An Interview with William Gibson
conducted by Larry McCaffery

In 1984 William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, burst onto the science
fiction scene like a supernova. The shock waves from that explosion had an
immediate impact on the relatively insular SF field. Neuromancer became the
first novel to win the triple crown- Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards-
and, in the process, virtually single-handedly launched the cyberpunk
movement. Neuromancer, with its stunning technopoetic prose surface and its
superspecific evocation of life in a sleazed-out global village of the near
future, has rapidly gained unprecedented critical and popular attention 
outside SF.

Prior to the publication of Neuromancer, Gibson had published only a half-
dozen stories (since collected in Burning Chrome [1986b]). Although several
of these display flashes of his abilities- and two of them, "Johnny Mnemonic"
and "Burning Chrome," introduce motifs and elements elaborated upon in the
later novels- clearly Neuromancer was a major imaginative leap forward for
someone who had not even attempted to write a novel previously. The sources
of all the white light and white heat being generated by this new kid on the 
block are immediately apparent from the opening words of the novel: "The sky
above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Dense,
kaleidoscopic, fast-paced, full of punked-out, high-tech weirdos, Neuromancer
depicts with hallucinatory vividness the desperate, exhilarating feel of life
in our new urban landscapes.

A number of critics have pointed out Gibson's affinities with certain earlier
innovative SF authors: comparisons with Alfred Bester's early novels, with
Philip K. Dick's midperiod fiction, and with Samuel R. Delany's Nova (1968);
Gibson's reliance on the cut-up methods and quickfire stream of dissociated
images characteristic of William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard are also 
noted. But equally significant are the influences from sources either wholly
outside SF- the hard-boiled writing of Dashiell Hammett, 1940s film noir, the
novels of Robert Stone- or only nominally connected with the field- the 
garishly intense, nightmarish urban scenes and pacings in the work of rock
musicians like Lou Reed; or the sophisticated blend of science, history, pop
culture, hip lingoes, and dark humor in Thomas Pynchon's work.

What made Neuromancer's debut so auspicious, however, was not its debts to
earlier authors, but its originality of vision, especially the fresh, rush-
of-oxygen high of Gibson's prose, with its startling similes and metaphors 
drawn from computers and other technologies, and its ability to create a
powerfully resonant metaphor- the cyberspace of the computer matrix- where
data dance with human consciousness, where human memory is literalized and
mechanized, where multi-national informations systems mutate and breed into
startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, 
mystical, and above all nonhuman. Probably as much as any first novel since
Pynchon's V. (1963), Neuromancer seemed to create a significant synthesis of
poetics, pop culture, and technology.

Although often overlooked by critics and reviewers in this regard, 
Neuromancer is also deeply rooted in human realities. Gibson's presentation 
of the surface textures of our electronic age re-creates the shock and 
sensory overload that define our experience of contemporary life, of having
grown up with VCRs, CDs, terrorists broadcasting messages on fifty-channel
video monitors, designer drugs, David Bowie and the Sex Pistols, video games,
computers. Both disturbing and playful, he also explores much deeper 
questions about the enormous impact of technology on the definition of what
it means to be human. After reading Neuromancer for the first time, I knew I
had seen the future of SF (and maybe of literature in general), and its name
was William Gibson.

Gibson's second novel, Count Zero (1986a), is set seven years in the future
of Neuromancer's world, and to some degree it retains the earlier novel's
focus on the underbelly world of computer cowboys, black market drugs, and
software. But the pace is somewhat slower, allowing Gibson more time to 
develop his characters- a mixture of eccentric lowlifes and nonconformists 
who find themselves confronting representatives of egomaniacal individuals
whose vast wealth and power result directly from their ability to control
information. More tightly controlled and easier to follow than Neuromancer,
Count Zero is nevertheless as extraordinarily rich in suggestive neologisms
and other verbal pyrotechnics; it's also a fascinating evocation of a world 
in which humanity seems to be constantly outshone by the flash and appeal of
the images and machines that increasingly seem to push people aside in their
abstract dance toward progress and efficiency.

When we spoke in August 1986 at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia,
William Gibson was working on the screenplay for Aliens III and on his third
novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which completes his cyberspace trilogy.
Mona Lisa Overdrive expands some of the implications of the two earlier
novels- for instance, the interface between the human social world and 
cyberspace is now sufficiently permeable that humans can actually die in
cyberspace; Angie Mitchell (who appeared in Count Zero) is able to tap into
the matrix without a computer; and, once again, we witness people (including
Molly from Neuromancer) struggling against having their bodies and 
imaginations manipulated by international corporations who control 
information and images to suit their own purposes. While these overlaps seem 
to make Mona Lisa Overdrive less startlingly original than the earlier works,
Gibson's experiments with prismatic storytelling methods, his ongoing 
stylistic virtuosity, and his presentation of characters possessing deeper
emotional resonances all point to a growing maturation and versatility.

Larry McCaffery: There are so many references to rock music and television in
your work that it sometimes seems your writing is as much influenced by MTV
as by literature. What impact have other media had on your sensibility?

William Gibson: Probably more than fiction. The trouble with "influence"
questions is that they're usually framed to encourage you to talk about your
writing as if you grew up in a world circumscribed by books. I've been 
influenced by Lou Reed, for instance, as much as I've been by any "fiction" 
writer. I was going to use a quote from an old Velvet Underground song- 
"Watch out for worlds behind you" (from "Sunday Morning")- as an epigraph for
Neuromancer.

LM: The breakdown of distinctions- between pop culture and "serious" culture,
different genres, different art forms- seems to have had a liberating effect
on writers of your generation.

