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: There's this club in Idoru where solidified urine has become part of the decor. What's that about?
Gibson: I had a wonderful book five or six years ago. I couldn't find it when I was writing this book to verify this but it was a book of 1,000 whacked out Japanese inventions. And one of the inventions was a product, some kind of enzyme that you could add to urine that would turn it into a harmless green solid. And this was sold to mothers so if you were in some kind of crowded situation and your child has to pee, he pees in a coffee cup and you throw in a teaspoon of this stuff and it goes pffff and you can just toss it in the trash. And it won't smell. And it won't be a problem. I just loved the idea of people throwing great pods of that stuff around the very messy impromptu urinals of this nightclub. That club is named for a Steely Dan song, by the way. There's a Steely Dan song called "Here At the Western World."
ATN: Right. It wasn't on a regular album.
Gibson: I think it was probably one of the first things they ever wrote. At the end of the book when Chia is thinking about her new life hanging out in the walled city, there's mention of Klaus and the Rooster, who are two friends of the Etruscan who's actually a Burroughs character I appropriated but Klaus and the Rooster are from that song too.
ATN: How do you feel now about the impact that your first novel has had? Is it weird?
Gibson: Well, it's weird in the sense that I think it's always kind of frustrating if your first shot has the biggest impact. [laughs] But on the other hand, it's like having a grown child. It's out in the world meeting people and doing things to and/or with them. I'll never see that. So I think Neuromancer has its career and I have mine.
ATN: You're one of a very small number of people who have written something that have had that kind of an impact.
Gibson: I don't know how much impact it's actually had. The perception of its so-called impact is, to my mind, like Sunday supplement journalism. And I've never much bought into it. I've actually spent a lot of the energy that I've expended doing interviews over the past 15 years has been in saying, now look Neuromancer doesn't actually predict the Internet. What cyberspace apparently is in Neuromancer is nothing like what we're doing today really. It really isn't. I don't think that I failed particularly in that.
In all of science fiction, the entire body of science fiction prior to the advent of broadcast television, I only know of one piece that predicts anything like broadcast television even though television was like a known technology and television is in every science fiction story from the '20s on but it's nothing like broadcast television. They use it like the video phone which is a technology that we've had for years and don't even bother using. Nobody wants video phones. They're in the museum of unwanted technology. And the only guy who ever wrote a story predicting anything like broadcast television was E. M. Forster, who was not exactly a genre guy. He wrote a novella called The Machine Stops, that does predict something very close to broadcast TV. There are very, very few things you can point to in the science fiction of the last 50 years that predict anything like the world we live in.
ATN: I was thinking about the character, Case, in Neuromancer. This sort of street guy who's plugged in. I know all kinds of people like that. Black leather jacket and hair down to here, plays in a band. He's so deep in terms of the scripts he writes for us and code and everything. You wrote about that way back when.
Gibson: Well, yeah. I'll cop to that. I did anticipate that, that it wasn't necessarily gonna be guys in short sleeve polyester white shirts with lots of felt pens tucked into their pocket protector. To bring it back to rock 'n roll influences, when I was writing Neuromancer, I'm pretty sure I was listening to Springsteen's Nebraska and thinking "OK, it's not hotrods, it's computers." And I think that was probably one of the hippest moves, one of the best moves I ever made as a writer of fiction because I think all over the world there were people who were passionately involved with the beginnings of ubiquitous computation. And yet, they could not assume the postures until a kind of fiction or something came along that said, "Yeah, you can do that, but you can be James Dean too." They needed that.
I don't think that I alone provided that. I think it came from a lot of different places at once but I think that there were people passionately writing code in garages who when they stepped out of the garage, needed permission to put on that black leather jacket and kind of rock with it. And now, that's sort of taken for granted that you can do that.
I think what I might have glimpsed early on without knowing it is that computation was going to become truly ubiquitous. Computers were going to be everywhere and pretty much everybody was going to be doing it. So any scene you could look at in the world, you could kind of rejig, you could wire it. So what would that be like if it was wired? And what would drug dealing be like if it was wired? Well, it is wired. Cellular phones and beepers completely changed the illicit drug dealing delivery industry in the United States. It changed American neighborhoods. It literally changed cities just because they gave these guys cellular phones. Things changed.
While we're on that, crack is a technology too. Why was that invented when it was? I'm really curious about that. Who did that? Who did that? How did cocaine suddenly appear in a form where you could sell like a $2 hit? They could have made crack cocaine in 1890 in New York but they didn't. Never heard of it. It's not there in history. Where the hell did that come from? That's a technology. That's real interesting. I wonder if we'll ever know where that came from. That's like a marketing move but it'll take a chemist to figure it out. That's a real interesting question, I think.
ATN: Yeah, given the horrendous destruction and havoc.
Gibson: You know that thing happening in South Central L. A. now where the people are saying that the contras set up. Have you heard about that? It's very interesting. It's kind of a breaking thing. A lot of people in South Central are saying that the C.I.A. and the contras put that together and that the contras were selling coke to L. A. Big stuff in the L. A. Times about that. I'm not a conspiracy theory guy usually but that one's really interesting.
ATN: You recently wrote a piece about the Net for the New York Times. Did I catch this right earlier? Do you now have Web access?
