William Gibson is acknowledged as the godfather, if not the father, of cyberpunk. He was in Dublin to promote his latest novel, Idoru, and I was fortunate enough to be granted an interview. As the new novel has been dealt with exhaustively in the media since its launch, I have concentrated on his career as a whole rather than the mechanics of the new book.
Were you a science fiction junkie as a kid?
When I was fourteen my highest ambition was to be a science fiction writer. By the time I was sixteen I had forgotten about it. Puberty had struck. Girls were more interesting and then the Sixties happened. I remember thinking around about sixty-eight that what was happening socially in the US was so far beyond anything that I'd ever experienced in science fiction. It seemed illustrative of how rinky-dink science fiction was.
You were writing about the internet ten, fifteen years ago when it was far future whereas today it's yesterday.
Yes. I think it's important to point out that the cyberspace in Neuromancer doesn't really prefigure what the internet has become today. People in Neuromancer aren't using the internet in as myriad very personal ways people use it today. I know two women in the US who are in recent, very happy relationships, both of which will probably lead to marriage, and both of those relationships began on the internet. They met their boyfriends on the net. That sort of thing isn't happening in Neuromancer. And also the internet was evolving when I wrote Neuromancer but I didn't know it. I didn't know about the precursors. There's a really interesting new book I've just seen in the States called Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which is a social history of how the internet came to be and it's really fascinating.
I watched a show on TV where your new book, Idoru, was reviewed and one of the criticisms was that bathrooms you had put in the future already exist in Japan. A very strange point to pursue.
I think they're missing the point. That is a very very conscious part of my technique right now. I don't think that science fiction's best purpose at the end of the 20th century is charting the future. I think that science fiction serves us best now as a way to explore an increasingly unthinkable present. That's really what I'm trying to do. So while it's a conceit of science fiction that it's about the future, what I do more consciously in these recent books is to import exotic artefacts from the present into my imaginary future. Those Japanese toilets satisfy me more than anything I could make up and a lot of my readers will probably assume that I did make them up. They won't know that toilets like that already exist in Japan.
Do your literary aspirations stay within the field of science fiction or would you like to expand into what they call mainstream?
Well I think I have to an extent. I've been very fortunate because I've had it both ways. I've had the reliability of the genre audience - the genre aspect of publishing means that everything I've ever written is in print and probably will stay in print for quite a while. I don't think I necessarily would have had that if I hadn't started out as a science fiction writer. And science fiction is my native literary culture and it is where I'm coming from and I value it's toolkit highly. But I don't think it's what I am today exactly. I've always had a sizeable audience outside science fiction. The thing that I hear most frequently at signings in the US when I'm talking to the people is,'You know, I never read science fiction but I really like your stuff.'
Would you drop the furniture of science fiction and write a straight contemporary novel?
Given the way the world is going, in another couple of years I should be able to write an absolutely naturalistic novel which has the look and feel of my science fiction. I may be working unconsciously towards that aim in this series of books that began with Virtual Light because in a way they're happening next Wednesday. It's almost like an alternate universe. I can't see how our world could get there in that short a space of time but it doesn't bother me. The extrapolation thing in the traditional sense isn't really what I'm doing.
You tend to work in a very near future rather than that vast unimaginable future that was Fifties space opera.
That's why I haven't been able to do that stuff, because to me it is unimaginable. I was always very fond of that remark of Ballard's in the sixties when he said 'Earth is the alien planet.' I took that very much to heart. By the same token this present we live in is the future. I'm forty-eight years old and I sometimes feel I'm living in a Robert Sheckley type of future. Something that Sheckley would have dreamed up on a bad night.
Are you a technophile or is the future happening in spite of you?
I feel that I have a professional obligation to be as deeply and systematically ambivalent about any new technologies as I can be and I think technologies are morally neutral until we use them for something. Personally I'm less inclined to buy new gadgets than many people I know. Not because I'm afraid of them but because it doesn't excite me terribly. A friend of mine was showing me her brand new Motorola cellular phone. This is a cellular phone that when it's folded up could easily fit into a packet of twenty cigarettes. It has more features than any phone on the market, including a vibrator so that you can carry it in your pants' pocket and not annoy people with a ring. And she has it set up on a roam mode so that she can take it with her anywhere in North America. They're pretty pricey too. But she expected that having played with hers I would immediately want to go out and buy my own. I didn't.
I also am at the bottom of the food chain in our house as far as computers are concerned. My son is at the top. When his machine gets upgraded his sister inherits his, my wife inherits our daughter's machine and I inherit my wife's.
What have you currently inherited?
The desk machine, which I hardly use any more, is an SE 30, which is sort of the high end of the high grade toaster Mac's - the old fashioned Mac with the little monochrome screen. But what I wrote Idoru on is a Mac Powerbook, a 170 which is pretty slow, obsolete, but I'm not tied to the desk. The eyestrain factor with a liquid crystal screen is far superior. There's no flicker or refresh rate going on.