WG: The idea that all this stuff is potentially grist for your mill has been
very liberating. This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what
postmodernism is all about. The result is a generation of people (some of
whom are artists) whose tastes are wildly eclectic- people who are hip to
punk music and Mozart, who rent these terrible horror and SF videos from the
7-11 one night and then invite you to a mud wrestling match or a poetry 
reading the next. If you're a writer, the trick is to keep your eyes and ears
open well enough to let all this in but also, somehow, to recognize
intuitively what you should let emerge in your work, how effective something
might be in a specific context. I know I don't have a sense of writing as
being divided up into different compartments, and I don't separate literature
from the other arts. Fiction, television, music, film- all provide material
in the form of images and phrases and codes that creep into my writing in
ways both deliberate and unconscious.

LM: Our culture is being profoundly transformed by technology in ways most
people are only dimly starting to realize. Maybe that's why the American
public is so fascinated with SF imagery and vocabulary- even people who don't
even know what SF stands for are responding to this stuff subliminally, in 
ads and so on.

WG: Yeah, like Escape from New York never made it big, but it's been redone a
billion times as a rock video. I saw that movie, by the way, when I was
starting "Burning Chrome" and it had a real influence on Neuromancer. I was
intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says
to Snake: "You flew the wing-five over Leningrad, didn't you?" It turns out
to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF, 
where a casual reference can imply a lot.

LM: In theory MTV could be an interesting new art form, a combination of 
advertising and avant-garde film, though it seems to be getting worse.

WG: We don't get MTV up here, but from what I've seen of it in the States, 
there was initially a feeling of adventure that you don't find in the 
established forms. But you're right- it's getting worse. So is most SF.

LM: How conscious are you about systematically developing an image or a 
metaphor when you're writing? For example, the meat puppet image in 
Neuromancer seems like the perfect metaphor for how the soft machine of our
living bodies is manipulated by outside forces. I assume you arrived at that
metaphor from listening to the cow-punk band Meat Puppets.

WG: No, I got it from seeing the name in print. I like accidents, when an
offhand line breezes by and you think to yourself, Yes, that will do. So you
put it in your text and start working with it, seeing how it relates to other
things you've got going, and eventually it begins to evolve, to branch off in
ways you hadn't anticipated. Part of the process is conscious, in the sense
that I'm aware of working this way, but how these things come to be embedded
in the text is intuitive. I don't see how writers can do it any other way. I
suppose some pick these things up without realizing it, but I'm conscious of
waiting for them and seeing where they lead, how they might mutate.

LM: Sounds like a virus.

WG: It is- and only a certain kind of host is going to be able to allow the
thing to keep expanding in an optimal way. As you can imagine, the structure
of a book like Neuromancer becomes very complicated at a certain point. It
wasn't complicated in the "admirably complex" way that you find in Pynchon's
novels, but simply in the sense that all these odds and ends started to 
affect  and infect one another.

LM: Does knowing that most readers won't recognize many of these references
bother you? Obviously, they don't have to know that "Big Science" is a song
by Laurie Anderson in order to catch the drift of what you're suggesting; but
if they do know the song, it might broaden the nature of their response.

WG: I enjoy the idea that some levels of the text are closed to most readers.
Of course, writers working in popular forms should be aware that readers 
aren't always going to respond to subtleties- thought that isn't as weird as
finding out that people are missing the whole point of what you think you're
doing, whether it's thinking you're being ironic when you're not, or being
serious when you're trying to make fun of something. When I was in England in
February, I noticed that the response to my work was markedly different;
people were referring to me as a humorist. In England they think what I'm 
doing is funny- not that I'm only being funny, but they can see that there's
a certain humor in my work.

LM: Clearly, in "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome" you were laying the
foundation for what you would do later on in Neuromancer.

WG: Yes, although I didn't think in those terms when I wrote those stories.
Actually, "Johnny Mnemonic" was the third piece of fiction I wrote, and the
only basis I had for gauging its success was that it sold. "Burning Chrome"
was written later on, and even though it got more attention than anything I'd
done before, I still felt I was four or five years away from writing a novel.
Then Terry Carr recruited me to write a book, which turned out to be 
Neuromancer. He was looking for people he thought had some promise- he'd
offer them contracts and say, "Do you want to write a book?" I said "Yes"
almost without thinking, but then I was stuck with a project I wasn't sure I
was ready for. In fact I was terrified once I actually sat down and started 
to think about what I meant. I didn't think I could fill up that many pages;
I didn't even know how many pages the manuscript of a novel was "supposed" to
have. It had been tkaing me something like three months to write a short
story, so starting a novel was really a major leap. I remember going around
asking other writers things like, "Assuming I double space everything, how 
long is a novel?" When somebody told me 300 pages, I thought, My God!

LM: What got you going with the book?

WG: Panic. Blind animal panic. It was a desperate quality that I think comes
through in the book pretty clearly: Neuromancer is fueled by my terrible fear
of losing the reader's attention. Once it hit me that I had to come up with
something, to have a hook on every page, I looked at the stories I'd written
up to that point and tried to figure out what had worked for me before. I had
Molly in "Johnny Mnemonic"; I had an environment in "Burning Chrome." So I
decided I'd try to put these things together. But all during the writing of
the book I had the conviction that I was going to be permanently shamed when
it appeared. And even when I finished it I had no perspective on what I'd 
done. I still don't, for that matter. I always feel like one of the guys
inside those incredible dragons you see snaking through the crowds in
Chinatown. Sure, the dragon is very brightly colored, but from the inside you
know the whole thing is pretty flimsy- just a bunch of old newspapers and
papier-mache and balsa struts.