Gibson: Yeah, I've got Web access but I don't do email. I don't use it to communicate. I just look at stuff.
ATN: Have you spent a lot of time looking around at what's out there?
Gibson: No. I probably watch less television than most people my age and I probably spend more time watching television than I do poking around on the Net. But I do occasionally do it and I find it really fascinating. And also, it's changing so quickly that if you don't check it out all the time and you let it sit for a month, you go back to it, you can actually see it's different. It's an evolving medium.
ATN: What do you think are the most interesting kinds of things that are going on?
Gibson: In a general sense, I think the most interesting thing that's happening is the overall attempt to discover what this thing is good for. Given that I haven't checked out Addicted To Noise but something like Salon I think is the equivalent, which is well-intentioned and well-written and everything but I think it's the equivalent of...just after the invention of the movie camera, the guys who invented it said, "Wow, you know what we could do with this? We could set this up in a theater in front of the stage and we could film the actors doing a play and then we could watch the play whenever we wanted to." And in fact they did that. It never really caught on. I think that's what a lot of Internet magazines are like. It's like the thing that it really is hasn't been discovered yet. Like it's Eisenstein hasn't turned up. I have this fantasy that somebody's going to walk in and say, you know, you can do montage. This is how we edit film. And suddenly, there will be this kind of entertainment that we haven't had before. Actually, I don't think it will happen that way because this is something that is being evolved by everybody. It's not like a Thomas Edison situation.
The really fascinating thing for me about the Web is the way that it's not hierarchical. I have a website now. I have an incredibly cool looking website that doesn't cost me anything. It's just because I've got this one super smart guy who does really great graphics and it's his hobby. I've got a much cooler looking website than my publisher does, for instance. They couldn't afford to pay somebody to do the kind of website I've got. That's different. That's completely new. Anybody with the talent can get something out there at very little cost that rivals anything a large corporation can put together. It usually is better than anything a large corporation would bother to put together.
The first time I went to see my publisher's website -- they're an MCA company - I got slammed into this MCA strip mall. It's the ugliest environment I've ever seen on the Web. Push here for Universal. Please! I called them up and I said, "Do you know where you are in cyberspace? You're in a strip mall." It's very different. I kind of look at the Web at this point, it's like for very low cash output, anybody can become a global ham television station except pretty much all you can broadcast is color postcards and messages. But still, it's fantastic that people can do that. And the whole thing is evolving so quickly.
For years, I said I don't care about the Internet because I'm not going to be interested in it until they make it so simple that children and dogs can do it. And now they did. They did that with Netscape. Children and dogs can pretty much surf the Net. It doesn't take long to teach anybody. It takes longer to download stuff than it does to teach people how to use it.
ATN: You made a decision at the end of the Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive trilogy to move on and do some different things. Virtual Light and now Idoru are not just more of the same. Where do you see your writing going?
Gibson: Well, with Idoru, I suspect I've written myself into a corner that's going to require a third volume of stuff in that universe. As embarrassing as I find that given genre science fictions near terminal affliction with sequelitis. Although I don't actually consider these books sequels in the traditional sense. They're sort of connected to about the extent that a lot of Elmore Leonard novels are actually connected. And you see mine are characters from one blending through in the background. And after that, I'll just have to see what's going on. I never know. It's not like a planned campaign. It's a kind of ongoing exploration of something.
ATN: Have you started another novel or are you going to get through all this promotional stuff first?
Gibson: Well, I think...it's a twinkle in my eye as they used to say. I think I have a pretty good hunch where it would go and that's that I'm deeply curious about what the 24-hour convenience store on Sunset that Rydell has to work at now would be like. And what would they sell? You get a glimpse of it. Laney remembers going there in Idoru but I really wonder. What would the 21st century 7-Eleven be like? There's a certain strip of Sunset that I'm actually quite familiar with now and the convenience stores are the only places there that sell anything that anybody ever really needs. All the other shops on Sunset just sell weird impulse buy stuffs that no one really needs to survive. The necessities of survival are in the convenience stores and I think that might be an interesting way to start and figure out what people need.
ATN: What was it that made you want to write in the first place and write sci fi?
GIbson: I think rock 'n roll and science fiction were in a very real sense all the culture I had. [laughs] That's my real native culture. Anything else I know of literature is like an overlay of four years of college and some reading afterwards. When I was 14 years old, probably what I most wanted to be to the extent that I wanted to be anything was a science fiction writer. I forgot about that. I lost interest in it and forget about it. But when I found myself turning 30 with no career and really not very much ambition to do anything, I felt doors closing. So I thought, I'm going to try just once to be an artist of some kind. What'll I do? I'll write science fiction. I knew that from what I'd learned in my teens, I kind of knew the business of culture. I thought I'd give it a shot and I'd give science fiction writing a shot. And I did and through some kind of real incredible fluke, I immediately made a little money at it. So it was something I could do on the kitchen table and bring in maybe enough money to buy a small color television set. So I was kind of stuck doing it. It had a built-in reward system.
I think if I hadn't had some immediate success, I probably wouldn't have had the dogged persistence to sit there and keep cranking out stories and mailing them out and having them rejected, which is what happens to most people. I always feel very deeply for those people because I kind of see myself there.