Cobra, She Said
An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson
by Tom Maddox
This story originally appeared in Fantasy Review, April, 1986.
In terms of the esteem of his peers and fans, William Gibson was the most successful science fiction writer of 1985. His first novel, Neuromancer, Published in 1984, won the Philip K. Dick, Nebula, and Hugo Awards, as well as the Ditmar, the top award given in Australia. Neuromancer tapped the source, hit a nerve. To many of those who voted for it or just read and admired it, the book seemed to manifest a new set of possibilities for sf. The questions naturally arise, what are the characteristics of Gibson's work and what is its novelty by the standards of sf? The primary difference, especially in terms of reader response, is that - untypically in sf - the ideas are not the hero. Rather, line for line his narratives contain a precise and detailed inventory of perception. Also, they are built around the narrative conventions of the thriller and executed with an intensity not seen in the genre since Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man. Finally, Gibson's fiction is an art of collage, assembled fragment - the work of a junkman and vandal: Post-apocalypse biker rooting through Bloomingdales's for a piece of fine lace to hang from his sleeve.
From Tunnel Vision: Cyberspace
Gibson claims not to invent anything. He says he just looks around. If that's the case, it's weird in here. Altered stated of being, rewritten flesh - in sum, technology redoing fundamental ways of human life. Perhaps Gibson is right: perhaps he's extrapolating, not inventing. The concentrated tunnel vision of the videogames player mutates in to cyberspace, the audio-visual intensity of color television and Walkman earphones into simstim, the password and data encryption programs of telecommunications into ICE, the Atlantic corridor into the Sprawl. Just extrapolating - as surpassing the speed of sounds just required speeding things up a bit.
In fact, the essence of Gibson's technique is not dependent upon any sf device. He can work his effects with objects we can obtain here and now. Here, chosen more-or-less at random, is an example:
She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight identical tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coilspring slid out and locked. "Cobra," she said. (Neuromancer, 15)
Though there's nothing to mark this passage as sf, the presence of Samuel Delany comes through strongly in the insistently precise visual images. One could slide this paragraph into Dhalgren without creating a ripple.
Gibson constantly pushes forward. There are indeed other technologies to explore. For instance, there is cyberspace:
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now-
A gray disk the color of Chiba sky....
Now-
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding-
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of the Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release staining his face. (Neuromancer, 52)
There are also styles - of clothing, architecture, cosmetic surgery, drugs, sec - on and on, a veritable catalog of apparently disconnected items which seem part of an unnamed, probably unknown gestalt whose structure shifts with every moment.
Semiotic Supermarket
What is this structure? What is the nature of its elements? Gibson himself provides the clue. In an interview given to the British sf magazine Interzone, he says, "I see myself as a kind of literary collage-artist, and sf as a marketing framework that allows me to gleefully ransack the whole fat supermarket of 20th century cultural symbols." The "fat supermarket" is of course itself a powerful cultural symbol - one can see Gibson as the winner in a mad gameshow competition which allows him the wheel his basket through the store and take anything he wants.
More precisely and comprehensively, he is talking about semiotics - signs, symbols, signifiers. As Umberto Eco says, in A Theory of Semiotics, everything that can be used to lie. As the twentieth century has gone on, and the means for producing and distributing signs have proliferated wildly, our environment becomes evermore densely layered with them. From the viewpoint of semiotics, human culture is seen as a vast assemblage of signs, shifting in meaning from moment to moment, place to place; both structuring and structured by human understanding and emotion. In some ways, the study of culture has become the study of signs.
"The Gernsback Continuum" is particularly interesting in this connection. Its protagonist is possessed - in the demonic sense - by 1930s technophiliac visions of the future. As a consequence, he begins to hallucinate characteristic creations of this culture, such as a giant, aerodynamically-impossible flying wing. Appalled, he consults Merv Kihn, "free-lance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind" (Universe 11, 85). Kihn explains: "I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost. All theses contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own...." (86)
This story is interesting - and very funny - in it's own right, but for the moment let me simply make this point: from very early on, Gibson's work is built around a peculiar and problematic sensitivity to semiotic fragments.
Data as Wealth & Power
In fact, Gibson's fiction details a future with semiotics as its hot, active core. In "Burning Chrome" (Omni, July, 1982), wealth and power are not represented by the data in the matrix; the data are wealth and power. If the information is wiped from the matrix, power disappears with it.
