Addicted To Noise 10/96:
William Gibson on Neuromancer, crack, the Net, rock 'n' roll and his latest book, Idoru, in which he investigates the mechanisms of celebrity in the modern age.
By Michael Goldberg
The voice at the other end of the phone was all charm, from the South by way of Vancouver, B.C.. I took a seat in the lobby of the posh Clift Hotel. I drank coffee, a tall Starbucks' Misto, from a cardboard cup. And I thought about the man I was about to meet...
Gibson. William Gibson. Celebrated novelist. The man who coined the term "cyberspace." Treated like a rock star by Wired. Sent to interview U2 some years back by Details. Recently asked to write about the Net by the New York Times.
At 48, Gibson has just published his fifth novel, Idoru (the Japanese word for idol). And so he is here, in San Francisco for a few days before heading on to the next city. Traveling the book promotion circuit, moving from one first class hotel to another, picked up by a limo and driven from interview to book store, book store to interview. Gibson is not the first to benefit from the '90s concept of author-as-celebrity, but he is, 12 years after the publication of Neuromancer, the novel that made him a star, certainly accustomed to the fine art of late '90s book promotion. "Writers are people who work away in the basement by themselves," he'll tell me shortly. But this, this book promotion thing, "is like being a rock star, only without the parties."
He'll also tell me, before the actual interview starts, about his first real brush with selling books--his books--over the Net. Just yesterday, Gibson showed up for an in-store appearance at a book store. Not many people were there. He inquired as to what kind of publicity had been done. Not much out in the real world, so to speak. But plenty online. He was then shown a pile of books that had been ordered over the Net, which he had to sign. More books than he had ever had to sign at any in-store appearance before.
After Neuromancer, Gibson wrote two more books that were loosely related to his first one: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Then he made a somewhat abrupt shirt away from the exaggerated cartoon-style of those first three and, in 1993, published Virtual Light. It's clear that Gibson is intent on evolving his art; he has no interest in being pigeon-holed as a Sci-Fi genre writer, and with both Virtual Light and Idoru, he has demonstrated that he shouldn't be.
I looked at my watch. I was due upstairs in five minutes. I headed for the elevator.
One thing Gibson's brilliant new book is about is a rock star named Rez (half of the group Lo/Rez), based in Japan who has come up with the seemingly crazy idea of wanting to marry a virtual idoru, a female computer generated media star. Colin Laney, a man with the peculiar talent of being able to sift through info and create a dead-on portrait of the emotional state of the person who generated that data, is hired to find out what, or who, has gotten to Rez. Meanwhile Chia Pet McKenzie, age 14, a big Lo/Rez fan, heads for Japan on behalf of her Lo-Rez fan club friends to see if those rumors on the Net of the Rez/idoru marriage are fact or fiction.
Gibson is tall (6-foot-6) and skinny, dressed in black jeans and a dark blue shirt, his curly hair slightly on the shaggy side. He wore glasses and was even more charming in person than he was on the phone. He spoke with a Southern drawl, offered his hand as he invited me in.
His unfinished breakfast sat on a tray on a table next to the window in the suite. He takes his interviews seriously. As we began to talk, his fax machine started whirring. There was a laptop of some sort. Gibson doesn't use email, as he's told many an interviewer. It is the fax machine, that is his piece of technology of choice, although he now surfs the net infrequently. He laughed at the absurdities of modern day life as they came up in conversation.
I must confess this: interviewing William Gibson felt very strange. I was running a Mini-Disc recorder with a microphone aimed at his face. I was holding a Hi-8 video camera, pointed at Gibson, with it's own, large microphone sticking out at him. Half-way through the interview, ATN chief photographer Jay Blakesberg and his assistant arrived. And as the interview continued, Blakesberg clicked away, before eventually taking the author out into the hallway where he had set up a makeshift studio complete with spotlights and strobes.
It's not just an interview, it's a multimedia event.
It felt like we were documenting his every move. How strange for the man who has just written a book about the weirdness of celebrity.
I spent an hour and a half with William Gibson. Here is what I found out:
Addicted To Noise: One of the things your new book, Idoru, is about is a rock star who wants to marry a virtual star. Where did that idea come from?
William Gibson: Well, I have run across somewhere the story, apparently true story, of a real idoru in Japan who hadn't existed, hadn't existed at all. The idorus as they are manufactured in Japan today, are these young girls who are kind of turned out on an assembly line with a super high Milli Vanilli factor. They wouldn't pass muster over here at all but it's part of the music industry in Japan. And they're all cute and eminently forgettable. I ran across mention of one where they hadn't even bothered to have a girl. And because of that, she had actually gotten a very special kind of cult following. A lot of people were really hot for her because she didn't exist. And I found that idea deeply resonant in terms of mounting a kind of investigation of the mechanisms of celebrity in the late 20th century, which is one of the things I'm trying to do in this book.
ATN: So, you had that idea. How does the process work for you?
Gibson: Oh, it's a painful thing. If you've ever wanted to make a great big ball of rubber bands...the really hard part is getting that first rubber band to tie it into a sufficiently tight knot that you can start snapping the other rubber bands around it. So there's a very agonizing three or four month period where I'm sort of pushing this idea around and rubbing other things against it and trying to get things to stick to it and it's really a very random process initially, at least for me. It isn't as though I have a vision or dream of what the book is going to be or even what it's supposed to be about.
It's a process of assemblage and it's sort of junk collage. And it's also something like what Laney does in Idoru. It's a matter of looking for the nodal points, whatever that means and whatever they are. I look at a big flow of mostly print media when I'm doing that and go through hundreds of dollars worth of magazines a week, looking for things that pop out at me as potentially part of this thing I'm putting together. Then I just sort of pop them in and move them around. And when I have enough material, I have something that I can start shaping into narrative or the narrative starts to emerge from it.
ATN: Have you always written that way?
Gibson: Yep. Absolutely. That's one of the many reasons I find it very difficult to work in Hollywood. Film producers want to know how the story ends and what it consists of. That's not my optimal working environment because I either have to lie and tell them I know what I'm doing or I tell them the truth and they think I'm crazy. I say, "Be cool. In a month we'll have a story and I'll know how it ends." And that's not what they're used to dealing with. But it really is an assemblage of found objects initially and that's the only way it works for me.