LM: The world you evoke in Neuromancer struck me as being a lot like the 
underworld we find in the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett- 
sleazy, intensely vivid, full of colorful details and exotic lingoes that 
somehow seem realistic and totally artificial.

WG: It's probably been fifteen years since I read Hammett, but I remember
being very excited about how he had pushed all this ordinary stuff until is
was different- like American naturalism but cranked up, very intense, almost
surreal. You can see this in the beginning of The Maltese Falcon (1930), 
where he describes all the things in Spade's office. Hammett may have been 
the guy who turned me on to the idea of superspecificity, which is largely
lacking in most SF description, SF authors tend to use generics- "Then he got
into his space suit"- a refusal to specify that is almost an unspoken 
tradition in SF. They know they can get away with having a character arrive
on some unimaginably stange and distant planet and say, "I looked out the 
window and saw the air plant." It doesn't seem to matter that the reader has
no idea what the plant looks like, or even what it is. I think Hammett may 
have given me the idea that you don't have to write like that, even in a
popular form. But with Chandler- I never have read much of his work, and I 
never enjoyed what I did read because I always got this creepy puritanical
feeling from his books. Although his surface gloss is very brilliant, his
underlying meaning is off-putting to me.

LM: The other reason I thought of Hammett has to do with your rich, poetic
vocabulary- the futuristic slang, the street talk, the technical and 
professional jargon.

WG: I suppose I strive for an argot that seems real, but I don't invent most
of what seems like exotic or strange in the dialogue- that's just more 
collage. There are so many cultures and subcultures today that if you're 
willing to listen, you can pick up different phrases, inflections, and 
metaphors everywhere. A lot of the language in Neuromancer and Count Zero
that people think is futuristic is probably just 1969 Toronto dope dealer's
slang, or biker talk.

LM: Some of the phrases you use in Neuromancer- "flatlining" or "virus 
program"- manage to evoke some response beyond the literal.

WG: They're poetry! "Flatlining," for example, is ambulance driver slang for
"death." I heard it in a bar maybe twenty years ago and it stuck with me. A
drunken, crying ambulance driver saying, "She flatlined." I use a lot of 
phrases that seem exotic to everyone but the people who use them. Oddly 
enough, I almost never get new buzzwords from other SF writers. I heard about
"virus program" from an ex-WAC computer operator who had worked in the 
Pentagon. She was talking one night about guys who came in every day and
wiped the boards of all the video games people had built into them, and how
some people were building these little glich-things that tried to evade the
official wipers- things that would hide and then pop out and say, "Screw 
you!" before vanishing into the framework of logic. (Listening to me trying 
to explain this, it immediately becomes apparent that I have no grasp of how
computers really work- it's been a contact high for me.) Anyway, it wasn't 
until after the book came out that I met people who knew what a virus program
actually was.

LM: So your use of computers and science results more from their metaphoric
value or from the way they sound than from any familiarity with how they
actually operate.

WG: I'm looking for images that supply a certain atmosphere. Right now,
science and technology seem to be very useful sources. But I'm more 
interested in the language of, say, computers than I am in the 
technicalities. On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a
metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the
ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to
revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie
a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could
finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive
mechanism inside- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an
exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was
a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old 
record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made 
computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

LM: What many readers first notice in Neuromancer are all the cyberpunk 
elements- exotic lingoes, drugs, cyber-realities, clothes, and so on. In many
ways, though, the plot is very traditional: the down-and-out gangster who's 
been jerked around and wants to get even by pulling the big heist. Did you
make a conscious decision to attach this punked-out cyber-reality to the 
framework of an established plot?

WG: When I said earlier that a lot of what went into Neuromancer was the
result of desperation, I wasn't exaggerating. I knew I was so inexperienced 
that I would need a traditional plot armature that had proven its potential
for narrative traction. I had these different things I wanted to use, but
since I didn't have a preset notion of where I was going, the plot had to be
something I already felt comfortable with. Also, since I wrote Neuromancer
very much under the influence of Robert Stone- who's a master of a certain
kind of paranoid fiction- it's not surprising that what I wound up with was
something like a Howard Hawkes film.

LM: First novels are often the most autobiographical. Were you drawing on a 
lot of things from your own past in Neuromancer?

WG: Neuromancer isn't autobiographical in any literal sense, but I did draw 
on my sense of what people are like to develop these characters. Part of that
came from accessing my own screwed-up adolescence; and another part of it 
came from watching how kids reacted to all the truly horrible stuff happening
all around them- that unfocused angst and weird lack of affect.

LM: Did the book undergo significant changes once you knew the basic 
structure was in place?

WG: The first two-thirds was rewritten a dozen times- a lot of stylistic
changes, once I had the feel of the world, but also a lot of monkeying around
to make the plot seem vaguely plausible. I had to cover up some of the 
shabbier coincidences, for example. Also, I never had a very clear idea of
what was going to happen in the end, except that the gangsters had to score
big.

LM: Do you look for specific effects when you revise your prose?

