William Gibson on the Past and Future

Somehow, cyberspace and the real world switched places.

By Marion Long|Monday, July 30, 2007

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In 1984, Neuromancer by William Gibson became the first novel to win the
three top prizes for science fiction (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K.
Dick awards). It established a new literary subgenrecyberpunk, or digital,
fictionand helped inspire the Matrix film trilogy. In his debut novel, Gibson
coined the term cyberspace and described the Internet and virtual reality
long before they were part of the cultural landscape. In subsequent works,
such as Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtual Light,
and Pattern Recognition, he continued his habit of prescience, forecasting
developments in such complex and diverse fields as nanotechnology, identity
theft, 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 Countrya high-style political techno-thriller out this
monthactually takes place in the (very recent) past, February 2006. The
affable and thought-provoking writer talked with DISCOVER from his home in
Vancouver, British Columbia.

The publicity materials call Spook Country a contemporary novel of political

paranoia. Do you agree?
To the extent that its an American novel of its time, I think its necessarily a
novel of political paranoia. Cyberpunks got it right. In Neuromancer
although its never dated in the book, I always assumed it was happening

around 2035you glimpse the United States, and its not that great a place.
There doesnt seem to be any middle class. Theres nothing between these
post-human superrich people and the Street, with a capital S. Nobodys ever
more than one door away from the Street. Its quite grim and maybe its
become a kind of clich, but on the other hand, its exactly like Mexico City.
Its really similar to a lot of the Third World. And so I think that the cyberpunk
future, if you want to generalize it, is a future in which globalization really
does work both ways, and everybodyunless theyre very, very, very rich
winds up getting to be part of the Third World.

How do you account for your ability to identify and write about things before
other people perceive them?
It sometimes must have involved leaps of induction that I wasnt conscious of.
And the way I experience it myself, its 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 everybody would have one of those, and from that,
knowing nothing about the technology and all the things they would have to
overcome to get there, I just took it for granted that everybodys machine
would be connected with everybody elses and that theyd be typing to 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 theyd built, and I knew some of those guys, and I
would talk to them and say, Yeah, theyre going to hook them all up, and
then, and then. . . . And they would always say: But theres not enough
bandwidth! I never knew what bandwidth was, and I probably dont really
know today, but I just knew that they were wrongthat it wasnt going to
matter about the bandwidth. It was amazing to me: These guys were so
smart, so technical. They were doing this stuff, but they couldnt see its
potential.

How do you think computer media are affecting our unconscious minds? Do
you think that affects peoples creativity for either good or bad?
It must be having amazing effects on younger people, and Im sure that its
having amazing effects on me, Im just not sure what they are. Think of the
people on, say, something like LiveJournal, who are totally exposing
themselves to their friends, who are like 22 years old, and they dont know
any different, and where is that going to go? Where is that going to go when
those people start writing more novels? Its going to be different. I think that

maybe with what Ive done with writing these very speculative novels of the
very recent past, I may be able to sit down and try to look at MySpace and all
of that and see where it feels like that goes. Although I dont know; it may be
too generationally specific.

Do you see any positive trend in current society that gives you hope that if
we can no longer live without the Matrix, we might live with it more as the
character Neo doeswe live with it but are not enslaved by it?
The Internet gives me hope that way every day. I think thats the big one for
me. I think if we didnt have that, I cant even imagine where we would be
now. To me, the Internet is as basic a thing for humanity to be doing as, say,
cities have been. Its that primal, that important, maybe more so. I think its a
fundamentally new way of doing a lot of things that weve always done, and
its also such a fertile ground for so many things that weve never really done
at all.

If you could build a little binary time-travel switch between 2007 and 1967,
and you toggle back and forth, the biggest difference is the Internet. And its
one of the things that you just couldnt have imagined from 1967. Thats a
very interesting thought experiment, by the way. I recommend that to
anyone: Sit down and choose a yearit doesnt have to be 1967, of course,
but it only really works if you choose a year in your own lifeand compare it
to your sense of where the present is and look at the difference. What most
people experience when they do that is vertigo. It scares them. They say,
Oh, its really changed a lot, and suddenly feel like they aint seen nothing
yet.

Early on, you were fascinated by how people related to their machines. How
do you see the relationship between man and machine progressing?
Theres a blip of that in Spook Country, where theyre sitting around in the
coffee shop in Los Angeles and one of the virtual reality art people says,
Cyberspace turned itself inside out. By turning itself inside out, the digital
has become the constant; its becoming where we all are, all the time. And
really the exotic and kind of weirdly unexplored area is the part of our lives
that isnt online, that for some reason cant be online.

So in that sort of scenario, people might be in some ways personalizing and

fetishizing their hardware. Think about it: Youve got all this junk lying around
thats got really neat pieces inside it that are capable of all sorts of things
you might as well try to get in there and see what it actually does. Otherwise,
youre just living in this kind of molded little corporate surface world, where
they are giving you a pretty little box and you dont know whats inside. And
the truth is, theres power inside.