TM: Oh Jesus Christ (laughs).
WG: In our book, Oliphant is the man who dreams up disappearing people; he believes in the All-Seeing Eye. He just dreams it up to solve one terrible problem that they have, and then it takes over. And so he's sort of tortured by knowing he's the guy that discovered the principle of this, because he knows it's wrong. It's gonna be a crazy book; I hope we can finish it. We've got the whole plot together; it's really twisted.
BF: What are the mechanics involved with collaborating with someone on a book?
WG: It's impossible to explain. It's like telling somebody how you "be married." You "be married" the only way you can be married to the person you're married to, and that's all there is to it.
BF: Since we're on the topic of writing, I'd like to talk a bit about influences. I find the Cyberpunk 101 reading list 9] interesting in terms of what it says about the formation of canons. As soon as people accept and validate a category like "Cyberpunk," it becomes a retroactive thing. All of a sudden everyone like J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs becomes a proto-cyberpunk writer. There are works on this list written as long ago as 1937.
WG: (looking at list, laughing) Last and First Men??! ...and Chandler... I don't like that, you know? I'd like to go on record as saying that I don't like Raymond Chandler. I think he's kind of an interesting stylist but I just found him to be this creepy puritanical sick fuck. (laughter)
DW: That would explain the way you handle Turner in Count Zero.
WG: Yeah, Turner is a kind of detective, a deconstructed [literally and figuratively: ed.] thriller guy. I wanted to get one of those macho thriller guys, a real he-man straight out of the kit, and just kind of push him apart. I never was quite able to do it. The scene that works for me the most is when he kills the wrong man. There's a slow build and he blows the shit out of somebody and someone says to him, so-and-so's the agent here, you asshole.
TM: (laughing) Yeah, why'd you kill him?
WG: (back to the list) Alfred Bester, yeah. Bester I'll go for. [William Burroughs'] Naked Lunch, yes. Philip K. Dick, though, had almost no influence.
TM: Right, you've really never much really read...
WG: I never really read Dick because I read Pynchon. You don't need Dick if you've read Pynchon. I mean Dick was the guy who couldn't quite do it.
TM: Ah, I think that's different, but you haven't read Dick, Bill (laughs).
WG: That's true. I read a little Dick, but I didn't like it. [Michael Moorcock's] The Cornelius Chronicles? Well, [Samuel R. Delany's] Nova, yeah, I could see Nova. But The Cornelius Chronicles, well.... I never read [Alvin Toffler's] Future Shock. [J. G. Ballard's] The Atrocity Exhibition, yeah. [Robert Stone's] Dog Soldiers, yeah.
DW: Do you know Richard Kadrey, the guy who made this list?
WG: Yeah. You know, I think Richard Kadrey's first short story was my first short story cut up into individual blocks of one or two words and rearranged. It was published in Interzone, and it's really weird. I talked to him about it, and he just wouldn't cop to it. It's weird, it's indescribably weird, you should actually read it. There are sentences in there that are out of "Fragments of A Hologram Rose," but they've been dicked with in some mysterious way. And you couldn't really say it's plagiarism. I actually thought it was kinda cool.
TM: Yeah. he's a good guy, a smart guy. Richard's the only one I know who's really, Metrophage is really and truly a Gibson hommage. He's not derivative at all.
WG: Yeah, it's really good. This guy published his book and everybody's saying, "God, this really a rip-off of you. You should be offended!" I thought that it was a dynamite book and that it really stands out. What he'd gotten in there and done was he'd gone in there and played riffs on the instrument that I'd never dreamed of. And he's one of the hipper people in the field, that's for sure. He knows about drugs, too. (laughter)
DW: What about the "punk" in cyberpunk? Do you see any real connections between what you write and punk rock?
WG: I read something recently where they described me as the dark godfather of an outlaw subculture (laughs). I mean, when I was fifteen, that was my wildest dream, but now...
TM: (laughing) It's a case of being careful what you wish for, Bill, because sometimes you get it.