WG: My revisions mainly involve looking for passages that "clunk." When I 
first started to write, I found that in reading for pleasure I'd become
suddenly aware that a beat had been missed, that the rhythm was gone. It's 
hard to explain, but when I go over my own writing I look for places where
I've missed the beat. Usually I can correct it by condensing my prose so that
individual parts carry more weight, are charged with more meaning; almost 
always the text gets shorter. I'm aware that this condensation process winds 
up putting off some readers. "Genre" SF readers say that Neuromancer and 
Count Zero are impossibly dense, literally impossible to read; but other SF
readers who ordinarily have no patience for "serious" fiction seem to be
turned on by what I'm doing. Now that I've gained some experience writing,
revisions take up less of my time; in fact, it's become easier to hit a level
I'm satisfied with and stay there. One of the big problems with Neuromancer
was that I had so much stuff- all this material that had been accumulating- 
that it was hard to get it into a manageable book.

LM: Has Thomas Pynchon had an influence on your work?

WG: Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In
many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture
imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a
kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of 
recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into Pynchon 
early on- I remember seeing a New York Times review of V. when it first came
out- I was just a kid- and thinking, Boy, that sounds like some really weird
shit!

LM: What was the inspiration for your cyberspace idea?

WG: I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver's version of "The Strip,"
and I was looking into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical
intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of 
those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons 
coming off the screens into the kids' eyes, neurons moving through their 
bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly 
believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with 
computers seems to develop a belief that there's some kind of actual space 
behind the screen, someplace you can't see but you know is there.

LM: From a purely technical standpoint, the cyberspace premise must have been
great to hit on simply because it creates a rationale for so many different
narrative "spaces."

WG: When I arrived at the cyberspace concept, while I was writing "Burning
Chrome," I could see right away that it was resonant in a lot of ways. By the
time I was writing Neuromancer, I recognized that cyberspace allowed for a
lot moves, because characters can be sucked into apparent realities- which
means you can place them in any sort of setting or against any backdrop. In
some ways I tried to downplay that aspect, because if I overdid it I'd have
an open-ended plot premise. That kind of freedom can be dangerous because you
don't have to justify what's happening in terms of the logic of character or
plot. In Count Zero, I wanted to slow things down a bit and learn how to do
characterization. I was aware that Neuromancer was going to seem like a
roller coaster ride to most readers- you've got lots of excitement but maybe
not much understanding of where you've been or why you were heading there in
the first place. I enjoyed being able to present someone like Virek in Count
Zero, who apparently lives in any number of "realities"- he's got the city of
Barcelona if he wants it, and an array of other possibilities, even though 
he's actually a pile of cells in a vat somewhere.

LM: Philip K. Dick was always writing about people like Virek who have so
many "reality options," so many different reproductions and illusions, that
it's difficult to know what reality is more real- the one in their heads or
the one that seems to exist outside. That's a powerful notion.

WG: Yeah, it is powerful- which is why it's such a temptation to keep pushing
once you've got a concept like cyberspace that creates an instant rationale.
I probably was a little heavy-handed in Count Zero with Bobby's mother, who's
hooked on the soaps, who lives in them, but it was just too much to resist.
Everybody asks me about Dick being an influence, but I hadn't read much of
his work before I started writing- though I've imagined a world in which 
Pynchon sold his early stories to Fantasy and Science Fiction and became an
alternate Dick.

LM: One of the issues your work raises is the way information- this "dance of
data," as you refer to it- not only controls our daily lives but may be the 
best way for us to understand the fundamental processes that control the
universe's ongoing transformation. It seems significant that mostly SF
writers are tuned to this.

WG: Information is the dominant scientific metaphor of our age, so we need to
face it, to try to understand what it means. It's not that technology has 
changed everything by transforming it into codes. Newtonians didn't see things
in terms of information exchange, but today we do. That carries over into my
suspicion that Sigmund Freud has a lot to do with steam engines- both seem to
be similar metaphors.

LM: The various ways you use the dance metaphor in Neuromancer suggests a
familiarity with the interactions between Eastern mysticism and modern 
physics.

WG: I was aware that the image of the dance was part of Eastern mysticism, 
but a more direct source was John Shirley, who was living in the East Village
and wrote me a letter that described the thing about proteins linking. That's
just another example of how pathetically makeshift everything looks from
inside the papier-mache dragon. It was the same thing with the voodoo gods in
Count Zero: a copy of National Geographic was lying around that had an 
article about Haitian voodoo in it.

LM: Back in the '60s and early '70s, most of the important New Wave SF took a
pessimistic stance toward technology and progress. Although your work has
sometimes been described as glorifying technology. I'd say it offers a more
ambivalent view.

WG: My feelings about technology are totally ambivalent- which seems to me to
be the only way to relate to what's happening today. When I write about 
technology, I write about how it has already affected our lives; I don't
extrapolate in the way I was taught an SF writer should. You'll notice in 
Neuromancer that there's obviously been a war, but I don't explain what 
caused it or even who was fighting it. I've never had the patience or the 
desire to work out the details of who's doing what to whom, or exactly when
something is taking place, or what's become of the United States. That kind
of literalism has always seemed silly to me; it detracts from the reading
pleasure I get from SF. My aim isn't to provide specific predictions or 
judgments so much as to find a suitable fictional context in which to examine
the very mixed blessings of technology.

LM: How consciously do you see yourself operating outside the mainstream of
American SF?

WG: A lot of what I've written so far is a conscious reaction to what I felt
SF- especially American SF- had become by the time I started writing in the 
late '70s. In fact, I felt I was writing so far outside the mainstream that
my highest goal was to become a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser Ballard.
I assumed I was doing something no one would like except for a few crazy
"art" people- and maybe some people in England and France, who I always 
assumed would respond to what I was doing because I knew their tastes were
very different and because the French like Dick a lot. When I was starting
out, I simply tried to go in the opposite direction from most of the stuff I
was reading, which I felt an aesthetic revulsion toward.

