Now romancer

William Gibson has been hailed as a prophet and a futurist, but his eye is on the present moment. He talks to Salon about virtual readings, emerging technology and his new novel -- set in 2006.

By Dennis Lim

Read more: Books, Technology & Business, Cyberpunk, Science Fiction, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

Salon composite / Photo: Michael O'Shea

Aug. 11, 2007 |

In William Gibson's 2003 novel "Pattern Recognition," there is a line that alludes to, among other things, the plight of the science fiction writer in the early 21st century. "Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day," a marketing mogul theorizes, "one in which 'now' was of some greater duration."

"Pattern Recognition" was Gibson's first immersion in the contemporary world. Its quasi-sequel, the newly published "Spook Country," establishes his allegiance to the here and now. The shift from future to present dystopias is a logical one for this one-time cyberpunk, who turned 59 this year. For all the fetishistic detail of his sleek, compact, minutely observant prose, Gibson has always been a big-picture diagnostician par excellence. Like few other authors, sci-fi or not, he grasps with intuitive clarity the psychic and cultural implications of the technologies in our lives.

The aforementioned ad exec, a maxim-spouting Belgian evocatively named Hubertus Bigend, provides a link between the two books. In "Pattern Recognition," Bigend funded a professional cool-hunter's quest for the mystery auteur behind a rash of video clips that anonymously surfaced on the Internet. In "Spook Country," his latest project is a Wired-like start-up magazine called Node, for which he hires Hollis Henry, indie-rock cult star turned freelance journalist, to write a feature on "locative art," a brand of site-specific installation that utilizes virtual reality holography and GPS technology. Other players negotiating the labyrinth include a Cuban-Chinese data trafficker who worships the saints of Santeria and an Ativan addict forcibly recruited into espionage by a possible CIA-affiliated thug.

Set in the summer of 2002, "Pattern Recognition" perfectly approximated the aching dissonance of the post-9/11 moment. "Spook Country," which takes place in the spring of 2006, is another vivid freeze frame, registering the particular confusion and anxiety of our ethereal, uncertain now. Speaking by phone from Seattle, the first stop of his book tour, Gibson talked to Salon about virtual readings, the Google-era novel, and post-9/11 reality.

You recently did a reading in the virtual world of Second Life, where you are a kind of patron saint. I got shut out -- I didn't realize capacity would be an issue -- but I caught up with it afterward on YouTube. Did the event turn out as you'd expected?

Apparently there's always finite space in Second Life. I was actually in a room at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver with a live audience so I wasn't paying much attention to the Second Life aspect, which is probably a good thing in terms of my performance. I had a laptop open so I could see it as if I was watching from within Second Life. What I saw I found a bit distracting -- people levitating and sitting on top of the microphone.

How much time had you spent in Second Life by yourself?

Just a couple of hours. I think it only works if you're hooked up socially. Otherwise it's like walking around outside a shopping mall in Edmonton, Alberta, at 4 in the morning in December. You never see anybody and if you do, chances are they run away.

Some people have called Second Life the fulfillment of your vision of cyberspace. Does it at all resemble what you had in mind in 1984 when you wrote about a "consensual hallucination" in "Neuromancer"?

It is and it isn't the vision I had. It's what the characters in my early novels would call a "construct" -- that was a word I used before virtual reality was around. I did imagine constructs where people could appear in avatar form. And in "Idoru," I imagined these teenage girls leading virtual lives in abandoned corporate Web sites which they'd taken over and altered to build themselves a hideout. Those are the two things in my fiction closest to Second Life, but they're not really anything like it. It never would have occurred to me to write something about a corporation building a virtual world in which shopping and real estate were two of the most popular activities. It sounds like too conventional a science-fiction novel.

It seems like the word that used to pop up most in reviews of your work was "prophetic." Now that you've shifted to writing about the world we live in, it's "zeitgeist."

That would have been more accurate all along. From the start, what I've tried is to have a sense of the potential of the present moment. Which is really not the same as knowing the future.

I'd always been resistant to our cultural assumptions about science fiction -- that it's predictive and it's about the future. All science fiction is in one way or another about the moment in which it's written, even if the people who write it don't know that. My fourth, fifth and sixth novels were written in the early '90s but take place around 2007. Not only is it a world that now could never have happened but the characters, and this was a deliberate decision, act and talk like people from the '90s. I would always say, I could set one of these in the present and it wouldn't feel that different. I finally decided with "Pattern Recognition" to call myself on it and see if I could do it. It proved much harder and more disorienting than I had imagined it would be.

Does your decision to write explicitly about the present have to do with the nature of our particular moment? Is there something about this point in time that demands closer scrutiny than the present (by which I mean 1984) of "Neuromancer"?

I basically agree with Mr. Bigend in "Pattern Recognition" when he argues that our present has become so unutterably brief and ever-changing that we have no ground upon which we can stand and project a future historical arc as H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein were able to. The short form of that is, none of us know what the hell is going to happen next.

If I'd gone into a publisher's office in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a lethal, sexually transmitted virus that was going to take down huge numbers of human beings, and in that same world, it was determined that we'd completely thrown the climate of the planet out of whack -- not only would they not have bothered but they probably would have called security. No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel "The Sheep Look Up," has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.

You said you thought "Pattern Recognition" was a stand-alone book when it came out. Did you have a sense when you started working on "Spook Country" that it would be so directly connected?

Not at first. But you know, there's a part of me that is a terrible storyteller. If someone forced me to sit down and make up the plot of a novel, it would be the worst thing you'd ever read. I know that from my bad experience at Hollywood pitch meetings. The novels I write come from aspects of myself that I don't have any conscious access to most of the time. I actually have to be a bit crazy in a clearly benevolent, mostly controlled sort of way.

In your work you've always emphasized the subversive uses of new technologies. Would you say that potential has faded, given how quickly things are now co-opted and corporatized?

I think there's still evidence to the contrary, if you just look at BoingBoing on any given day. I used to worry that there was no more territory in which bohemias could grow, but now I think they grow best on the Web. You don't need a physical neighborhood where everybody's into the same outfit and drug of choice. You can't really do that anymore because it gets marketed back to you as soon as you try it, but on the Web I think you still can.

Next page: What do you get when you invite the zeitgeist for tea?