Addicted To Noise 10/96:
William Gibson on Neuromancer, crack, the Net, rock 'n' roll and his latest book, Idoru, in which he investigates the mechanisms of celebrity in the modern age.
By Michael Goldberg
ATN: It's a cliche that rock stars go out with models and that the rock star has become aware of the model long before he ever met her and vice versa. So, in a way, that aspect of this book is not even that far-fetched.
Gibson: Well no. I'm really not in the business of inventing imaginary futures. Well I am ostensibly because I'm marketed as a science fiction writer, but what I really do is look at what passes for contemporary reality and select the bits that are most useful to me in terms of inducing cognitive dissonance. I have this fantasy that someday in the future, I will be written about as a naturalistic author. Somebody who was actually trying to take the pulse of the late 20th century and going at it in a kind of unconventional way. But I sometimes think going at it in the only way it can be gotten at this far into the game.
We're living in a kind of conjury of overlapping science fiction scenarios. There are things in our world that are like pure science fiction. AIDS is pure science fiction. What's happening in Moscow today is like some kind of farcical alternate reality. It often feels like that to me. The Soviet Union is gone. The Russians are doing capitalism with the brakes off. Give them five years and what they've got over there is going to be like pure sci-fi. It already is but when they get it up to speed, it's just going to blow our minds.
ATN: In a way, you're in the role that at least some traditional science fiction writers have always been in which is writing about what's going on right now and commenting on what's going on right now and parodying it or taking it to its logical conclusion.
Gibson: In a sense. 1984 is called 1984 because it was written in 1948. But a lot of the mainstream traditional science fiction writers, particularly in the United States, I don't think they were conscious that they were writing about the era in which they lived. I think they actually thought they were writing about the future. I'm different in that from the very beginning I was self aware and I was aware of that so there's a level of irony there that isn't present in a lot of stuff. And I think that's because I come from the first generation of people writing something like science fiction who conceivably could have discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. Prior to us, that wasn't possible.
ATN: There's a new album coming out by the Counting Crows and in it, there are the lines: "We only stay in orbit for a moment in time / And then you're everybody's satellite." The guy who wrote the song, Adam Duritz, who is a rock star, had a brief relationship with a TV star. When I was listening to that song I thought about the rock star in your book, Rez, and the idoru...
Gibson: Yeah. The conclusion I came to in the course of writing about Rez trying to marry the Idoru and finally in a sense succeeding....as I was trying to solve the puzzle of how that would go, what I realized was that he--and this is something that the other people in the book, the other characters in the book never quite realize--is that he is already much more like her, he has more in common with her than he does with the other characters in the book. He's already virtual to a very large extent. The part of him that's the physical guy walking around is not the biggest part of him.
ATN: And that comes through. Here you have Chia, this 14-year-old girl and all the other fans and their perception of this band is through images of the band from before they were born.
Gibson: I was also interested in that weird aspect in which pop is kind of outside of time, in which the Beatles are always in their Abbey Road phase and will be, perhaps, as long as we have media. So that they're always there for children to access. I think it's an interesting thing.
It's almost as though these industries are kind of shooting themselves in the foot. It's harder and harder to sell something on the basis of, "OK, it's now. This is today's hot number. You should buy it, kids." Kids have this a chronological mass of material that they can access. We didn't have that before. Although its advent has been very, very gradual. If you wake up in the morning, turn on the radio and hear Elvis Presley singing "Heartbreak Hotel," you don't think, "I heard a dead man sing." But in fact that's what you did. That is strange and new, our capacity to do that. People can be multiplied images...stars can be multiplied and put out everywhere. But there's a kind of immortality there. They become outside of time.
ATN: And radio, of course, by creating classic rock stations, oldies stations, '70s stations...
Gibson: Oh yeah, I did that last night. I was so tired. I had this book signing chore to do and I was so exhausted that I was tuning around on the radio in my hotel room and I got this total time-warp classic rock station that was just completely slotted to some kind of cellular demographic that I'd actually forgotten that I was carrying around. So I was sort of humming along to the Eagles and they actually played a couple of songs I hadn't thought about in 20 years. I thought, "This is a strange thing."
ATN: Yeah. It's much easier to hear music from the past than it is to hear something going on right now.