LM: What sorts of '70s SF did you have in mind? All those sword-and-sorcery
books or the hard SF that people like Jerry Pournelle, Gregory Benford, and
Larry Niven were writing?

WG: Some of my resistance had to do with a certain didactic, right-wing
stance that I associated with a lot of hard SF, but mainly it was a more
generalized angle of attack. I'm a very desultory reader of SF- I have been
since my big period of reading SF when I was around fifteen- so my stance was
instinctual. In the '70s, during the years just before I seriously thought
about writing SF, it seemed like the SF books I enjoyed were few and far
between. Just about everything I picked up seemed to slick, and, even worse,
uninteresting. Part of this has to do with the adolescent audience that a lot
of SF has always been written for. My publishers keep telling me the
adolescent market is where it's at, and that makes me pretty uncomfortable
because I remember what my tastes ran to at that age. One new factor around
1975 was that writers started getting these huge advances for SF books, and I
saiid to myself, Hey, you can get big money for SF. But by the time I started
writing SF, those big advances had dried up, because a lot of them had gone 
to books that had lost money. I had a sense of what the expectations of the 
SF industry were in terms of product, but I hated that product and felt such 
a genuine sense of disgust that I consciously decided to reverse
expectations, not give publishers or readers what they wanted.

LM: How would you describe the direction of your work?

WG: When I first started writing, what held me up for a long time was finding
a way to introduce the things that turned me on. I knew that when I was 
reading a text- particularly a fantastic text- it was the gratuitous moves, 
the odd, quirky, irrelevant details, that provided a sense of strangeness. So
it seemed important to find an approach that would allow for gratuitous
moves. I didn't think that what I was writing would ever "fit in" or be
accepted, so what I wanted was to be able to plug in the things that
interested me. When Molly goes through the Tessier-Ashpool's library in 
Neuromancer, she sees that they own Duchamp's Large Glass. Now that reference
doesn't make sense on some deeper symbolic level; it's really irrelevant, a
gratuitous move. But putting it there seemed right- here are these very rich
people on this space station with this great piece of art just gathering
dust. In other words, I liked the piece and wanted to get it into the book
somehow.

LM: Precisely these personal "signatures" create a texture and eventually add
up to what we call a writer's "vision." You can see this in Alfred Bester, 
whose books remind me of yours.

WG: Bester was into flash very early. When Neuromancer came out, a lot of
reviewers said that I must have written it while holding a copy of The 
Demolished Man (1953). Actually, it had been some time since I'd read Bester,
but he was one of the SF authors who had stuck with me, who seemed worthy of
imitating, mostly because I always had the feeling he had a ball writing. And
I think I know exactly what it was that produced that sense: he was a New
York guy who didn't depend on writing SF to make a living, so he really just
let loose; he didn't have to give a damn about anything other than having
fun, pleasing himself. If you want to get a sense of how groovy it could have
been to be alive and young and living in New York in the '50s, read Bester's
SF. It may be significant that when you read his mainstream novel (which is
pretty hard to find over here, but it's released in England as The Rat Race),
you can see him using the same tools he used in those two early SF books- but
somehow it doesn't work. Bester's palette just isn't suited for convincing
you that you're reading about reality.

LM: This business about realism often seems misleading. You said that 
Bester's books gave you a sense of what it felt like to be in New York at a
certain time- that's realism, though different from what you find in Zola,
Balzac or Henry James; it's the realism that cyberpunk supplies, that sense
of what it really feels like to be alive in our place, at our time.

WG: My SF is realistic in that I write about what I see around me. That's why
SF's role isn't central to my work. My fiction amplifies and distorts my
impressions of the world, however strange that world may be. One of the 
liberating aspects of SF when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to 
tune me in to all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn't as
totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy. In the
early '60s, SF was the only source of subversive information available to me.

LM: Some of that spirit of subversiveness, that sense of the strangeness of
the ordinary, is finding its way into mainstream quasi-SF novels: Ted 
Mooney's Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), Don DeLillo's White Noise 
(1985), Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro (1985), Steve Erickson's books, and recent
work by Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, Max Apple, and Stanley Elkin.

WG: Funny you should bring up Mooney's novel, because I was very jealous of
the attention it got. Easy Travel is a brilliant book, but I remember 
thinking, "Here's this guy using all these SF tropes and he's getting 
reviewed in Time." I was struck with how categories affect the way people
respond to your work. Because I'm labeled a "SF writer" and Mooney is a
"mainstream writer," people may never take me as seriously as they do him- 
even though we're both operating on some kind of SF fringe area.

LM: Your work and Mooney's share a hyperawareness that people are being
affected in all sorts of ways- psychologically, perceptually- by the constant
bombardment of sounds and other data. And you're both willing to experiment
stylistically to find a means suitable for presenting the effects of 
information overload.

WG: I'm very prone to what Mooney calls "information sickness," and I'm 
having increasing trouble dealing with it. Without doing this too 
consciously, I had set up my life to minimize input. But now that I've 
started to make it- even relatively modestly in an obscure field like SF- 
I've been bombarded with all kinds of stuff. People are coming to my home,
stuff arrives in the mail, the phone is ringing. I've got decisions to make
about movies and book jackets.

LM: One of the common, maybe simplistic comments you hear about information
overload is that the result is a kind of psychological confusion or 
dislocation. We have all this stuff coming in but we can't seem to put 
anything together so that it means anything. We're only slightly better off
than Mooney's characters, with their paralysis and convulsions.

