An Interview With William Gibson

by Edo Van Belkom (1998)

William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties is published as a Viking trade paperback this October (2000), at £9.99. Although he’d had stories published in sf magazines, Gibson became prominent with the publication of his first book, Neuromancer, in 1984. An urban and urbane novel, it quickly won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick sf awards, immediately establishing Gibson as a great in the perceived field of sf. It didn’t stop there, though; it established him as one of the most significant and relevant authors writing in English. Neuromancer has been continuously in print since, its tenth anniversary commemorated by a hardcover reprinting.

Neuromancer and some of Gibson’s early stories (‘Johnny Mnemonic’, 1981; ‘Burning Chrome’, 1982; ‘New Rose Hotel’, 1984), laid the groundwork for the ‘cyberpunk’ movement. ‘Cyberpunk’ is a kind of sf sub-genre; its works are set in a computer-driven, high-tech near-future and feature low-life protagonists interacting in hard-boiled detective type plots.

The early stories were later published in the landmark 1986 collection Burning Chrome. That same year, the second book in what was to become The Neuromancer or Sprawl Trilogy, Count Zero, was also published. Two years later, the series closed with the publication of Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson has written several screenplays, but only Johnny Mnemonic, based on his short story of the same name has made it to the screen. Starring Keanu Reeves, it had the highest budget of any film shot in Canada - roughly $30 million.

Gibson was born in Virginia in 1948 and moved to Canada in 1968. He first lived in Toronto, but moved to Vancouver in 1972 where he met his wife Deborah and obtained a BA in English from the University of British Columbia. The father of two has lived in British Colombia ever since.

Writing short fiction requires a different kind of muscle. It’s like sprinting. I probably started with that because it’s the traditional entry level activity for science fiction writers. After having spent years and years writing novels, I’ve tried to do short stories and I just don’t know how to make it all fit in to a twenty-seven page manuscript anymore.

Before you were professionally published, at least one of your stories appeared in a fanzine [‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’ in UnEarth, in 1977, collected in Burning Chrome.] Was it a case of lack of confidence in your own work, naiveté about the market, or did you think it was too different from what was being published at the time?

It was lack of confidence and naiveté. I went from this one semi-professional publication to submitting to what were the top markets at the time, but I was forced to do that by other writers. My initial impulse was to hide it under a bushel and avoid rejection, and I was very fortunate that I had people who came along who beat me up and twisted my arm.

No, I knew they were right because that was basically what it said in all the ‘How to Market Science Fiction’ checklists. They said send to the most lucrative market first, and when it’s rejected there send it to the next most lucrative market.

But the first time I just wouldn’t do it. Actually the first piece of fiction I wrote [‘Fragments’], I had turned in in lieu of an essay for a science fiction course at UBC. I got like a B+ or something, and then the instructor said, ‘You should submit this for publication.’ And I said, ‘Okay,’ and submitted it to UnEarth, which was this fabulously obscure magazine.

Well, they printed millions of them, apparently. It is currently a kind of fake rarity because they couldn’t get it together to distribute very many, but I understand that somewhere in California there’s a garage full of that particular issue.

No, that was when I re-discovered the sub-culture of science fiction when I was an English major at UBC [University of British Columbia]. I was sort of back, post-sixties, as an adult student. And I was amazed to discovered that the stuff that I’d known about when I was a teenager was still going on and that it was even happening locally. I think what happened when I first ran into it was that I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what you guys are doing,’ and I drew them cartoons and wrote some little things and then forgot about it.

Well, I certainly didn’t expect it when I wrote it. I know that what I expected was very much the opposite. I thought it was going to be the kind of paperback original that was never reprinted. My secret ambition was that it would attain some kind of odd cult following in England or France where I knew there were at least two dozen people who liked the same kind of science fiction I had liked as a teenager.

It surprised me, although there were hints early on that it was going to have an unusual career. I couldn’t recognise them at the time because it was all very novel to me. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, this is how people respond when they see an sf novel in manuscript.’ I had nothing to compare it to. Now, looking back, I can see that in some weird way it was some kind of marked card.

You collaborated with Bruce Sterling on The Difference Engine. What was it like to work with a collaborator and what did you think of the end product?

That’s sort of like asking what it’s like to be married, because it’s different in every case. That book had a very organic genesis. Bruce and I discovered that we were writing it sometime after we began, in a sense, to write it. We’d been talking about Babbage and having this sort of on-going dialogue with imaginary bits of what might have happened. This was going on for about a year when one of us -- I forget which one it was -- said, ‘Wait, wait! This is a book.’ At that point we argued about which one would do it because neither of us wanted to undertake it.

It’s the only one of my books that I go back to with any regularity and read with a kind of pleasure. I don’t have that with my solo novels. The Difference Engine really feels to me as though I didn’t write it and neither did Sterling. It’s by some third character who we’ve never met and by the end of the book we were both slightly frightened of.