Gibson: I'm like a classic boomer in terms of when I was born, and I think that will pass with us. [laughs] I hope so. I hope people aren't sitting around listening to the Eagles in 2035. Why should they? I hope that's just a function of trying to satisfy a bunch of rich old people and give them what makes them feel good. It's like Benny Goodman was for my parents, you know.
ATN: Except that then you have enormous numbers of kids into Led Zeppelin or the Doors.
Gibson: Yeah, that's true. But that's quality stuff in a way. It doesn't bother me if it's the cult of a particular band or performer. Where I live in Vancouver, it's actually very hard to hear new music. You're driving along and...Joe Walsh. No, no, no! Give me something new. I want to hear something I've never heard before. We don't have enough of that in Vancouver.
ATN: Do you listen to music while you write?
Gibson: Yeah, I do but in a way that would be grounds for divorce if anyone else was in the room. Like often, I will listen to the same...if I'm stuck writing something, I can listen to the same cut 50 times in a row. I don't know why but it seems to help.
ATN: In the writing of this book, were there particular songs that you did listen to like that?
Gibson: Let me see. I'm trying to come up with something. Yeah, there were things I listened to when I was writing this but you would never be able to put it together with the text. I listened to a song by Iris DeMent called "Easy's Gettin' Harder Everyday," which is like this tear-jerking, country-folk masterpiece but I don't think you could find the point where it interfaces the text. Or I was the point where it interfaced the text so I don't think it's really reflected in the way the book feels, not in the way that Neuromancer, I know for a fact was fueled by Joy Division, old Velvet Underground records, Lou Reed, lots of Steely Dan and there's actually textual evidence scattered all through it and Patti Smith too. It had a soundtrack for me.
Idoru didn't have a soundtrack for me in the same way maybe because I was sort of writing about music or there was an aspect of it where I was writing about the medium of pop music. I don't know what the band Lo Rez sounds like. I kind of stayed away from that in the book except to imply maddeningly that they had emerged from the Hong Kong Kento-Pop scene after the Chinese took over. And if you've ever heard any Kento-Pop, it's hard to imagine. I kind of imagine they would sound kind of like a cross between Kento-Pop and late U2.
ATN: How old are you?
Gibson: 48.
ATN: So when you wrote Neuromancer you were 35? It came out in...
Gibson: '84. Actually, I wrote it in '82 and '83. Yeah, it was kind of like a thirtysomething effort for me but I think what I was doing with that was I was accessing my inner adolescent in a rather deliberate way.
I was giving voice to my inner teenager. He's kind of gone now. [laughs] I can't channel him anymore so if people say, why don't you write another book like Neuromancer I really like that one. I just say, "I can't, I'm too old." It's not there for me anymore and I think I was lucky to pull it off when I was 30.
ATN: You just mentioned a lot of music that you listened to while writing Neuromancer. Was that music that you had listened to when you were a teenager and in your early 20s?
Gibson: Some of it was. But even in 1982, the Velvet Underground had not accrued the sort of recognition. I'm very proud to say I was like an ardent Velvet Underground freak from the release of their first album. And I figured I was pretty much the only one in the world. Right through the '70s people would come over to my house and I'd say, "Have you heard this?" and I'd put it on and they'd look at me with horror. And I'd say Andy Warhol produced these guys... Nobody was listening to Steely Dan.
Actually, in terms of musical recognition, one of the things that was most gratifying for me was when [Steely Dan's] Donald Fagen brought out Kamakiriad [Fagen's second solo album.] He did one interview where he said, one of the reasons I did this was I was reading these books by this guy named William Gibson and there are all these Steely Dan references and he said, I always kind of wanted to be a science fiction writer so I thought I'd do this album. I love that. And the other thing I love about Steely Dan and I think this does make them probably the most deeply...I just lost the word...subversive. That's a scary word to lose.
Steely Dan is the most deeply subversive of all pop groups because sometimes now in 1996 I'll be shopping in the supermarket and they'll be playing Steely Dan in the background. Everybody will be buying their cereal and this guy's singing a song about doing drugs and feeling depressed because you're 35 years old sleeping with an 18-year-old girl. If anybody knew what they were saying, they would never play it in a supermarket. It's perfect elevator music and then you listen to the words and it continues to be cutting stuff. I loved it...whoever did the what passes for the liner notes in that Steely Dan box that came out a couple of years ago. It said, somehow these guys produced the perfect soundtrack to the '90s. [laughs]
ATN: The world in your books is a pretty dark place.