WG: But sometimes you find you can have fun with these dislocations. When I 
said I was prone to information sickness, I meant I sometimes get off on 
being around a lot of unconnected stuff- but only certain kinds of stuff, 
which is why I'm having trouble handling the input right now. I have a 
friend, Tom Maddox, who did a paper on my work. He's known what I've been up
to for a long time- he says I display "a problematic sensitivity to semiotic
fragments." That probably has a lot to do with the way I write- stitching 
together all the junk that's floating around in my head. One of my private
pleasures is to go to the corner Salvation Army thrift shop and look at all
the junk. I can't explain what I get out of doing this. I mean, I used to 
have to spend time there as a survival thing, and even now I'll go in and
find something I want.

LM: You said you weren't really reading much SF when you started out as a 
writer. What got you started writing SF?

WG: A series of coincidences. I was at the University of British Columbia,
getting an English B.A.- I graduated in '76 or '77- because it was easier at
the time than finding a job. I realized I could get the grades I needed as an
English major to keep getting the grants I needed to avoid getting a job. 
There were a couple of months during that period when I thought very 
seriously about SF without thinking I was ever going to write it- instead, I
thought I might want to write about it. I took courses with a guy who talked
about the aesthetic politics of fascism- we were reading an Orwell essay, 
"Raffles and Miss Blandish," and he wondered whether or not there were 
fascist novels- and I remember thinking, "Reading all these SF novels has
given me a line on this topic- I know where this fascist literature is!" I
thought about working on an M.A. on this topic, though I doubt that my 
approach would have been all that earthshaking. But it got me thinking
seriously about what SF did, what it was, which traditions had shaped it and
which ones it had rejected. Form/content issues.

LM: Were there other literature classes that might have influenced your 
thinking about SF?

WG: Most of the lit classes I took went in one ear and out the other. 
However, I remember a class on American naturalism, where I picked up the
idea that there are several different kinds of naturalist novels: the mimetic
naturalist novel- the familiar version- and the crazed naturalist novel- the
kind Hammett writes, or Algren's Man with the Golden Arm (1949), where he
tries to do this realistic description of Chicago in the '40s but his take on
it is weirder than anything I did with Chiba City in Neuromancer. It's full 
of people with neon teeth, characters with pieces of their faces falling off,
stuff out of some bad nightmare. Then there's the overt horror/pain end of
naturalism, which you find in Hubert Selby's books. Maybe related in some way
to these twisted offshoots of naturalism are the books by William Burroughs
that affected SF in all kinds of ways. I'm of the first generation of 
American SF authors who had the chance to read Burroughs when we were 
fourteen or fifteen years old. I know having had that opportunity made a big
difference in my outlook on what SF- or any literature, for that matter- 
could be. What Burroughs was doing with plot and language and the SF motifs I
saw in other writers was literally mind expanding. I saw this crazy outlaw
character who seemed to have picked up SF and gone after society with it, the
way some old guy might grab a rusty beer opener and start waving it around. 
Once you've had that experience, you're not quite the same.

LM: Has the serious attention you've gotten from the SF world made you feel 
any less alienated?

WG: Yeah- everyone's been so nice- but I still feel very much out of place in
the company of most SF writers. It's as though I don't know what to do when 
I'm around them, so I'm usually very polite and I keep my tie on. SF authors
are often strange, ill-socialized people who have good minds but are still 
kids.

LM: Who among the current writers do you admire or feel some connections 
with?

WG: Bruce Sterling is certainly a favorite- he produces more ideas per page 
than anyone else around. Mare Laidlaw had a book called Dad's Nuke that I 
really enjoyed. And John Shirley, of course. I also admire Greg Bear's work,
even though his approach is much more hard SF oriented than mine. Recently I 
came across some quasi-SF books by Madison Smartt Bell- The Washington Square
Ensemble (1983) and Waiting for the End of the World (1985)- which are
wonderful, brilliant.

LM: What about Samuel Delany? His work seems to have influenced your 
generation of SF authors in important ways.

WG: There's no question about his importance, and he's obviously influenced
me. Those books he was writing when he was twenty-one or whatever were my 
favorite books when I was fifteen and plowing through all that SF. I'm pretty
sure I didn't know at the time that Delany wasn't much older than I was, but 
I think the fact that I was a kid reading books by a slightly older kid had
something to do with my sense that his books were a lot fresher than anything
else I could find.

LM: You're usually considered the leading figure of the cyberpunk movement.
Is there such a thing, or was the movement dreamed up by a critic?

WG: It's mainly a marketing strategy- and one that I've come to feel 
trivializes what I do. Tying my stuff to any label is unfair because it gives
people preconceptions about what I'm doing. But it gets complicated because I
have friends and cohorts who are benefiting from the hype and who like it. Of
course, I can appreciate that the label gives writers a certain attitude they
can rally around, feel comfortable with- they can get up at SF conventions,
put on their mirrored sunglasses, and say, "That's right, baby, that's us!"

LM: That was exactly the scene at the recent SFRA conference in San Diego.
John Shirley, decked out in a leather jacket and shades, wound up in a 
screaming match with the hard SF "Killer B's"- Brin Bear, and Benford- who
have their own identity, their own dress code.

