Prophet of the Real: An Interview with William Gibson

Do you consider your latest books to be works of science fiction? There is certainly nothing unreal in them, but you’re using the methods of describing an alien world in order to tell these stories.

I'm using the tools of science fiction to examine our world today, which for many reasons is largely an alien one.

You're down from Vancouver, and you've lived in Canada for most of your adult life. How has living as an American in Canada influenced your writing?

Expatriation is supposedly a rather good strategy for writing about where you're from. But the writers I tend to enjoy generally have managed to expatriate whether or not they've physically departed their homeland.

Let's talk about Hubertus Bigend, the CEO whose desires drive the action of Zero History. Bigend first appeared in Pattern Recognition - he's sort of a human manifestation of the abstract forces of the zaibatsus that formed the economic architecture of your Sprawl trilogy. Is he based on the behavior of anyone who exists, or is he projected?

Bigend is shaped the way he is because of his evolution as all-purpose plot-driver, mainly. Some part of him was the initial result of having read that Malcolm Maclaren, who I had met in Hollywood, had been appointed "design and marketing czar" of (I think) Poland.

It seems like your anthropology of the immediate requires a specific neutrality. How do you maintain your place as an observer? To put that another way, how has your writing process changed since you began to engage with technology more consistently via your website and Twitter?

One can never be perfectly objective, but one can try to be objective.

My Twitter experience, actually, has reminded me that there are activities that make little sense to anyone but their participants.

Addiction and recovery figure into your work with some frequency. What's the attraction there?

It's the zeitgeist. Contemporary social naturalism. Recognition of the mechanisms of addiction is still quite new, as is the possibility of recovery, so it's another part of that future that's constantly getting itself more evenly distributed.

Let’s talk about the relationship of the real to the fictional. Because you traffic in the newly real, much of what populates your work seems nearly fictional. Near the end of Zero History, I found myself expecting the reveal of objects that were actually magical. Can you talk about how you identify this “sweet spot” of the real-but-nearly-fictional? In my imagination, you have an allergy towards story elements much like Pattern Recognition’s Cayce Pollard has towards branding, but it’s probably more prosaic. How do you decide what to include in your work?

I know I've developed a module to identify that sweet spot, but it's a black box to me. As Cayce's ability, in Pattern Recognition, to know whether or not a new logo "works", is to her.

Feels purely binary, has nothing to do with any conscious logic. Like the fiddle maker who said that he started with a block of wood and removed everything that wasn't a fiddle. The goal, in a way, is to induce in the reader a constant "liminal" apprehension, akin to the one those watercolors cause Hollis to feel in Zero History. Suggestion of a threshold state.

A related question - what ends up cut from the final draft?

The parts that weren't a fiddle, one hopes!

Pattern Recognition is something of a response to 9/11, and Spook Country involves the economic collateral of the Iraq War. When you began writing Zero History, were you inspired by anything similarly tied to the zeitgeist?

Zero History is post global financial collapse *but business as usual*, and also post 9-11 and post Iraq *as business as usual*.

Zero History seems almost Victorian, in that the society we visit is built of separate subcultures, each of which has a specific semiotic code. The characters in Zero History imbue their clothing and their environments with an eerie intentionality. They seem to view their material possessions as almost sacramental. What do you count amongst your most important possessions - for sentimental or whatever reason?

I think we really are quite Victorian, again. I try not to imbue possessions with emotional meaning, though of course we all do to some extent. I think those characters view their *choices* as something akin to sacramental, but they don't strike me as highly materialistic people. Actually I seem to write about nomadic characters who travel light. I suspect that writing about characters' emotions around retail choices is still a major cultural taboo, for us. I find cultural taboos inherently interesting.

What’s your writing process like?

Slow and unpleasant, initially. Isolating. (Though as Bruce Sterling used to like to remind me, at least we aren't loading concrete blocks on trucks.) Whatever it is, I have little control of it. It's like being at the mercy of a very distant and rather perverse home office.
("But we never *ordered* these. What were they thinking of?")

There’s been a softening in your most recent books - there’s significantly less violence than in the Sprawl or Bridge trilogy. Threats come as implications, not as acts of violence. Is this a product of realism? Is it that you just like your characters more? I get the sense that you really like people.

I think it's a product of realism (or of naturalism, actually). I'm less inclined to resort to the ever-handy pornography of violence now, but really because *it's usually an escape*, culturally. In the way that "horror" fiction tends to be an escape from what's really horrible in our lives. A release of tension, but minus recognition. I certainly do like some people, very much. Others not so much, but that's the luck of the draw.

How do you think your present work will be received in twenty or thirty years?

As some sort of attempt to take the measure of the day I lived in.

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