What sparked your imagination when you were young?
I started with Heinlein juveniles and that led me to Heinlein's adult, so called, output. It's easy to forget but there really wasn't that much science fiction around. So I sort of read the classic canon. You know, I had a Bradbury period. But early on I was attracted to the more left wing side of American science fiction. So I was a big Theodore Sturgeon fan at one point. I loved Fritz Lieber. Then I found a huge stash of old Galaxy magazines in a second hand shop so I got to read Bester and Sheckley.
How come all science fiction fans inhabit second hand book shops?
I think it's the nature of the science fiction ecology.
I believe science fiction books and comics were used as ballast on transatlantic ships which placed a lot of science fiction in the second hand shops on this side of the world.
Yeah. I read in British fan histories that that was how it came about. Just as I was outgrowing science fiction, or so I thought, I discovered the British new wave which really intrigued me. I couldn't quite get a handle on it. Judith Merril had a very influential annual year's best anthology published in paperback. I remember reading Ballard and Moorcock - she was very big on that stuff, she actually went over and lived there for a while, she was one of the Americans who was attracted to that scene. So that introduced me to them.
Round about that time probably the most significant thing that happened in terms of having an impact on my work is when I was fifteen or sixteen I discovered William Burroughs and it blew me away. I remember sitting and reading the beatnik anthology which had the City of Interzone section from Naked Lunch and I remember reading this thing and being blown away by it. I knew at some level this guy was using some of the tools that I understood from science fiction but he was using them in a way that I could not comprehend at all. So that was a very formative experience. So that as I went on into my later teens the fiction that I kept up on was sort of informed by my earlier taste, but different. I was reading Burroughs, I kept track of Ballard, I kept track of Samuel Delaney, who I suspect I also discovered through Judith Merril.
So today, given the whopping content of any genre science fiction shop, it makes me laugh to remember when I was fifteen I could buy every paperback science fiction novel published in the US every month. That was because there would be a maximum of three titles, if that. The field was very small and I kind of suspect that because it was very small the quality was remarkably high. There really wasn't much careerism because there weren't any careers to be had. Everyone except Heinlein was living on dog food.
When I started thinking about trying to write some science fiction of my own in the late seventies and the early eighties one of the things that initially put me off when I started going around to conventions I'd meet wannabe entry level science fiction writers it struck me that a lot of them just sort of looked at it as, 'Should I study to be a dental technician or might I make a fairly decent living writing science fiction.' I think what I expected from my own sense of science fiction when I was a kid was that there would be passion and a sense of avocation. But where I did find that and found it in spades was when I had the good luck to meet Bruce Sterling who had, and has today, an absolutely burning passion for science fiction and this terrific sense of avocation. He'd do it if they never gave him another dollar. He'd do it anyway. He doesn't care whether the books sell or not. They sell fairly well but he genuinely doesn't care. He has a sense of a kind of a higher purpose. That was great, I got some very good energy out of that.
Is that what attracted you to collaborating?
Collaboration is a tradition in science fiction. There have been great collaborations over the years. Those initial short story collaborations were like jam sessions. It was like playing improvisational jazz. I collaborated with Sterling, with John Shirley, with Michael Swanwick. Never more than once, though, at least in the short stories.
When you say improvisational jazz, how did the collaboration work?
Each one is different. The story I did with Shirley, he had sent me a draft of a story asking for a critique. I started writing the critique and realised that it would actually be faster and more fun if I rewrote the story. So I very quickly rewrote it, cutting great hunks of it and producing a much shorter manuscript. I mailed it back to him with a note saying, Don't be offended. I'm not proposing that you do anything with this but it's easier and quicker this way. He called me a few weeks later and said 'I've sold that story. It's going in as a collaboration.'
The only collaboration I've done that I could tell you in detail how it worked was The Difference Engine with Sterling. That was a book that was completely dependant on word processing technology. I don't think it could have been written without word processors. We decided that at any given moment during the writing of the book the only text of the book would be what we had on disc. Any printouts were regarded as safety measures only in case something happened to the discs. In effect we weren't allowed to consult an earlier printout to restore something on disc. You had to do it all from memory.
We swapped the discs back and forth so that gradually the whole thing became overwritten by two people at every level. Each of us was completely free to change anything we wanted in the whole manuscript as we went along. It kept us honest, it kept us merged.
For me the difficult thing in writing a novel is to get the voice to emerge. Each novel has its characteristic voice and when I find the voice I'm pretty much home free. But it's often a long search. When we found the voice of The Difference Engine it was so alien to both of us it was really quite eerie. It finished itself in such a cold, grim way that we were both standing there going, 'Oh dear.' We got a kind of Frankenstein feeling. It was a very scary voice. And that was a deeply satisfying writing experience. So that's the only book of mine that I ever go back to and read for pleasure, because it doesn't really seem like my work. Neither does it seem like Bruce's. It's its own thing.