WG: There was a while, at the start of all this cyberpunk stuff, when I contemplated dressing up like that, getting a foot tall blue mohawk or something. When people go to a reading to see a cyberpunk author, they expect to see him come running in out of the rain and whip the sweat out of his mohawk and start signing books. (laughter) Actually, one time I was in New York signing books, there was this godawful huge roar outside the bookstore, and these two huge motorcycles screeched up to the curb, and these two huge guys covered in leather and studs and chains and shit got off, and came into the store. When they got a good look at me in my loafers and buttondown shirt their faces just fell, you know? One of them pulled out this copy of one of my books and said, "Well, I guess you can sign it anyway." (laughs)
DW: Some of the characters you describe in your books sound a lot like various types of punks: the Gothicks and Jack Draculas, for example.
WG: Yeah, I hung out with some of them [Goths] in London. You know, they pierce their genitals? And they won't fuck anyone who doesn't have a hunk of steel shoved through there. It's weird, 'cause they hang little bells & shit on them. You can hear them jingle when they move (laughs).
BF: Are there other people who've influenced you that you talk to regularly? Do you correspond with Timothy Leary at all?
WG: I exchange letters with Mark Pauline; the stuff in Mona Lisa Overdrive is supposed to be a homage to SRL, but I don't think I quite got it. Leary? I talk to him on the phone, yeah. We don't really correspond, because he doesn't write...
TM: I was going to say he's probably post-literate at this point (laughs).
BF: I like his new book, he's redone Neuro-Politics, he calls it Neuro-Politique [check titles]. It's dedicated...
WG: Oh God, finding that out was the weirdest experience. I was in L.A. working on screenplays, and I got into this limo in L.A.X. to go to a meeting in this fancy Chinese place on Sunset. I got this crazy little Yugoslavian limo driver--you have to be very careful with limo drivers because every limo driver's an out-of-work screen writer or something--I get in and he sort of looks at me and he says, "Are you the William Gibson?" and I said, "Well, I'm the William Gibson that's sitting in your car" (laughs). And he says, "I haven't read your books, but I'm the greatest admirer of Dr. Timothy Leary," and he whips Leary's book out and it's dedicated to me and Bob Dylan. I mean, if you want weird, I thought, you know, total cognitive dissonance there. And he got talking so much that he made me late for the meeting: he overshot the restaurant.
BF: Yeah, that's the book, all right (laughs).
WG: Yeah, he overshot the restaurant, and then he told me this really sad story about how he'd been a TV producer. It was a heartbreaking fucking story; I believe it too. He got his ass out of Yugoslavia, and he got over to Hollywood, and he thought, you know, he could work in the TV or film business, and he just realized that he'd been around and nobody would touch him with a ten foot pole. So there he was, mooking around and driving this limo. Anyway, I went into the meeting, and somewhere between realizing that I didn't want to write another version of Alien III and getting back into the car, when we were sort of doing small talk, I said, "This is such an amazing town. The guy driving my limo used to be a television producer in Yugoslavia," and I told them this story that had really affected me. One of the people who's there is this woman who's The Bitch Woman from the studio--she's there to hurt me if I get out of line--they've always got an edge, you know. She keeps her mouth shut until I'm finished, and then she sort of drew on her pity look, and she says to me, "Huh. Don't they all have a story."
TM: Yeah, right. All the little people (laughs).
WG: Oh, man. But they do--they have people who're like psychic leg-breakers that they bring along. There's always one.
This Shareware meme is brought to you courtesy of the ADoSA in conjunction with _Virus 23_. If you plan on reprinting or reposting it, (or are just curious about what else we do) please let us know:
VIRUS 23
c/0 Box 46
Red Deer, Alberta
Canada
T4N 5E7
Copies of _Virus23_ #$ (memes, real-life vampires, the Twentysomethings, Guy Maddin, Dario Argento, Jack Womack, prairie depressionist film, concrete fractal poetry, IAO Core, Rose McDowall, The Brotherhood of Baldur, The Loved One, art by Don David, and much much more) are available from the above address for $7.00 ppd.
ADoSA: Because there's No Reason Not To Gnow.