We'd given the bulk of Chrome's Zurich account to a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten percent for ourselves and shot it through the Long Hum setup in Macao. The took sixty percent of that for themselves and kicked what was left back to us through the most convoluted sector of the Hong Kong exchange. It took an hour before our money started to reach the two accounts we'd opened in Zurich. ("BC," 106)
Here is a world where information is the real.
Granted the semiotic supermarket as the source of his loot, Gibson is then confronted with the question, in what form should these elements be presented? His answer to this question emerged with "Johnny Mnemonic" - which stands to the Gibson cosmos as the Big Bang does to our own. The form Gibson chose is, of course, the hard-boiled thriller.
Though the elements of hard-boiled fiction vary, certain constants remain. The primary one is affect: the writing must be intense, the action violent, the atmosphere erotically charged. Hard-boiled fiction can be crude and direct, as in early Dashiell Hammett; ornate and meditative, as in the Philip Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler; extravagant and hallucinatory, as in William Burroughs. If the 20th century has a distict narrative voice, this is it.
The Great Game Narrative
The version of hard-bioled that Gibson employs has proven one of the most durable: the cosmopolitan, great form in Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, it became widely know in the works of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, and has served authors as various as John Le Carre and Robert Stone. In it, the hard-boiled atmosphere is made more complex by the presence of what we might call vast powers. The British Secret Service has provided a flexible and eloquent framework for many writers - its antagonisms span decades and range from Nazis to Russians to traitors within. But always, whoever is doing the writing and in whatever context, the narratives a re figured by what a character in Count Zero, Gibson's second novel, calls and "articulate structure," an "unnatural field" (CZ, 84). It is created by vast power or vast wealth - governments, their secret services and hidden armies, industrial combines licit and illicit, families and individuals whose wealth elevates them to these precincts. As Thomas Pynchon showed in V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, the intuited presence of such forces is the characteristic 20th century paranoia. Thus, as in Elizabethan drama, we have a sense of the familiar and profound - of a whole literary style, yes, but more: of a metaphysics of 20th century life.
Behind all I have said about Gibson thus far remains a fundamental fact about his work that is extremely difficult to talk abut analytically, and yet is central to it. Reading Gibson is an intensely involving, sometimes exhausting experience. The constant flow of sensual detail embedded in an unfamiliar, often grotesque technology makes for a quintessential sf experience, but for some people the experience is either too intense of too unrelenting. For instance, I know of several people whose response to Neuromancer went something like, "It's really well done, but I got tired of it towards the end." Then usually comes an addendum to the effect, "I couldn't get involved with the characters."
In old-fashioned terms, this is a sensible response. It is a call for "rounder" characters, more believable plot lines, and so on. However, I think the response is also quite mistaken. For a cautionary instance, one can look at Kim Stanley Robinson's The Wild Shore, which succeeds in precisely these old-fashioned ways, and also succeeds in seeming irrelevant, unexciting - sf by a serious, well-intentioned 50s writer, someone on the order of Lous Auchincloss.
In this light, I think that critics or reviewers who are waiting for Gibson to make some rfadical move outside this narrative framework are simply kidding themselves. For him to do so would be no more or less unexpected than for Robert Stone or John Le Carre. And no more or less ill-advised. If Gibson is going to go anywhere, he cannot relinquish the values of the hard-boiled thriller.
My point is this: much of contemporary art is strenuous, but we have learned to meet its demands. So my advice to the reader of Neuromancer is simply, read it again. Its supposed flaws - plot fatigue, weak character development - are in fact manifestations of its strength and modernity.
Post-modernist Dada
Semiotic fragments, then, caught in the thriller's web - here we have essential Gibson. One other element remains to be discussed: Gibson's characterization of himself as a "collage artist." A recent story, "Winter Market," features a character who puts together constructions out of junk of all sorts. The story's narrator says he is "a master .. garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off good our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk." However, as the narrator also recognizes, our century poses a difficult question: "Where does the gomi stop and the world begin?" The answer the narrator seems to give is that there is no separation, not if one understands gomi correctly. There is the gomi which the Japanese have piled in Tokyo Bay and named "Dream Island," and there is the gomi which is the entire collection of human symbols, conscious and unconscious - semiotics in the entirety. Here is Gibson as post-modernist: cultural vandal, junkman, boxmaker.
