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Original appearance: Albedo 1 issue 12, 1996
William Gibson is acknowledged as the godfather, if not the father, of cyberpunk.
He was in Dublin to promote his latest novel, Idoru, and I was fortunate
enough to be granted an interview. As the new novel has been dealt with
exhaustively in the media since its launch, I have concentrated on his career
as a whole rather than the mechanics of the new book.
Were you a science fiction junkie as
a kid?
When I was fourteen my highest ambition
was to be a science fiction writer. By the time I was sixteen I had forgotten
about it. Puberty had struck. Girls were more interesting and then the Sixties
happened. I remember thinking around about sixty-eight that what was happening
socially in the US was so far beyond anything that I'd ever experienced
in science fiction. It seemed illustrative of how rinky-dink science fiction
was.
You were writing about the internet ten, fifteen years ago when it was far
future whereas today it's yesterday.
Yes. I think it's important to
point out that the cyberspace in Neuromancer doesn't really prefigure what
the internet has become today. People in Neuromancer aren't using the internet
in as myriad very personal ways people use it today. I know two women in
the US who are in recent, very happy relationships, both of which will probably
lead to marriage, and both of those relationships began on the internet.
They met their boyfriends on the net. That sort of thing isn't happening
in Neuromancer. And also the internet was evolving when I wrote Neuromancer
but I didn't know it. I didn't know about the precursors. There's a really
interesting new book I've just seen in the States called Where Wizards Stay
Up Late, which is a social history of how the internet came to be and it's
really fascinating.
I watched a show on TV where your new
book, Idoru, was reviewed and one of the criticisms was that bathrooms you
had put in the future already exist in Japan. A very strange point to pursue.
I think they're missing the point.
That is a very very conscious part of my technique right now. I don't think
that science fiction's best purpose at the end of the 20th century is charting
the future. I think that science fiction serves us best now as a way to
explore an increasingly unthinkable present. That's really what I'm trying
to do. So while it's a conceit of science fiction that it's about the future,
what I do more consciously in these recent books is to import exotic artefacts
from the present into my imaginary future. Those Japanese toilets satisfy
me more than anything I could make up and a lot of my readers will probably
assume that I did make them up. They won't know that toilets like that already
exist in Japan.
Do your literary aspirations stay within the field of science fiction or
would you like to expand into what they call mainstream?
Well I think I have to an extent.
I've been very fortunate because I've had it both ways. I've had the reliability
of the genre audience - the genre aspect of publishing means that everything
I've ever written is in print and probably will stay in print for quite
a while. I don't think I necessarily would have had that if I hadn't started
out as a science fiction writer. And science fiction is my native literary
culture and it is where I'm coming from and I value it's toolkit highly.
But I don't think it's what I am today exactly. I've always had a sizeable
audience outside science fiction. The thing that I hear most frequently
at signings in the US when I'm talking to the people is, 'You know,
I never read science fiction but I really like your stuff.'
Would you drop the furniture of science fiction and write a straight contemporary
novel?
Given the way the world is going,
in another couple of years I should be able to write an absolutely naturalistic
novel which has the look and feel of my science fiction. I may be working
unconsciously towards that aim in this series of books that began with Virtual
Light because in a way they're happening next Wednesday. It's almost like
an alternate universe. I can't see how our world could get there in that
short a space of time but it doesn't bother me. The extrapolation thing
in the traditional sense isn't really what I'm doing.
You tend to work in a very near future rather than that vast unimaginable
future that was Fifties space opera.
That's why I haven't been able
to do that stuff, because to me it is unimaginable. I was always very fond
of that remark of Ballard's in the sixties when he said 'Earth is the alien
planet.' I took that very much to heart. By the same token this present
we live in is the future. I'm forty-eight years old and I sometimes feel
I'm living in a Robert Sheckley type of future. Something that Sheckley
would have dreamed up on a bad night.
Are you a technophile or is the future happening in spite of you?
I feel that I have a professional
obligation to be as deeply and systematically ambivalent about any new technologies
as I can be and I think technologies are morally neutral until we use them
for something. Personally I'm less inclined to buy new gadgets than many
people I know. Not because I'm afraid of them but because it doesn't excite
me terribly. A friend of mine was showing me her brand new Motorola cellular
phone. This is a cellular phone that when it's folded up could easily fit
into a packet of twenty cigarettes. It has more features than any phone
on the market, including a vibrator so that you can carry it in your pants'
pocket and not annoy people with a ring. And she has it set up on a roam
mode so that she can take it with her anywhere in North America. They're
pretty pricey too. But she expected that having played with hers I would
immediately want to go out and buy my own. I didn't.
I also am at the bottom of the food chain in our house as far as computers
are concerned. My son is at the top. When his machine gets upgraded his
sister inherits his, my wife inherits our daughter's machine and I inherit
my wife's.
What have you currently inherited?
The desk machine, which I hardly use any more, is an SE 30, which is sort
of the high end of the high grade toaster Mac's - the old fashioned Mac
with the little monochrome screen. But what I wrote Idoru on is a Mac Powerbook,
a 170 which is pretty slow, obsolete, but I'm not tied to the desk. The
eyestrain factor with a liquid crystal screen is far superior. There's no
flicker or refresh rate going on.