Can you still point and say, I wrote that paragraph?
Yes. But very occasionally. Less than you think. A lot of it is simultaneous. Another use for word processing technology in that book is that we used it to import great swathes of Victorian pulp fiction which we would then overwrite. So that virtually every description in the book is a contemporary Victorian description. We didn't make up any of the interiors, except for the more science fictional ones, but every room that is described is from an account. The room in which X meets Karl Marx is actually from a Prussian intelligence document filed by a Prussian spy who had actually gone up to Marx's flat pretending to be a journalist. He filed this very minute report on what was in the room and what everything looked like. So that's actually Marx's room. If we had had scanners we would have used them to scan these Victorian documents into the text and use word processing to airbrush it all together and disguise the seams.
Did you have a shared interest in Babbage?
It emerged quite organically from this ongoing enthusiastic discussion we'd been having about Babbage. I forget which of us encountered him first. When we started writing the book Babbage was pretty obscure. He became better known during the two and a half years we wrote the book but we had just been shooting the shit as science fiction writers do and one of us, I don't remember which one, said 'You know, there's a book in this. What if Babbage had been able to build that machine in 1855.' Whichever one of us suggested it the other one said, 'You do it.' We went back and forth before agreeing to do it together.
Are you a fast worker?
I'm not very fast getting off the mark but once I've started in earnest I think I am fairly fast. Although I'm never as fast as I remember being. Every time I write a novel I imagine it will be finished much more quickly than it actually is. I'm always late, always out of contract. I don't think I've ever turned a book in on time.
How long is it since you finished Idoru?
February, I think. (Interview took place in October).
Have you started on another project?
I have a contract to do the screenplay of a film version of Neuromancer. I'll go back, do that. That'll probably take me up to Christmas and then I'll start the next book.
Has the Johnny Mnemonic experience soured you on Hollywood in any way?
No. I had so much fun making the film that we shot not the film they released. In some ways it was a dismaying experience. The film we shot will never be seen. It doesn't really exist anywhere.
It couldn't be recut from lost footage? There's no director's cut?
There's no director's cut. Something closer to what we were trying to do is the Japanese release which is on PAL. It's subtitled rather than dubbed and it's fifteen minutes longer than the Tri Star release and it's edited very differently. It doesn't have that horrible score that Tri Star stuck us with. Really what you saw, part of the confusion round that film is that what you saw is in many ways the equivalent of what you would have seen if studio executives had recut David Lynch's Blue Velvet to make it more accessible to a mainstream audience. It wouldn't have worked as Blue Velvet and it wouldn't have worked as what they were trying for and that's what happened to Johnny. The great thing about Johnny is that it cost thirty million to make and grossed seventy million world-wide, so we more than doubled their money. We were one of Sony's most profitable products that year. So it's not as though doors have closed.
It used to be that the scriptwriter was bottom of the food chain. That does seem to have changed to a degree.
It's changed if you are Bob Esterhazy. By and large being a screenwriter in Hollywood is like being a very well paid plumber. It's a union job. Except you're a plumber they'll take to lunch, a plumber that gets to go to the meetings. The trouble with writing for Hollywood is that when you're writing novels, when I'm writing novels I feel like I'm being paid to access my unconscious as deeply and freely as I can manage. Whereas in Hollywood the whole studio system is set up to separate the writer from his unconscious. They don't want your unconscious. They want everything to be conscious and rational. It just doesn't work that way for me and I suspect it doesn't work that way for really great screenwriting either.
Yes, I'll do a few more. Everything I've ever written except Idoru is today under option somewhere, so there will be more, quote, William Gibson films. The bulk of them I won't have anything to do with, they'll be other people's versions. But there are a couple of projects that if they go I'll have some involvement. I had more intimate involvement with Johnny Mnemonic than writers ever have. That was because it had a first time director and we had become really close friends raising the money to make the film. I worked on that thing really hard for five years. It took longer to make that film than it took to get a university degree. It was harder work. I know quite a lot about making movies now.
What made you go for that particular project if you were going to put so much into it?
Longo turned up and he wanted to make a feature film. He didn't have any money really. He couldn't afford the option on a novel and at that point most of my novels were under option. So I said look Burning Chrome is not available but Johnny Mnemonic is and Johnny Mnemonic has in larval form everything you get if you optioned a Gibson novel. Plus we'll be able to expand it because it's a short story, bring in new elements. Plus it won't cost you very much. It doesn't cost very much to option a short story.
Unfortunately at this stage the ugly face of the marketing machine intervened. (Metaphorically, of course). There was a queue of interviewers waiting to get at Gibson and my time was up. With little ceremony I was booted out. For a writer whose work I had read infrequently and with little enthusiasm, I found myself with a warm feeling for the man and still bursting with questions for the mind behind the words.
(c) 1996 by Bob Neilson. All copyrights retained.