Gibson: I think it's a dark place viewed from a sweet and fancy hotel in San Francisco. If you're being shelled by ethnic separatists in Bosnia, you'd emigrate there in a flash. If you lived in Somalia, you'd want to move to any of the places described in Idoru instantly. The world is a really dark place for a whole lot of people all the time. I don't think of the world of Idoru, for instance, as a distopia. I don't think it's particularly more distopian than the world we live in. It's certainly not a utopia but neither is this.
ATN: That's what I wanted to get at. If you have concerns and I would imagine you have lots of concerns about what's going on right now, whether it's in North America, whether it's in....
Gibson: I do have concerns about the real future. I have children. I have a stake in it. My daughter's 14 and if I try to imagine the world she's going to have to live in, I get deeply and personally frightened. But that's not the space that I write these books from. And I think what I'm doing when I write these books is I'm using this tool kit that I inherited from genre SF and some other tools that I picked up from the bohemian wing of American literature, to push back at that fear. I can sort of get a handle on it when I'm writing these books. But I don't think of them particularly even as cautionary tale. I think of them as explorations of occluded aspects of contemporary reality, things we can't afford to think about. We're all walking around pretending it's like 1986.
If it was 1986, we could cope. I think we have like a 10 year buffer and the buffer gets telescoped occasionally in one of those horrendous CNN moments. Like you turn on the TV and there's a building blown to shit. And it says Oklahoma City. And you can feel your brain stretch around this and the world's never going to be the same. That's now. But when we hit now, we get slammed into it like bugs on a windshield. Then we pull back and we see things are just proceeding in a normal fashion. "I can understand the world. I'm not going to freak out." I think we have to do that to survive.
So I think probably what I do as an artist is I mess with that. I mess with that buffer and bring people right up close to the windshield and then pull them back and keep doing that. I suspect that's the real pleasure of the text in the sort of thing I do. I suspect that's what the people are actually paying for is having that experience. If they think they're paying for a hot ticket glimpse of the future, then they're kind of naive.
ATN: One of the things that's interesting is the backdrop of the books and each one has a different backdrop. This is the world as it is, and then this story's unfolding before you and everything is just sort of taken for granted that that's how it is. Gibson: Yeah. It's what we do. That's the way the world works. You don't ordinarily think about all the technology underpinning what we do. You don't think about the way in which the world differs from what the world was in say 1965. If we could get a long- distance call from 1965.... If we could get a long-distance call from me, from myself in 1965, I'd be saying, "Wow, did we win this sexual revolution? Have we gone to the moon or Mars?" What am I going to tell myself? I'm going to say, well, we did but we've got this contagious sexual cancer and you can't really have sex with people you don't know unless you're wearing a really heavy duty condom. Yeah, we went to the moon for about five minutes but nothing ever came of it. And by the way, the Soviet Union doesn't exist. We had this really ugly civil war in Europe but nobody's much doing anything about it although it seems to have calmed down now. What would that kid think? That's what I'm dealing with. It's an interesting time to write something, even try to write something that passes for thoughtful science fiction.
ATN: Your books always have individuals who do heroic things. There are heroes in the books who when the particular story's over, they're at least doing OK. In real life things are a lot more messy.
Gibson: Stories have endings. Real life...you don't get closure. You're in trouble in your life I think if you walk around looking for closure. All right, that chapter has ended. It doesn't happen that way. You're gonna know that person for the rest of your life or whatever. People spend a fortune on therapists and whatnot to get a feeling of closure but in a book... These books I'm doing now are sort of structured like thrillers. They sort of mess with that I think, in terms of what they actually give, what they're actually providing the reader.
In a sense, they don't do a very good job of being a thriller but they're not really thrillers. There's something else. They have different agendas. Like at the end of Virtual Light, Rydell and Chevette seem like...some people have said this is like a goofily happy ending and I thought, "No, man, they're owned by this television network. They're kind of owned by a tabloid TV network now. They're not going to be happy." Indeed, in Idoru, you have to wonder why Rydell is the night security man at the Chateau Marmont. What happened to his television career? By the end of the book, he's the night security man at 7 Eleven on Sunset.