What sparked your imagination when you were young?
I started with Heinlein juveniles and that led me to Heinlein's adult, so
called, output. It's easy to forget but there really wasn't that much science
fiction around. So I sort of read the classic canon. You know, I had a Bradbury
period. But early on I was attracted to the more left wing side of American
science fiction. So I was a big Theodore Sturgeon fan at one point. I loved
Fritz Lieber. Then I found a huge stash of old Galaxy magazines in a second
hand shop so I got to read Bester and Sheckley.
How come all science fiction fans inhabit second hand book shops?
I think it's the nature of the science fiction ecology.
I believe science fiction books and comics were used as ballast on transatlantic
ships which placed a lot of science fiction in the second hand shops on
this side of the world.
Yeah. I read in British fan histories that that was how it came about. Just
as I was outgrowing science fiction, or so I thought, I discovered the British
new wave which really intrigued me. I couldn't quite get a handle on it.
Judith Merril had a very influential annual year's best anthology published
in paperback. I remember reading Ballard and Moorcock - she was very big
on that stuff, she actually went over and lived there for a while, she was
one of the Americans who was attracted to that scene. So that introduced
me to them.
Round about that time probably the most significant thing that happened
in terms of having an impact on my work is when I was fifteen or sixteen
I discovered William Burroughs and it blew me away. I remember sitting and
reading the beatnik anthology which had the City of Interzone section from
Naked Lunch and I remember reading this thing and being blown away by it.
I knew at some level this guy was using some of the tools that I understood
from science fiction but he was using them in a way that I could not comprehend
at all. So that was a very formative experience. So that as I went on into
my later teens the fiction that I kept up on was sort of informed by my
earlier taste, but different. I was reading Burroughs, I kept track of Ballard,
I kept track of Samuel Delaney, who I suspect I also discovered through
Judith Merril.
So today, given the whopping content of any genre science fiction shop,
it makes me laugh to remember when I was fifteen I could buy every paperback
science fiction novel published in the US every month. That was because
there would be a maximum of three titles, if that. The field was very small
and I kind of suspect that because it was very small the quality was remarkably
high. There really wasn't much careerism because there weren't any careers
to be had. Everyone except Heinlein was living on dog food.
When I started thinking about trying to write some science fiction of my
own in the late seventies and the early eighties one of the things that
initially put me off when I started going around to conventions I'd meet
wannabe entry level science fiction writers it struck me that a lot of them
just sort of looked at it as, 'Should I study to be a dental technician
or might I make a fairly decent living writing science fiction.' I think
what I expected from my own sense of science fiction when I was a kid was
that there would be passion and a sense of avocation. But where I did find
that and found it in spades was when I had the good luck to meet Bruce Sterling
who had, and has today, an absolutely burning passion for science fiction
and this terrific sense of avocation. He'd do it if they never gave him
another dollar. He'd do it anyway. He doesn't care whether the books sell
or not. They sell fairly well but he genuinely doesn't care. He has a sense
of a kind of a higher purpose. That was great, I got some very good energy
out of that.
Is that what attracted you to collaborating?
Collaboration is a tradition in science
fiction. There have been great collaborations over the years. Those initial
short story collaborations were like jam sessions. It was like playing improvisational
jazz. I collaborated with Sterling, with John Shirley, with Michael Swanwick.
Never more than once, though, at least in the short stories.
When you say improvisational jazz, how
did the collaboration work?
Each one is different. The story I did
with Shirley, he had sent me a draft of a story asking for a critique. I
started writing the critique and realised that it would actually be faster
and more fun if I rewrote the story. So I very quickly rewrote it, cutting
great hunks of it and producing a much shorter manuscript. I mailed it back
to him with a note saying, Don't be offended. I'm not proposing that you
do anything with this but it's easier and quicker this way. He called me
a few weeks later and said 'I've sold that story. It's going in as a collaboration.'
The only collaboration I've done that I could tell you in detail how it
worked was The Difference Engine with Sterling. That was a book that was
completely dependant on word processing technology. I don't think it could
have been written without word processors. We decided that at any given
moment during the writing of the book the only text of the book would be
what we had on disc. Any printouts were regarded as safety measures only
in case something happened to the discs. In effect we weren't allowed to
consult an earlier printout to restore something on disc. You had to do
it all from memory.
We swapped the discs back and forth so that gradually the whole thing became
overwritten by two people at every level. Each of us was completely free
to change anything we wanted in the whole manuscript as we went along. It
kept us honest, it kept us merged.
For me the difficult thing in writing a novel is to get the voice to emerge.
Each novel has its characteristic voice and when I find the voice I'm pretty
much home free. But it's often a long search. When we found the voice of
The Difference Engine it was so alien to both of us it was really quite
eerie. It finished itself in such a cold, grim way that we were both standing
there going, 'Oh dear.' We got a kind of Frankenstein feeling. It was a
very scary voice. And that was a deeply satisfying writing experience. So
that's the only book of mine that I ever go back to and read for pleasure,
because it doesn't really seem like my work. Neither does it seem like Bruce's.