WG: Michael Swanwick wrote an article about the split between the cyberpunks 
and the humanists. He referred to John Shirley as John-the-Baptist-of-
Cyberpunk, roaming the wilderness trying to spread the new gospel. Even 
though I don't agree with everything Swanwick wrote, I do think John has 
always had this evangelical side to him- though into spiked dog collars. No 
one was ready for his insane novels, which are unfortunately very hard to 
find. There just wasn't anything else like that being written then- no hook 
or label like cyberpunk, no opening- so they were totally ignored. If those
books were published now, people would be saying, "Wow, look at this stuff! 
It's beyond cyberpunk." Really, though, I'm tired of the whole cyberpunk
phenomenon. I mean, there's already bad imitation cyberpunk, so you know it
can only go downhill from here. All that really happened was that a bunch of
work by some new authors landed on some publisher's desks at the same time.
People didn't know what to make of us, so they gave us this tag.

LM: The cyberpunk/humanist opposition seems way off base to me. There are a 
lot of scenes in both Neuromancer and Count Zero that are very moving from a 
human standpoint. Beneath the glittery surface hardware is an emphasis on the
"meat" of people, the fragile body that can get crushed so easily.

WG: That's my "Lawrentian" take on things. It's very strange to write 
something and realize that people will read into it whatever they want. When
I hear critics say that my books are "hard and glossy," I almost want to give
up writing. The English reviewers, though, seem to understand that what I'm 
talking about is what being hard and glossy does to you.

LM: One of the scenes that sticks out for me is the one near the end of 
Neuromancer where Case is on thata beach with the woman. It's a powerful and
sad moment even though- or maybe because- we know he's in cyberspace 
imagining all this.

WG: It's great to hear someone react that way to that scene, because that
passage was the emotional crux of the book, its center of gravity. I'd like 
to think that the novel is balanced in such a way that the scene shows how
distorted everything has become from several different perspectives.

LM: Another scene that has a peculiar emotional charge is the one where Case
is trying to destroy the wasps' nest. What makes the nest seem so primal, so 
scary?

WG: The fear ofo bugs, for one thing! That scene evolved out of an experience
I had destroying a very large wasps' nest. I didn't know what was inside, 
didn't know they were "imprinted" that way, so when the nest broke open I was
astounded and scared by all the wasps. It probably also helped that I got 
stung several times.

LM: Do you consciously build a metaphor like the wasps' nest so that it 
resonates in different ways, or is the process buried in your unconscious?

WG: Once I've hit on an image, a lot of what I do involves the controlled use
of collage; I look around for ways to relate the image to the rest of the 
book. That's something I got from Burroughs's work, and to a lesser extent
from Ballard. I've never actually done any of that cut-up stuff, except for
folding a few pages out of something when I'd be stuck or incredibly bored 
and then checking later to see what came out. But I could see what Burroughs
was doing with these random methods, and why, even though the results weren't
always that interesting. So I started snipping things out and slapping them 
down, but then I'd air-brush them a little to take the edges off.

LM: Isn't that approach out of place in a field like SF, where most readers
are looking for scientific or rational connections to keep the futuristic
fantasy moving forward credibly?

WG: As I said earlier, I'm not interested in producing the kind of literalism
most readers associate with SF. This may be a suicidal admission, but most of
the time I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to the scientific
or logical rationales that supposedly underpin my books. Apparently, though,
part of my skill lies in my ability to convince people otherwise. Some of the
SF writers who are actually working scientists do know what they're talking
about; but for the rest of us, to present a whole world that doesn't exist 
and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. 
That's just the act of all good writing.

LM: Are you interested in developing a futuristic, Faulknerian Yoknapatawpha 
County in which everything you write will be interconnected in a single 
fictional world?

WG: No- it would look too much like I was doing one of those Stephen R.
Donaldson things. People are already asking me how many of these books I'm
going to write, which gives me a creepy sensation because of the innate
sleaziness of so much SF publishing. When you're not forced to invent a new
world from scratch each time, you find yourself getting lazy, falling back on
the same stuff you used in an earlier novel. I was aware of this when I was
finishing Neuromancer, and that's why, near the end, there's an announcement 
that Case never saw Molly again. That wasn't directed so much at the reader 
as at me. If you had told me seven years ago that I would write a SF trilogy,
I would have hung myself in shame. Posthaste.

LM: The obsession today with being able to reproduce a seemingly endless 
series of images, data, and information of all sorts is obviously related to 
capitalism and its drive for efficiency; but it also seems to grow out of our 
fear of death, a desire for immortality. The goals of religion and 
technology, in other words, may be closer than we think.

WG: I can see that. But this isn't something that originated with 
contemporary technology. If you look at any of the ancient temples, which 
were the result of people learning to work stone with the technology 
available to them, what you'll find are machines designed to give those 
people immortality. The pyramids and snake mounds are time machines. This 
kind of application of technology seems to run throughout human culture.

LM: You didn't start college until the mid-1970's. What were you doing during
the late '60s and early '70s?

WG: Virtually nothing. My father was a contractor back in the '40s; he made a
bunch of money installing flush toilets for the Oak Ridge projects and went 
on to the postwar, pre-Sun Belt building boom in the South. He died when I 
was about eight, and my mother decided to move the family back to this little 
town in Virginia where they had bookish, geekish, can't-hit-the-baseball kind
of kid. Then I went to boarding school in Tucson, where I was exposed to 
urban kids and where I encountered the first wave of hippies pouring over the 
land from San Francisco. They were older than I was, and they were really 
into some cool stuff. Eventually, I got kicked out of boarding school for
smoking pot. I went back to Virginia, but my mother had died and my relatives 
weren't particulary sympathetic to my style. So I spent some time bumming 
around. I more or less convinced my draft board that they didn't want me; in 
any case, they didn't hassle me, and in 1968 I left for Toronto without even
knowing that Canada would be such a different country. I wound up living in a
community of young Americans who were staying away from the draft.

