Salon.com > William Gibson

William Gibson: I really can’t predict the future

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

On the Toronto stop of his book tour this month, William Gibson was asked by an earnest 20-something reader for advice: “Give my generation whatever you think is helpful for it to survive.” Where an author with an inflated sense of self-worth might have dispensed a few pearls of wisdom, Gibson replied that one should distrust people on stages offering programs for how to build the future.

As much as people look to Gibson as a prophet, the science-fiction writer who invented the term “cyberspace” (in the 1982 short story “Burning Chrome”) helped conceptualize the ways we interact with the Web (in 1984’s "Neuromancer" and later works) and foretold the explosion of reality TV (in 1993’s "Virtual Light") is notoriously reluctant to predict the future. The title of his new collection of journalism and essays, "Distrust That Particular Flavor," is taken from a piece on H.G. Wells where Gibson explains his suspicion of “the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever.” Though he’s often able to extrapolate from the present with great prescience, Gibson prefers to probe, not prescribe.

William Gibson jacks into Google’s cool menace

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:22:00 +0000

I don't like William Gibson's Op-E d piece on Google in today's New York Times merely because, barely a week after I went all Jeremy Bentham Panopticonic on the cat bin lady, he writes that "Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn't really suit an entity like Google." Even though it's kind of a put-down (perennial!), still, great minds think almost alike, right?

Nor am I content just to revel in the crispness of his prose:

Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information.

That's some nice work. It doesn't matter what the format is, tweet, Op-Ed column or novel; the man knows what he is about with the English language. (Seriously, Gibson tweets like a cyborg-Mozart. He's unstoppable!)

Remembering Thomas M. Disch

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:49:00 +0000

Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction's New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term "speculative fiction." His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias "Camp Concentration" and "334" are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, "On Wings of Song," a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and limits of transcendence through art.

Now romancer

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:03:00 +0000

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.

Lawbreakers, paradigm shifters, opportunity scoffers and letter writers

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 19:45:00 +0000

Some of today's must reads:

Justin Rood at TPMMuckraker has an item about a report, due later this week from House Judiciary Democrats, concluding that "the Bush administration may have broken over two dozen federal laws and regulations -- some of them multiple times." The committee's Democratic minority could end up in the majority come November, Rood reminds us -- which means that the report's several hundred pages and thousand footnotes might serve as more than just cries in the wilderness.

The science fiction writer William Gibson finds a reason for "the apparently literal impossibility of explaining the fundamentally counterproductive nature of the United State's invasion of Iraq, or of what's currently going on in Lebanon, to those who disagree." It all goes back to Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and the blindness that changing paradigms induces.

Nodal point

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 00:09:00 +0000

"You're experiencing apophenia," William Gibson tells me, near the end of an interview.

I had just asked him what the significance is of the fact that Cayce Pollard, the protagonist in his new novel, "Pattern Recognition," has a first name that sounds exactly like that of Case, the protagonist in Gibson's first novel, "Neuromancer." Has he, in some obscure way, come full circle? "Neuromancer" unleashed a vision of the future that has become more real ever since the novel was published; "Pattern Recognition" is set in the very recent past, in a world that becomes more bizarre and unreal the closer you look at it.

But Gibson denies that there is any significance. It's just coincidence. I'm just being apophenic.

As defined by Gibson in "Pattern Recognition," apophenia is "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things." In other words: Recognizing patterns that aren't actually there.

There is no connection between Cayce and Case; no meaningfulness. Gibson explains that as part of his novelist craft, he goes through a complicated artistic ritual in order to summon his characters out of the ether. In this ritual, coming up with the right name is the crucial first step. And the process by which he came up with Cayce, he declares, had nothing to do with Case. "Cayce" was its own "found object" -- much as the name Case, from "Neuromancer," was also a found object, inspired originally by Case pocketknives.

Riding shotgun with William Gibson

Wed, 07 Feb 2001 20:07:00 +0000

Sitting in the back of a limousine, alternately smoking a cigarette or smiling at the unexpected results of his own eloquence, William Gibson looks comfortable. That's a good thing, too, since the vast majority of "No Maps For These Territories" -- an 88-minute documentary about the science-fiction author that screened at this year's Slamdance festival -- is shot, literally, on the road.

As he reclines, protected by his seatbelt, and occasionally, by a pair of dark sunglasses, he exists in nowheresville. We don't know where Gibson's going or where he's been. Every now and then we glimpse a freeway sign or some shimmery neon. Director Mark Neale also likes to play visual tricks -- overlaying images across the car windows that are obviously not the local landscape. Neale has a background in music video, and he employs plenty of MTV jumpiness to illustrate his narrative. The general effect is unsettling -- we're always moving, but never getting anywhere. But the technique also helps concentrate the viewer on what's important -- Gibson's words: his elaborations on the act of writing, his personal history, drugs, religion, pornography and, of course, the Internet, or, to use the word that most everybody knows by now Gibson coined, cyberspace.

“All Tomorrow's Parties” by William Gibson

Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

William Gibson is so secure in his status as a prophet of the digital age that it's easy to forget he's been publishing novels for just 15 years -- about as long as the Apple Macintosh has been around. But the computer revolution is all the history Gibson needs for his books; he combines it with old-fashioned notions of character and suspense and skews his novels hyperkinetically forward in time. A futurist who plays games with the present, Gibson imbues his stories with elements of technology both recognizable and unfathomable.

In his first novel, "Neuromancer," he explored the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace (he coined the word himself, in a 1981 short story), navigated by hackers and elegant forms of artificial intelligence who appear as ghosts in the machine. "Idoru" (1996) is set in 21st century Tokyo, where Rez, the lead singer in a rock band, becomes engaged to a pop singer named Rei Toei, a synthetic "idoru" simulated holographically by software agents. Rez's personal security detail hires Net runner Colin Laney, who can detect obscure patterns in electronic data and thereby predict aspects of the future, to ease their worries about the strange nuptials.

In defense of science fiction

Tue, 25 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time -- about a century ago -- something happened in the world of books that, for a while, boded no ill. H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse and Edgar Rice Burroughs consciously invented (along with a lot of other writers like Robert Louis Stevenson or Bram Stoker who didn't have a clue) the kind of story we now think of when we think of popular genres: detective stories, science fiction, horror, superman adventures, etc. These writers, responding to insatiable demands for copy from the sharp editors who ran up-and-coming new magazines, created stories that could be repeated: Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan are nothing if they don't happen again and again. They created markets, and they created, only half unwittingly, the monster of the Demand for the Same.

In doing so, Wells and Doyle and their colleagues laid the foundations for the world of literature we live in now. In 1999, most of what most of us read is genre. Sometimes this is obvious -- science fiction, which is what I'm most concerned about, has for many decades now been stigmatized as a genre literature that adults needn't bother with. Sometimes the formula is not so obvious. Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre. They can be read in public by adults, not because they are particularly worth being read in public by adults, but because they carry no mark of Cain.