It's its own thing.
Can you still point and say, I wrote that paragraph?
Yes. But very occasionally. Less than you
think. A lot of it is simultaneous. Another use for word processing technology
in that book is that we used it to import great swathes of Victorian pulp
fiction which we would then overwrite. So that virtually every description
in the book is a contemporary Victorian description. We didn't make up any
of the interiors, except for the more science fictional ones, but every
room that is described is from an account. The room in which X meets Karl
Marx is actually from a Prussian intelligence document filed by a Prussian
spy who had actually gone up to Marx's flat pretending to be a journalist.
He filed this very minute report on what was in the room and what everything
looked like. So that's actually Marx's room. If we had had scanners we would
have used them to scan these Victorian documents into the text and use word
processing to airbrush it all together and disguise the seams.
Did you have a shared interest in Babbage?
It emerged quite organically from this
ongoing enthusiastic discussion we'd been having about Babbage. I forget
which of us encountered him first. When we started writing the book Babbage
was pretty obscure. He became better known during the two and a half years
we wrote the book but we had just been shooting the shit as science fiction
writers do and one of us, I don't remember which one, said 'You know, there's
a book in this. What if Babbage had been able to build that machine in 1855.'
Whichever one of us suggested it the other one said, 'You do it.' We went
back and forth before agreeing to do it together.
Are you a fast worker?
I'm not very fast getting off the mark
but once I've started in earnest I think I am fairly fast. Although I'm
never as fast as I remember being. Every time I write a novel I imagine
it will be finished much more quickly than it actually is. I'm always late,
always out of contract. I don't think I've ever turned a book in on time.
How long is it since you finished Idoru?
February, I think. (Interview took place
in October).
Have you started on another project?
I have a contract to do the screenplay
of a film version of Neuromancer. I'll go back, do that. That'll probably
take me up to Christmas and then I'll start the next book.
Has the Johnny Mnemonic experience soured
you on Hollywood in any way?
No. I had so much fun making the
film that we shot not the film they released. In some ways it was a dismaying
experience. The film we shot will never be seen. It doesn't really exist
anywhere.
It couldn't be recut from lost footage? There's no director's cut?
There's no director's cut. Something closer to what we were trying to do
is the Japanese release which is on PAL. It's subtitled rather than dubbed
and it's fifteen minutes longer than the Tri Star release and it's edited
very differently. It doesn't have that horrible score that Tri Star stuck
us with. Really what you saw, part of the confusion round that film is that
what you saw is in many ways the equivalent of what you would have seen
if studio executives had recut David Lynch's Blue Velvet to make it more
accessible to a mainstream audience. It wouldn't have worked as Blue Velvet
and it wouldn't have worked as what they were trying for and that's what
happened to Johnny. The great thing about Johnny is that it cost thirty
million to make and grossed seventy million world-wide, so we more than
doubled their money. We were one of Sony's most profitable products that
year. So it's not as though doors have closed.
It used to be that the scriptwriter was bottom of the food chain. That
does seem to have changed to a degree.
It's changed if you are Bob Esterhazy.
By and large being a screenwriter in Hollywood is like being a very well
paid plumber. It's a union job. Except you're a plumber they'll take to
lunch, a plumber that gets to go to the meetings. The trouble with writing
for Hollywood is that when you're writing novels, when I'm writing novels
I feel like I'm being paid to access my unconscious as deeply and freely
as I can manage. Whereas in Hollywood the whole studio system is set up
to separate the writer from his unconscious. They don't want your unconscious.
They want everything to be conscious and rational. It just doesn't work
that way for me and I suspect it doesn't work that way for really great
screenwriting either.
Yes, I'll do a few more. Everything I've ever written except Idoru is today
under option somewhere, so there will be more, quote, William Gibson films.
The bulk of them I won't have anything to do with, they'll be other people's
versions. But there are a couple of projects that if they go I'll have some
involvement. I had more intimate involvement with Johnny Mnemonic than writers
ever have. That was because it had a first time director and we had become
really close friends raising the money to make the film. I worked on that
thing really hard for five years. It took longer to make that film than
it took to get a university degree. It was harder work. I know quite a lot
about making movies now.
What made you go for that particular
project if you were going to put so much into it?
Longo turned up and he wanted to make a
feature film. He didn't have any money really. He couldn't afford the option
on a novel and at that point most of my novels were under option. So I said
look Burning Chrome is not available but Johnny Mnemonic is and Johnny Mnemonic
has in larval form everything you get if you optioned a Gibson novel. Plus
we'll be able to expand it because it's a short story, bring in new elements.
Plus it won't cost you very much. It doesn't cost very much to option a
short story.
Unfortunately at this stage the ugly
face of the marketing machine intervened. (Metaphorically, of course). There
was a queue of interviewers waiting to get at Gibson and my time was up.
With little ceremony I was booted out. For a writer whose work I had read
infrequently and with little enthusiasm, I found myself with a warm feeling
for the man and still bursting with questions for the mind behind the words.
(c) 1996 by Bob Neilson. All copyrights
retained.
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