by Darren Wershler-Henry
(source: _Virus 23_ #0 [Fall 1989], 28-36)
A conversation with William Gibson is kind of like a full-immersion baptism in all of the weird and disturbing gomi [1] that comprises late twentieth century culture (Arthur Kroker would call it "excremental" culture, but then again, he's also capable of calling "the post-Einsteinian individual" a "hyper-Hobbesian energy pack." Screw that noise). Japanese Nazi geneticists in white bathrobes and terrycloth tennis hats, Luddite death squads, catfish farms, high rollers drawing voodoo designs in lines of cocaine, guinea pig- driven flamethrowers, unlicensed denturists... these are a few of his favorite things.
Gibson's writing is, on the most basic level, a testament to this obsession with the bizzarre and the disturbing: he takes these random, abandoned fragments of our shattered society and fuses them together into a strange and beautiful mosaic of words. The resulting gestalt, though, is more just than an artistic curiosity. Out of this odd assortment of cultural detritus, Gibson creates some genuinely new ideas, and redefines many old ones. "Scramble and resequence; but, in the process of borrowing symbolic energy from the past, new simultaneities and odd juxtapositions, like dreams, emerge" [2]. Take Gibson's most famous creation, cyberspace, as a prime example. The Media Lab (MIT) and Autodesk (California) are all lathered up about the possibility of actually building the thing. "Ether, having once failed as a concept, is in the process of being reinvented. Information is the ultimate mediational ether" [3]. As much as he is an entertainer, Gibson is also vitally important as a writer of ideas.
Tom Maddox, a long-time friend of Gibson's, is a professor at Evergreen State College, an excellent science fiction writer, and an astute critic. In the short biography of Gibson he wrote for the ConText 89 program, he points out that the public's reaction to Gibson has often been a mixed one: "[Many SF writers and readers say] Gibson's work is all 'surface' or 'flash,' 'never passes from ugly to ennobling.'" In other words, the reasons given by Gibson's detractors for their (often violent) dislike of his works rarely varies from typical conservative distaste for Postmodern writing techniques [4]. (On the other hand, it could be jealousy....) The explanation Maddox provides for this kind of reaction ia a blunt and simple one: Gibson's writing can be a colossal mindfuck for those unprepared to deal with the issues it raises.
It's a truism of SF criticism that speculative fiction is more about the author's lifetime than any hypothetical future." Reading Neuromancer is like putting on a pair of the X-ray specs from John Carpenter's They Live, and seeing the subliminal underbelly of North American capitalist culture. A trip through the lookinglass darkly, a strangely warped reflection in the left lens of the author's mirrorshades... it doesn't matter which metaphor you use, because the upshot of it all is that Gibson sees a blackness in our society that very few people are anxious to hear about, much less do or say anything about. So when someone picks up a Gibson novel which describes a world where multinational corporations have more personality than the people they employ, where the US navy "recruits" dolphins by hooking them on heroin, where people would rather live vicariously through media personalities than cope with their own lives, a little voice starts up in the back of their head. Our world isn't like that at all. Oh no.
Bruce Fletcher (Virus 23 staff writer) and I met Gibson and Maddox in Edmonton, where they were guest writers at ConText 89 (Gibson was the Guest of Honor), and persuaded them to talk for several hours about many of the things that make Gibson's work unique. My starting place was the Summer 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review, "Is the Body Obsolete?" [5]. In attempting to deal with the question of bodily obsolescence, Whole Earth lays bare the connections between most of the important work being done today in, well, in just about every field you can imagine (and a few others): cybernetics, theories of the body, downloading, feminist theory, artificial intelligence... the list goes on and on. Essentially, this is the same weird collection of oddities--gomi--that Gibson is so fond of. Sure, it's intellectualized gomi, but gomi nonetheless. The section on Gibson himself falls right in the middle of the magazine, acting (intentionally or not; there are no accidents, right?) as the point where all the other articles converge. It seemed to me that a natural place to begin an examination of Gibson's fiction would be the exploration of some of these connections. Judging from the range of the topics we covered in about 2 hours--many of which I've never seen mentioned in another interview with Gibson--I think it worked pretty well.
What follows is a sliced, diced (and hopefully coherent; everyone present was nursing a hangover) version of that conversation.
Darren Wershler-Henry: (Producing a copy of the Whole Earth Review, Summer 1989: "Is The Body Obsolete?") Have you seen this? It's a collection of a whole bunch of different things that seem to crystallize around your work: theories of the body, information theory; there's a piece on Survival Research Laboratories [6], a list of the major influences on cyberpunk writers, and (pointing out the interview entitled "Cyberpunk Era") they even did a [William] Burroughs-style cut-up of your old interviews.
William Gibson: No... show it to me. (To Tom Maddox) Have you seen this? This is really bizzarre. I wouldn't give them an interview so they cut up a bunch of old interviews.
Tom Maddox: Who did this?
WG: Kevin Kelly. It's the Whole Earth Review.
TM: Oh--I heard about that, yeah.
DW: For me, one of the most interesting things in this magazine is when they start talking about what happens when you download people into machines. What constitutes personality when the borderline between people and machines starts to blur? The Flatline seems to be a personality, but is a ROM construct, and the Finn, who gets himself made into some kind of construct...
WG: (Laughing) That's one of my favorite parts in that book... he's got the high rollers drawing in cocaine.
TM: Do you mean, what is it that's in there?
DW: Yeah. At the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive you've got Angie, Finn, Colin, and Bobby--two dead people and two personality constructs, one modeled after a "real" man and one a complete fabrication--in the Aleph, heading off into alien cyberspace, and they seem to have their own volition. It's not just a machine kind of thing... they're not programmed to act in certain ways. So that's what I want to look at: where does the self go? How much self do any of these characters have?
WG: Yeah, well, that's just a question, you know? I suppose the book poses that question, but it doesn't answer it. I can't answer it. As for that downloading stuff, I think those guys who seriously consider that stuff are crazier than a sackful of rats. I think that's monstrous! It just seems so obvious to me, but people like those guys at Autodesk who're building cyberspace--I can't believe it: they've almost got it--they just don't understand. My hunch is that what I was doing was trying to come up with some kind of metaphor that would express my deepest ambivalence about media in the twentieth century. And it was my satisfaction that I sort of managed to do it, and then these boff-its come in and say "God damn, that's a good idea! Let's plug it all in!" But, you know, it just leaves me thinking, "What??" You know, what is actually stranger than having people do theses about your work, is to have people build this demented shit that you dreamed up, when you were trying to make some sort of point about industrial society. It's just a strange thing.