Yeah, we really didn’t have any option. There was no Internet at the time. We purchased these primitive, weird, slow little modems and attached them to our Apples and actually attempted, by long-distance phone, to modem bits of it back and forth, but it was such a cranky, inaccurate process that Fed Ex won as technology. So we became early Fed Ex advocates.

Not so much. Almost everything I’ve ever written has been under option for film at one time or another. It’s sort of like those old-fashioned pinball games where marbles fall down and they either strike nails or go into holes. So I’ve been watching a whole field of marbles bounce down this endless and very boring board for years. ‘Johnny’ finally made it through, but it was five years in its genesis.

I read an article in Premiere magazine that outlined the troubles the production had getting going.

I don’t remember that one too clearly, but I’m sure we were being very diplomatic and outlining only a fragment, or one level, of production difficulties.

The film that was released bears almost no resemblance to the film we shot. And given that, I thought, ‘Yeah, it’s okay.’

The film that was released is something like what you would have seen if the distributor had taken over post-production of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and made a whole-hearted, but very misguided attempt to turn it into straight, irony-free thriller.

What we shot was nothing like that, which accounts for the very odd tone of the piece. The screenplay as published is pretty much what we shot. One of the reasons I let them publish that was I wanted it to be able to prove my good intentions regardless of what was finally released. The screenplay is a very different piece of work. It was meant to be a sort of semi-comic, or in any case, very ironic movie that in a way was about B science fiction films as much as it was about anything else. And we really went to a lot of trouble to get what we wanted, and we pretty much had what we wanted when we turned it in to TriStar. But it wasn’t what they wanted.

In addition to the screenplay for Johnny Mnemonic, you also did a screenplay for Alien 3. Will there be more screenplays, or after those two experiences, will you be more than happy to stick to writing novels?

No, I’ve written eight or ten screenplays to contract over the years. I think that being a novelist and being paid for it is just about the best job I could have, and being a Hollywood screenwriter and being paid for it is easily the worst job I’ve ever had.

Well, it depends on the project. It’s a very perverse activity for me. Most of the people I know do screenplay work because they can’t earn a living writing novels. When I do screenplay work my accountant gets pissed off with me because I don’t make as much money. I make a much better living as a novelist, so screenwriting is always a very twisted thing for me to do.

At first I wanted to do it just because I was very curious about how movies are made. Now I’ve certainly satisfied that curiosity, but every once in a while someone comes along with something that is just intriguing enough and I’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll do just one more.’

My wife. My wife was born in Vancouver and we moved out here in 1972. The sixties were over, or what I had thought of as the sixties were definitely over, and there just didn’t seem to be much going on. And at that time Vancouver was a kind of backwater, it seemed to me. There really wasn’t much going on here, it was just kind of a good place to heel up and lick one’s wounds. In the meantime it has become sort of post-modern Pacific-rim and an endlessly expanding urban scene.

I’m very happy living here. I’ve slowed down and it’s speeded up and some kind of parity seems to be in effect.

I don’t know if it ever will change. I probably wouldn’t be very comfortable, at least initially, moving back to the States because it’s not the place I left. It’s changed, and I don’t know how to get medical insurance, and I’ve become uncomfortable living in cities where the majority of the population is armed. I find that really an odd way of doing things.

I certainly identify with the state of being Canadian, but I don’t quite feel like I am. I don’t have the memories that my wife, for instance, has. The Canada she remembers - which no longer exists either - I don’t have any access to except through her stories of it. I’m probably becoming the kind of Canadian that people become if they stay here long enough. It seems to take a while. I always liked the idea that Canada had the cultural mosaic rather than the melting pot. I thought it was really cool that they didn’t require that you had the flag tattooed on your butt or whatever, which is really the American way.

I doubt it. Although it’s awfully difficult to separate those two. I mean, that was America, or it seemed that way at the time. The war was sort of a prominent issue in something else that was going on. The war was happening because America was, whatever it was that America was. With-out the threat of imminent military service I don’t think I would have had the motivation to leave. It’s really hard to motivate eighteen-year-olds to do anything, let alone abandon the country of their birth and go and live where it snows in the winter.

I wake up very early and drink coffee and read the papers and drive around buying Danishes and things. Then I come down to my office, check the incoming faxes, answer a few letters and things, and then try and write something. If I’m having a really super productive day I’ll try to write something until lunch time, have lunch, go back and try to write something until dinner time. That’s perfection really, it doesn’t happen that often. When I’m not officially on vacation, I try to come down and do something in a writerly direction.

In the last couple of months of finishing a book, I work compulsively and very hard and get quite mental and disagreeable and hard to talk to, mainly because I’m anxious to get it over with, and at the same time I’m trying not to hurry it. It’s one of those, ‘Because it feels so good when I stop,’ routines toward the end.

It hasn’t had that much of an effect on my lifestyle compared to what you have to put up with if you are a middle-rung pop musician. So, my recognisability factor continues to be much lower than say, Billy Idol’s, who is actually a fairly obscure figure these days, but he would be hassled more in public than I would.

