality is necessarily speculative because it’s generated by an individual writer. It can’t be absolute. Fiction is never reality. I know I had those ideas to handle when I started writing because I was an English major and I was studying things like Comparative Literary Criticism. I came into it with a kind of mild, post-modern spin, and I think I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing than someone who would have started writing science fiction forty years before. I think that as I’ve gone along, somehow that’s all geared up with the result that I now find myself writing speculative fiction about last February, rather than the middle of the coming century.

There’s a character in my previous novel, Pattern Recognition , who argues that we can’t culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don’t have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, “oh, the future, it’s over there and it looks like this.”

TVP: The present is contingent upon a kind of objectivity that no longer exists.

WG: Yeah, exactly.

TVP: But having said that, isn’t it a bit uncanny that all of the dystopian texts of science-fiction appear to be aiming at the present that we’re experiencing right now?

WG: Well, I would find that spookier if I had been believing all along that those sort of dystopian themes in science fiction were about some sort of vision of the future. I think they were actually like being perceived in the past when that stuff was being written. 1984 is a powerful book precisely because Orwell didn’t have to make a lot of shit up. He had Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as models for what he was doing. He only had to dress it up a little bit, sort of pile it up in a certain way to say, “this is the future.” But the reason it’s powerful is that it resonates of history. It doesn’t resonate back from the future, it resonates out of modern history. And the power with which it resonates is directly contingent on the sort of point-for-point mimesis, like sort of point-for-point realism, in terms of what we know happened.

TVP: With that in mind, is it harder for you to write about the present, as the present?

WG: Yeah, it actually is. There are ways in which I find it a lot more demanding. It makes it harder to make shit up. If I get to something like what in Hollywood they call a “story point,” something that’s not working, like a plot point that’s not working for me. When I was writing a novel like Count Zero I would just invent some other level of imaginary technology or invent some part of the back story of my future history that would account for me having a way to scoot past that bit of illogic in the story. I hope I didn’t do that too much when I was doing that, but it’s just something you can do when you’re writing about an imaginary future. When you’re writing about a present, whether it’s imaginary or not, and there’s some major imaginary elements in Spook Country , the rules are different. It isn’t the same. I have to come up with something that allows me to suspend my disbelief in my fantastic narrative and which I hope will allow the reader to suspend their disbelief. So actually, it is more work. It requires a different sort of examination of my own sense of the world outside myself.

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TVP: The freaky thing about what you’re doing now, to me, is that you’re using metaphors that help to reveal things that are going on now. We kind of live in an era where people should be hysterical, but aren’t.

WG: Yeah.

TVP: And I think it’s because they’re not imagining what is going on. I think they’re just getting bits of data.

WG: Yeah, I know what you mean, I think that we have a way of living in the past, I think that our sense of reality, at any given time, particularly in the modern era, lags behind our sense of what’s really going on. I think that we need that in order to function, in order to be comfortable in our own skin. I doubt that need even existed before, although it may well have been. The fourteenth century was not an easy time, either. Humanity has gone through some very strange, strange periods and I think that we’re going through a very strange one now. A decade ago I was saying that we live sort of back from the moment, we live well back from the windshield of the present moment as it’s encountering the wind of the future. I said then that occasionally you would turn on the television and have what my friend Bruce Sterling called a “CNN moment,” and in that moment we would be really in the present moment. And it would be like the Frederick Jamison experience, you know? Simultaneously we would be like over the moon about it and scared shitless and experiencing extreme vertigo, but then we would snap back into that position that we always have. After 9/11 I’m not sure if we have that anymore. For me, 9/11 sort of blew that particular metaphor of mind out of the water. But that may be because it literally changed something. I don’t know now what would constitute a “CNN moment.” I seems like a dated term.

TVP: That’s because every moment is a CNN moment?.

WG: Now, what constitutes a “YouTube moment.” You know, something has changed.

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TVP: I think you’ve used metaphysics at times in the same way that you use cyberspace as a medium to explore narrative.

WG: At some point it become apparent to me that if I became too carried away with ideas of technological novelty, all I needed to do was look at the history of metaphysics to sort of get that back into perspective. I think that’s sort of another semi-conscious technique of mine. Like if I get too wrapped up in virtual reality I sort of go to, like, “what would the 14 th century have made of this?” Would it have wowed them the way it wows us? And often the answer is no. They had their own stuff going on.

TVP: You don’t see people really embrace as much as they do adapt .

WG: Yeah, most people just adapt.

TVP: Celebrity is essential to a lot your novels. Where do you think that comes from?

WG: It comes from a sense of that being so much of what we do , or so much what we did . I think we’ve gone into another stage of that in the last ten or fifteen years. Back in the early 80’s when I started writing, one of the things I noticed was that we were making increasingly less of the tennis shoes and automobiles. But what we were really doing was outsourcing the manufacturing of that stuff. What we really were doing was making celebrities. And that was like “the biz,” it was what this culture could do.

TVP: In a way that’s happening on a whole different level now. I mean almost self-generated.

WG: Yeah, well, I’m not sure where it is now. I sort of suggested, in Virtual Light , there’s that show “Cops in Trouble,” which was, when Virtual Light was published, quite funny. It wouldn’t be the same for like fifteen-year-olds reading that, they would just go “okay.” It’s like kind of beyond, the irony has evaporated. It doesn’t have the kick it had when the book was published because we’ve gone so much further than that. I mean the evil celebrity-destroying show Slitscan in Virtual Light just seems like, you know, it’s all here now.

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