It's odd how "Pattern Recognition" -- despite being only 4 years old, or maybe because it's so specifically about 2002 -- now reads like a period novel. The idea of mystery Internet footage as an exotic holy grail seems to come from a pre-Lonelygirl, pre-YouTube time.
That's true, and I'm very grateful that it came out in this tiny remaining window before the emergence of YouTube, which would have changed the whole meaning of the book. People are probably reading it today and thinking, "Whoa, what happened to YouTube, this is an alternate universe." I always like to imagine a 12-year-old reading "Neuromancer," getting 20 pages in and turning to his friend and going, "I figured out what the mystery is! What happened to all the cellphones?"
How did you discover locative art? It's a very resonant illustration of a recurring theme in your work -- the encroachment of cyberspace into physical reality.
A friend of mine had been sending me links to locative art Web sites and I found it all excessively nerdy and very conceptual. But I was drawn very strongly to the idea that the entire surface of the planet is literally divided up into a digital grid. I read about geo-caching and geo-hacking, but my needs as a storyteller were not being met. So I came up with something that was like the lowbrow version -- locative art that would be on the side of vans or as it would be done by the people whose work is in Juxtapoz magazine. And that generated [the holographic artist character] Alberto and his art, which I like a lot. The cognitive dissonance comes from the idea that this guy's using it to make memorials to River Phoenix and Helmut Newton.
Those memorials made me think of J.G. Ballard's "Crash," or the death and celebrity paintings Andy Warhol did in the early '60s.
You're right, but I never actually thought about that. They're both so big now, Warhol and Ballard -- they're so pervasive in our world. What they were doing, it's all come true.
There's always been a political dimension to your work, but "Spook Country" deals, much more than you ever have, with real-world politics.
In 2006, if you invite the zeitgeist in for tea, that's what you're going to get.
And like "Pattern Recognition," it grows out of the aftershocks of 9/11. Do you think our sense of reality -- which to an extent is the subject of all your books -- changed fundamentally after 9/11?
In "Virtual Light" and the two novels that followed it, there's an idea of nodal points in history. In the wake of 9/11, I had a very strong sense that there had been a nodal point. The direction shifted in some deep, fractal sense. I suspect that was a pretty common apprehension globally.
As for how it changed us, when I think about that, what comes to me is a time [author] Bruce Sterling and I were doing something at CNN in Atlanta. This was after the Oklahoma City bombing. We were standing there looking down into the studios. Bruce went into the gift shop and bought these two tacky-looking shot glasses and said, "I'm going to put these on top of my television set for those CNN moments." I said, "What's a CNN moment?" And he said, "When you look up and see the federal building in Oklahoma City lying in smoking ruins, that's a CNN moment. That's as contemporary a moment as we're allowed." His idea is that in order to protect ourselves, we live somewhere in the past, we keep a buffer zone of about five years between us and contemporary reality. Or we did at that point. But when a CNN moment happens we're suddenly right in the present and it's shocking and disturbing and quite remarkable, but then we withdraw again. I think that he was right, but I think that 9/11 somehow blew that out of the water. The idea of a CNN moment doesn't apply in the same way anymore.
There's obviously an element of exhilaration to something like a CNN moment -- or whatever the equivalent is now -- if it's the way we can most fully experience the present.
Absolutely. It's what Fredric Jameson called the "postmodern sublime," which he characterized as the simultaneous apprehension of dread and ecstasy. That's very much to the point in terms of the times we live in.
In both "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country," because you're dealing with real-world locales for the first time, there's a level of specificity that comes off as almost journalistic.
One of the hallmarks of cyberpunk, again according to Bruce Sterling, was hyper-specificity. It's something I really value in fiction as a reader, and I can't imagine not doing it. We live in a world of objects.
Is most of your research done online?
It depends what I'm chasing. If I find something online and it seems resonant I'll use it. Because I'm not a journalist, resonant trumps accurate every time. With online research, there's a major surf factor. I'll often go looking for one thing and by accident find something else so much cooler. That's how I found Volapük, the Russian slang for the Cyrillic approximations on American keyboards. Before I was online, I would spend a ridiculous amount of money on magazines, and I would have a six-inch stack beside my computer. Whenever the prose stopped coming I'd reach over and flip through a magazine. Magazines are by definition aggregators of novelty, so I'd get a condensed hit of what a bunch of journalists thought was novel and interesting, and often it would just spark something. The Web has taken over that function.
How do you think Google has changed your work -- not just the process of writing but the end result?
It's changed the way I view a novel as I'm working on it. It seems to me there's a sort of ghostly, spectral hypertext that surrounds any novel now. It's as though everything we write is a hypertext link. Sometimes I'll think, well, somebody's going to Google this term I just used and it's going to take them back to where I found it. And that's strange.
Someone is essentially doing a hypertext version of "Spook Country" at Node magazine, with chapter summaries and various annotations and illustrations.
Yeah, I've seen that. The amount of effort involved is a bit scary. The entries I've looked at have been remarkably accurate. Oscar Wilde said mirrors and cats are both inherently unhealthy to pay too much attention to, and I think that sort of Web site is in that category for me.
Did you do much fact-checking for the last two books, since you're dealing with real technologies in the real world?
I do try to run the version that I'm turning in to the publisher past technologically literate people to see if I've made any howling mistakes ... But I don't look at the technology that much. I look at what people do with it. That allows me to see the forest in spite of the trees. I remember the first few years after "Neuromancer," techies would write passionate diatribes about what a stupid bullshit book it was because there was never going to be enough bandwidth for this stuff to happen. I wish I'd kept those because I was perfectly ignorant of actual computer science; I made the right guess. I didn't even know what bandwidth really was, but I just assumed there would be a whole bunch more of it, very shortly, enough for the cyberspace of "Neuromancer." And here we are doing it.
There's an image of you out there as an avid technophile, which I know you've tried to dispel.
There was also an image of me as a hard-bitten Luddite and I'm not that either. For 15 years or more, it was always "That William Gibson, he only writes on a manual typewriter." I did write a couple of novels on a manual typewriter, but that was before people had PCs and I couldn't afford an electric typewriter. It wasn't a freaky, fetishistic thing. But that Gibson-the-Luddite meme became a good thing to hang a story on.
I've always felt a serious obligation to be absolutely agnostic about emergent technologies. I think a case can be made for technology being morally neutral. I think what scares people most about new technologies -- it's actually what scares me most -- is that they're never legislated into being. Congress doesn't vote on the cellular telephony initiative and create a cellphone system across the United States and the world. It just happens and capital flows around and it changes things at the most intimate levels of our lives, but we never decided to do it. Somewhere now there's a team of people working on something that's going to profoundly impact your life in the next 10 years and change everything. You don't know what it is and they don't know how it's going to change your life because usually these things don't go as predicted.
To get back to Fredric Jameson, I find that both dreadful and exhilarating.
About the writer
Dennis Lim is editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image.
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