One of the effects it had though, was that I - without really thinking about it - started going to fewer and fewer science fiction conventions because those were the places I would be hassled. I could no longer go there and be a citizen of the convention, I had to go there and be William Gibson. So that took away the fun of it, but I’m still not famous enough that I have trouble being William Gibson on the street so that’s good.

Actually I think it frustrates them more than it does me because I spend a lot of time trying to disarm the idea that I’m a prophet. I’m not entirely innocent there because publishers market science fiction writers as these predictive engines or futurists and there are lots of science fiction writers who are happy to be seen that way. But for whatever reason that’s always bugged me. To the extent that I’m any sort of theorist or critic of science fiction, I would be one of those people arguing that science fiction is actually always about the present or about the period in which it was written.

I participate to whatever extent in my own commodification. It’s just what we do as a culture. It’s pretty much becoming the main thing we do as a culture, or at least that’s what Idoru is arguing. That maybe we’re doing it a bit too much, but I think that’s why I write about some of the things I write about. When I started writing I was only guessing.

Well, I was guessing about the mechanisms of popular culture and if you look at Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive and what’s going on in the background there’s a sort of extrapolated, near-future version of Hollywood, and it’s written with a certain surety as if I knew what that stuff was actually like. I didn’t, but my experience subsequently showed me that I was right. I got the tone of it. One of the reasons I got involved with other media was that I was really curious to see whether it was as I had envisioned it. It was always weirder than I could have envisioned, but still pretty much like what I had envisioned.

You’ve got two topic headings. One is ‘cyberspace’ and one is ‘cyberpunk.’

Cyberspace, I coined. I made that word up to describe something in my fiction that does sort of resemble what the Internet and the World Wide Web are becoming at this point. And that’s probably the only classical science fiction move in my entire body of work. But it was a really good one, because it was as though I had simultaneously had invented the rocket ship and space. ‘He didn’t just invent the rocket, he invented the whole concept of space travel!’ That’s not literally true of course, because there were all sorts of pre-cursors in science fiction to what I did with cyberspace and for some reason people just don’t recognise them. I mean everything from Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’, to Vinge’s ‘True Names’. There’s a body of work there that’s never been recognised, but I was certainly aware of it. When I started doing those early cyberspace stories, I remember thinking, ‘This is kind of cool, but it’s just too obvious.’ This simply isn’t going to amaze people. This idea had been around in larval form in a lot of other stories.

 

Do you think that if you hadn’t picked up on it, somebody else would have eventually?

I think that someone would have. I know that the people who were inventing virtual reality and the World Wide Web were doing it actively at the same time I was writing those stories. They had their visions they wanted to realise in the lab and then market. So, yeah, this stuff would have come along in any course. I think that someone would have been writing science fiction about something like this, but I don’t know if the punk side of the equation would have come into it.

Cyberpunk was not my coining. It was sort of a journalistic bumper sticker applied from outside the group of supposed practitioners. I don’t know what I would have called it, but I wouldn’t have called it that. I might have called it cyber-populism or something which wouldn’t have been nearly as catchy.

But I don’t know if anyone else would have come up with that particular union of, I suppose you could call, personal computer technology and Bohemian attitude.

That’s a good question. I think if I just absolutely stopped writing right now I could coast for a while, but I’m sure there still is some financial pressure there somewhere.

I think someone once said that writers are tails that are dragged around and wagged by the bodies of their work, and I think there’s some truth to that now. I don’t feel as though I’m on any particular literary mission myself so much as I’m completing a movement I began twenty years ago. Simply because it hasn’t been completed. I don’t know if you ever get to a point where you say, ‘Okay, that’s it. I’m done writing now,’ or whether it just goes on and on until it peters out, but it feels to me like I’m still doing what I was doing before except I’m doing the late 1990s versions of it.

Oh yeah, certainly. I’m never set, although I can’t tell you what they are, only that I’m never satisfied with these books. If I’m very, very satisfied they would be about seventy-five per cent of what they might have been. The book I’m working on now is the end of some aspect of my work, I’m not sure what to call it. And the next one I think will be very different, but I haven’t a clue what that will be.

I keep feeling that there’s a kind of book that hasn’t been written that I want to write now, in the same way that when I wrote Neuromancer there was a kind of book that hadn’t been written that I wanted to write in 1983. That was really the impulse there, the sense that there was something missing that was needed in the world. When I wrote Neuromancer I knew it had to be sort of like The Stars My Destination and sort of like Robert Stone’s Dark Soldiers and sort of like a Velvet Underground album. I had a whole list of things it had to be sort of like, and if it all went together it would become one of those seamless pop artefacts that sort of resemble everything and nothing at the same time.

I’m sure I do, but not consciously yet. It’s something I spend a lot of time wondering about. Wondering about that one is become a big part of what I do.