94 lines
6.0 KiB
Plaintext
94 lines
6.0 KiB
Plaintext
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This is a transcript of a short interview with William Gibson that
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appeared in the April-May issue of Creem magazine.
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Transcribed by Neoplasm on 3/22/91
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Some people retreat to the past in order to escape present-day
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anxieties, but William Gibson's motives are less therapeutic. Having pushed
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science fiction into the postmodern void with Neuromancer and Mona Lisa
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Overdrive, Canada's premier cyberpunk is now making the 19th century into a
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brave new world.
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In The Difference Engine, he and co-author Bruce Sterling have their
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way with history, turning Victorian England into a technocratic society
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where steam-driven computers monitor a future-shocked populace. Though set
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in the past, the novel is, like all of Gibson's work, very much a product
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of our time. Intrigued by technology's effects on modern music, he and
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Sterling have even laced their epic adventure with the literary equivalent
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of digital sampling.
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"It's like William Burroughs' prophecy come true: everything is being
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hacked up and recycled and having the serial numbers filed off," says
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Gibson. "There's a great deal of really rude literary sampling in The
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Difference Engine. When you go into a room, usually it's not a room that we
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invented-it's a room that we've sampled out of some obscure text. It's
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really a very baroque book on that level, and some enterprising young
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person will get a masters thesis out of that one day, I'm sure."
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The duo's "alternate world" novel evolved from a mutual interest in
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Charles Babbage, the Victorian inventor whose mechanical computing engine
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never got off the ground. Gibson and Sterling (an Austin-based author and
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editor of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology) conducted their
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long-distance collaboration via Federal Express and phone calls.
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"Initially, we tried to do it with modems, connecting our pathetic little
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Apple computers via the public telephone lines," admits Gibson. "but that
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proved to be beyond our technical capacities."
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Gibson claims to have been even less technically inclined when his 1984
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novel Neuromancer first tapped into the Information Age's collective
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unconscious. "I didn't know very much about computers, and still don't
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really," he says. "What interests me is the sort of visceral relationship
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that some people seem to have with that kind of technology."
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With its multi-cultural mix of streetwise anti-heroes jacking in and
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out of the computer matrix, Neuromancer defined the aesthetic that came to
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be known as cyberpunk. But while Gibson's cyberspace became science
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fiction's newest final frontier, the author himself remains somewhat
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ambivalent about both technology and his chosen genre. "Even as a teenager
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reading science fiction, I think I was distinctly distrustful of that
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techno-euphoric mythology of the engineerin a lot of mainstream American
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science fiction," he says. "I can remember having these inchoate, almost
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political doubts about Robert Heinlein when I was maybe 15 or 16 years
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old."
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Gibson was also skeptical about the insular world view of much science
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fiction. "I didn't like the idea that America was the future. I didn't like
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the idea that America was middle-class white people. And so, with a kind of
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adolescent sullenness-even though I was in my 30s when I started doing
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this-I just put in all this shit that I thought would reall piss them off."
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No such luck. Neuromancer became the first novel to take SF's triple
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crown (the Hugo, Nebula and Phillip K. Dick Awards), and subsequent novels
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have only broadened his fame.
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In retrospect, Gibson seemed predestined to his calling. The child of a
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contractor whose construction projects included the toilets for the Oak
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Ridge atomic site, he began traveling through time and space at an early
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age. His family moved constantly-from rural Tennesee to suburban North
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Carolina ("which was like moving to Jetsonville") to the small Virginia
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town where his parents grew up ("kind of a Bradburian, or possibly more
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Faulknerian, time track"). The cumulative effect, he says, was like "being
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shuttled around through these different levels of time-you know, the future
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is never very evenly distributed."
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Gibson relocated to Vancouver in 1972 and eventually began writing with
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relatively minimal expectations. "If I had any idea of how my career was
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gonna go, I thought I would be this poor guy working in a bookstore
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somewhere who had once published a book that some people in England or
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France had thought was sort of cool. I really thought that was the best I
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could hope for."
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Now Gibson's works have been translated into everything from graphic
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novels to computer games, with various film adaptations in the offing.
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"Recommodification isn't really painful; at least, I don't find it
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painful," he says. "I don't really feel much stake in trying to control the
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outcome. I'm kind of curious to see what they'll do with it."
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And having himself been influenced by early Lou Reed and David Bowie,
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Gibson is equally amused when his concepts are expropriated by pop bands.
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"Well, there's at least two Mona Lisa Overdrives, one of them being some
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kind of jazz fusion group in Manhattan," he reports. "And someone sent me a
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double CD set last year from a Tokyo hip-hop band called Major Force that
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had heavy Gibson sampling in the English translation of their lyrics."
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Other Gibson-inspired bands include Voivod, Panther Moderns and -legend has
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it- Sonic Youth. "Well, this is sort of apocryphal," laughs Gibson, "but
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somebody said that Sonic Youth said,'Oh, we liked those books at first. But
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then we found out how old he was.'"
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Does Gibson, now 42, ever regret not getting an early start? "No,
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actually I'm really glad I didn't," says the author, who will go back to
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the near future in his next novel, Virtual Light. "When I met Burroughs,
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that was something that we talked about, because he didn't really start
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writing until his 30s either. And he said something to the effect that it
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makes a lot of difference when you have something to actually write
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about."
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