He makes even more explicit his ancestry in the visual arts, in references to Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. In Neuromancer, Molly passes through the Tessier-Ashpool family's art gallery and without comment or recognition sees "a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass" (Neuromancer, 207) with an inscription in French which translates, "The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even." This is of course the legend on Marcel Duchamp's "Large Glass," one of the first pieces of assemblage art and perhaps still the most influential. Gibson has appropriated yet another semiotic element from the cultural store - through implication he has invoked Dada and Surrealism and has claimed allegiance to that form of the avant-garde which contiues to day in painting, sculpture, dance, music, and performance art combining any nunber of these elements. Neuromancer's "Big Scientists" are a tribute to Laurie Anderson, the New York City musician and performance artist who works in the musical tradition of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's more recent Einstein on the Beach.
In his most recent novel, Count Zero, this appropriation of 20th century visual arts becomes more obtrusive. The novel features a character new in Gibson's fiction, Marly, a woman who has no "street" expertise - her virtues are artistic, intuitional, meditative. (She is a transformation of Molly Millions - heroine of "Johnny Mnemonic" and Neuromancer, as her name Marly is a transformation of Molly.) And in fact she remains isolated within the narrative. Though her story connects with all the major plot lines, and gives a thematic focus to CZ, she pursues her own course, comes to her own truths. Along the way she is confronted with an art object, a box. Her assigned quest is to find its creator; her more personal task seems to be to understand it:
Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wings of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that mush have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing's face was seared and blackened. (CZ, 16-17)
Let us examine these seven objects. First there are the bones: one from a wing, the other from a human wrist, inset with what we are told on the previous page is a "biomonitor." These two objects are particularly marked by the pathos of what the boxmaker will call "'time and distance'" (CZ, 257) - these bones do not live. Primarily, however, a transition is being marked here, one as profound as the birth of modern man in the neolithic technology; carbon and silicon, man and machine, are joining. The, in the fragment of lace, "time and distance" confront fetishism and style - this remnant calls forth the vanished wearer of the lace, who sought to provoke desire, and the observer for whom the lace was worn, whose desire was sought. Three circuit-boards with gold-traced mazes: three, a magical number of course, simply enough explained here because CZ has a three-tiered structure: three main characters whose points of view alternate. The mazes are those into which the three stumble; the box's mazes are archaic, thus can be seen, unlike the microchips's, whose circuitry is invisible to the naked eye. And the gold is of course the wealth, the "unnatural field," which creates the mazes: of the zaibatsus - Hosaka, Maas - and of the anachronisms, the Tessier-Ashpool family of Neuromancer, and Virek, the malign Howard Hughes figure of Count Zero.
This leaves only one object, the "smooth white sphere of baked clay." It is perhaps picked from the "matrix, the infinite nonspace and consensual hallucination of cyberspace," where the data "abstracted from the backs of every computer in the human system" (Neuromancer, 51) stand graphically represented, in the forms of pyramid and cube and sphere. Or perhaps it is plucked from one of Joseph Cornell's boxes - many contain balls or spheres. In either case it is simple, inscrutable.
In sum, the box's objects signify inexcapably pathetic endings - stripped bone, damaged lace - and the golden maze of information technology into which we blunder. Marly poses the question, "How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged at the soul like a fish hook...? It could be done, she knew; it had been done many years ago by a man named Cornell who'd also made boxes" (CZ, 31). She also thinks, "The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience" (CZ,17). There can be little doubt that this effect upon us is what Gibson aspires to.
Coda
Finally, there is a minor but persistent theme in Gibson's work which can serve as a coda. It is this: technology produces results different from and more radical than the intent of its creators. In "new Rose Hotel" (Omni, July, 1984), the narrator says, "Nothing here seems to serve its original purpose" (93). In "Winter Market" the gomi no sensei - master of junk - says, "Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose.... But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before." One of Gibson's primary obligations is to portray these "new areas," to show the capable human monkey at its elaborate, ever changing play; in the process he has perhaps used sf in new ways.
As I indicated at the beginning of this paper, he has been well-rewarded so far. However, sf's honeymoon with Gibson will end, and other writers with other concerns be spotlighted. It is the way of things in our culture. To quote Neuromancer, "Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly" (58). But Gibson has also received Molly Millions' warning: "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you" (59). And he won't. Like the gomi master he will continue to pick through our culture's semiotic junk, looking for "things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as a muse."