LM: Was it pretty much an underground scene? Did it contribute to your 
novels?

WG: I'm sure it did, in terms of supplying me with some of the offbeat 
language I use. But to describe it as an "underground scene" would seem funny 
to anyone who knew me and what was going on. It was really pretty tame 
compared to what was happening in a lot of places; it was a soft-core version 
of the hippie/underground street scene, nothing heavy. I did have the small-
town kid's fascination with watching criminal things. No question, though, 
that it made a lasting impression on me. Those were portentous days. Nobody 
knew what was going to happen.

LM: You weren't giving much thought at that point to being a writer?

WG: Only occasionally. Like a lot of other people, I felt I was living in an
age in which everything was going to change very radically, so why make 
career plans? When things didn't get different, except maybe worse, I 
retreated. I went to Europe and wandered around there for a year- I had 
enough income from my parents' estate to starve comfortably. I came back to 
Canada because my wife, Deb, wanted to finish a B.A., and we moved to 
Vancouver so she could attend UBC. When Deb began work on an M.A. in 
linguistics, I realized that higher education was a good scam. If I hadn't 
wandered into SF, I'd be totally unemployable.

LM: Are you interested in trying your hand at non-SF soon, maybe breaking out
of the SF ghetto into the mainstream's mean street?

WG: I am, because I'm afraid of being typecast if I make SF my permanent 
home. But what seems important right now is finding my way out of what I'm 
doing without losing a sense of what it is I'm doing. I don't want to go back 
and start over. I have glimpses of how this might be done, but it's a lateral
move that has become increasingly difficult to make. It's taken as gospel 
among SF writers that to get out of SF once you've made a name in it is 
virtually impossible: "The clout isn't transferable."

LM: That's ironic, given all the mainstream writers doing quasi-SF. Not to 
mention the Latin American fabulists.

WG: I envy the Latin American writers because they can do what they want. In 
America, it seems like these influences mostly travel in one direction- 
mainstream writers borrow from SF, but SF writers seem locked into 
provincialism. When I was in England, I thought it was interesting that their 
community of SF writers was enthusiastic about Latin American fabulism. But 
few people in the equivalent American SF community seem remotely familiar 
with it.

LM: What can you tell me about your next novel? Have you started work on it 
yet?

WG: I'm supposed to be working on it, but as you can see by this household's 
sublime sense of peace and order, it's tough going right now. It's called 
Mona Lisa Overdrive and it's not a linear sequel to Count Zero- in fact, it 
bears the same relationship to Count Zero that Count Zero did to Neuromancer, 
in that each book takes place seven years after the previous one. You glimpse 
some of the same people, but fourteen years is a long time in a world like 
this, where things change so fast you can hardly recognize anything from 
minute to minute. When I was doing Count Zero, I had initially intended to 
pursue what was going to happen to Mitchell's daughter; that seemed like an 
interesting thread to follow. But I was so anxious to finish the book, so 
tired of working on it, that I talked myself out of making any judgments 
about it. It nagged at me, though; I kept wondering what happened to her. 
She's a permanent interface with the voodoo gods and she's also obviously 
going to be the next Superstar. Somehow, though, that wasn't enough to get me 
going. Then I spent a weekend at the Beverly Hills Hotel with some producers, 
an eye-opening trip. Coming back on the plane, it struck me that for the 
first time I had actually gotten to see some of the stuff I had been writing
about. I had another book I was supposed to start, but when I got back to 
Vancouver I phoned the agents and told them I wanted to do Mona Lisa 
Overdrive instead.

LM: The Japanese settings you've used, notably in Neuromancer, seem right in 
all sorts of ways. Was any of that based on personal experience?

WG: "Terry and the Pirates" probably had more to do with it than personal
experience. I've never been to Japan, but my wife has been an ESL teacher for
a long time, and since the Japanese can most afford to send their teenagers 
over here to study English, there was an extended period when this stream of 
Japanese students turned up in Vancouver- I'd meet them a week off the plane, 
see them when they were leaving, that sort of thing. Also, Vancouver is a 
very popular destination for Japanese tourists- for example, there are 
special bars here that cater exlusively to the Japanese, and almost no one 
else goes into them because the whole scene is too strange. I'm sure I got a 
lot of this in when I wrote Neuromancer. Of course, the Japanese have really 
bought the whole cyberpunk thing. It's as if they believe everything Bruce 
Sterling has written about it! It's frightening. But one of the things they 
seem to like about my work is that I don't try to invent Japanese names- I 
got the street names from a Japan Air Lines calendar. And I got lucky with 
the geography. I didn't even know where Chiba was when I wrote Neuromancer- 
all that stuff about it being on a peninsula and across a bay came out of my 
head- so I was really sweating when the book came out. But then I got a map 
and there was Chiba- on a peninsula! on a bay! Life imitates art. The only 
culture I've seen firsthand that might have influenced Neuromancer was 
Istanbul, which had a big impact on me even though I was only there for a 
week or so. Another place that affected my writing was the East Village, 
which John Shirley introduced me to in 1980. Nothing had prepared me for what 
I encountered when I stepped out into the street. The buildings were papered 
with Xerox art as high up as people could reach. From the point of view of 
somebody who'd been living in a place like Vancouver, the whole scene was 
total chaos and anarchy. It was weird and frightening and interesting all at 
the same time.

LM: Do you sometimes wish you lived in New York or Los Angeles so you could 
draw on the strangeness more directly?

WG: If I lived in a place like that, I'd write about unicorns. I'll leave 
well enough alone for now.


