William Gibson on the Past and Future

Somehow, cyberspace and the real world switched places.

by Marion LongIn 1984,

by William Gibsonbecame the first novel to win the three top prizes for science fiction (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards). Itestablished a new literary subgenre—“cyberpunk,” or digital, fiction—and helped inspirethe Matrix film trilogy. In his debut novel, Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” anddescribed the Internet and virtual reality long before they were part of the culturallandscape. In subsequent works, such as

Count Zero

Mona Lisa Overdrive

JohnnyMnemonic

Virtual Light

, and

Pattern Recognition

, he continued his habit of prescience,forecasting developments in such complex and diverse fields as nanotechnology, identitytheft, virtual art, computer viruses, and information control.Oddly, Gibson, a former English major, knows little about computers or technology of any kind. And he has always insisted that his fiction was a way to comment on the present day and not to suggest the future. Indeed, his latest work,

Spook Country

—ahigh-style political techno-thriller out this month—actually takes place in the (veryrecent) past, February 2006. The affable and thought-provoking writer talked withDISCOVER from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The publicity materials call

Spook Country

“a contemporary novel of politicalparanoia.” Do you agree?

To the extent that it’s an American novel of its time, I think it’s necessarily a novel of political paranoia. Cyberpunk’s got it right. In

Neuromancer

—although it’s never dated inthe book, I always assumed it was happening around 2035—you glimpse the UnitedStates, and it’s not that great a place. There doesn’t seem to be any middle class. There’snothing between these post-human superrich people and the Street, with a capital S. Nobody’s ever more than one door away from the Street. It’s quite grim and maybe it’s become a kind of cliché, but on the other hand, it’s exactly like Mexico City. It’s reallysimilar to a lot of the Third World. And so I think that the cyberpunk future, if you wantto generalize it, is a future in which globalization really does work both ways, andeverybody—unless they’re very, very, very rich—winds up getting to be part of the ThirdWorld.

How do you account for your ability to identify and write about things before otherpeople perceive them?

It sometimes must have involved leaps of induction that I wasn’t conscious of. And theway I experience it myself, it’s like pattern recognition. Something fits in a certain way.For instance, I remember the first time I saw a picture of a personal computer of any

kind: It was sort of portable-looking, and it had a little handle. I knew that everybodywould have one of those, and from that, knowing nothing about the technology and allthe things they would have to overcome to get there, I just took it for granted thateverybody’s machine would be connected with everybody else’s and that they’d be typingto one another, or whatever it was they did. In that regard, I guess I got it right, but I think I got it right because of the profundity of my ignorance. Because when I was doing that,there were guys who already had their own kind of Radio Shack computers that they’d built, and I knew some of those guys, and I would talk to them and say, “Yeah, they’regoing to hook them all up, and then, and then. . . .” And they would always say: “Butthere’s not enough bandwidth!” I never knew what bandwidth was, and I probably don’treally know today, but I just knew that they were wrong—that it wasn’t going to matter about the bandwidth. It was amazing to me: These guys were so smart, so technical. Theywere doing this stuff, but they couldn’t see its potential.

How do you think computer media are affecting our unconscious minds? Do youthink that affects people’s creativity for either good or bad?

It must be having amazing effects on younger people, and I’m sure that it’s havingamazing effects on me, I’m just not sure what they are. Think of the people on, say,something like LiveJournal, who are totally exposing themselves to their friends, who arelike 22 years old, and they don’t know any different, and where is that going to go?Where is that going to go when those people start writing more novels? It’s going to bedifferent. I think that maybe with what I’ve done with writing these very speculativenovels of the very recent past, I may be able to sit down and try to look at MySpace andall of that and see where it feels like that goes. Although I don’t know; it may be toogenerationally specific.

Do you see any positive trend in current society that gives you hope that if we can nolonger live without the Matrix, we might live with it more as the character Neo does —we live with it but are not enslaved by it?

The Internet gives me hope that way every day. I think that’s the big one for me. I think if we didn’t have that, I can’t even imagine where we would be now. To me, the Internet isas basic a thing for humanity to be doing as, say, cities have been. It’s that primal, thatimportant, maybe more so. I think it’s a fundamentally new way of doing a lot of thingsthat we’ve always done, and it’s also such a fertile ground for so many things that we’venever really done at all.To me, the Internet is as basic a thing for humanity to be doing as cities have been. It’s that primal.If you could build a little binary time-travel switch between 2007 and 1967, and youtoggle back and forth, the biggest difference is the Internet. And it’s one of the things thatyou just couldn’t have imagined from 1967. That’s a very interesting thought experiment, by the way. I recommend that to anyone: Sit down and choose a year—it doesn’t have to be 1967, of course, but it only really works if you choose a year in your own life—andcompare it to your sense of where the present is and look at the difference. What most