William Gibson Is Still Ahead of the Curve

When I reach William Gibson, he’s in the midst of parallel parking, the brain-busting futurity of his books giving way to the quotidian details of life in Vancouver. I typically try to avoid phone interviews, but in this case, I was happy to sidestep the pressure of deciding what I’d wear to meet the only septuagenarian novelist packing a pair of Acronym-designed Nike Prestos with his tour wardrobe.

While Gibson is revered for his eerily—alarmingly—prescient speculative fiction, he is also known for his refined sartorial palate, tuned to select frequencies: the severe tech-wear of Errolson Hugh’s Acronym, or intensely faithful Japanese reproductions of Americana and military garb. Buzz Rickson’s, one of the foremost reproducers of this latter type of gear, has a whole product line named after Gibson, inspired by his inclusion of their MA-1 in his 2002 novel, Pattern Recognition. (I have one of these hanging in my closet, and must confess I spent a non-negligible amount of time wondering how corny it would be to wear it to a hypothetical meeting with the author.) Gibson’s interest in fashion has provided no shortage of material for his novels—2010’s Zero History is propelled by trouser-related corporate espionage and the search for a mysterious denim brand—and, I suspect, created a portal into his work for an audience who may otherwise have never made time for it.

Since 1984’s Neuromancer—the novel that popularized the term “cyberspace,” which Gibson coined—he has made a habit of easing us into our impending present, introducing it to us just before it arrives at scale. 1996’s Idoru, for instance, revolved around a virtual pop star—at roughly the same time the first attempts at such a creation were unveiled, and over a decade before the concept really caught on with Vocaloid idol Hatsune Miku. One of the central themes of 2007’s Spook Country was the idea that our digital and physical worlds were becoming increasingly, inexorably intertwined. But, as Gibson will tell you, he has never set out to predict the future, only to respond to the present. He’s no seer—just an unusually canny observer.

His most recent novel, Agency, released in late January, is the second in a planned trilogy that began with 2014’s The Peripheral. The latter novel added a new page to Gibson’s playbook: time travel, of a sort. The plot of The Peripheral unfolds across two timelines: the first in a economically depressed near-future rural United States; the second in 22nd century London, decades after a cataclysmic series of events referred to collectively as “the Jackpot” wiped out 80 percent of life on Earth. (There’s the “alarming” part of Gibson’s prescience—uncomfortably resonant given the present state of the world. We speak before coronavirus panic takes hold in North America, but it’s not hard to read the pandemic as part of whatever Jackpot we might be living through.) Characters in this timeline have developed a technique that allows them to communicate with characters in the past, and interact with them directly via trans-temporal telepresence—an extreme work-from-home scenario. Each time contact is made with the past, a new “stub” reality, alternate to the one inhabited by the 22nd-century Londoners, is created. It’s an elegant piece of plot aikido, smoothly eliding the continuity errors that dog time travel narratives.

Agency returns to the London of The Peripheral, where its characters are called to intervene in another stub—this time, it’s 2017, San Francisco, and though Donald Trump is not the president, the world is nevertheless on the precipice of nuclear war. Our protagonist in this timeline, Verity Jane, has picked up a job for a tech start-up, testing what she’s told is a new app. Verity quickly discovers that this “app” is really a hyper-sophisticated artificial intelligence who goes by the name of Eunice. Soon, both are conscripted by the London gang to diffuse the conflict before it’s too late.

Gibson has just returned from touring Agency. He tells me that in these down periods between novels, he mostly looks forward to catching up on housework—doing anything with his hands besides typing. Unable to read fiction while writing it, Gibson suspects he’ll be ready to dig into his to-read pile any day now.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “that always signals that it’s time to start writing a book.”

GQ: I was at the Montreal stop of the tour you just wrapped up, and you mentioned that you only really figure out what the book you’ve just written is about after getting to read it aloud to people. So, I’m curious to know what sorts of insights have risen from the muck.

William Gibson: Well, it’s a good question, but the process is still in play for me. There was something that I studied as an undergraduate, an idea in comparative literary critical methodology called the interpretive fallacy: the belief that the author of a text has any more idea of what it’s about than anyone else does. If I were a critic, I would tend to go for that. I tend to somewhat take that for granted. And I know that over the course of my fiction writing career so far, my own sense of what I’ve written is about has constantly been changing. It’s a strange thing, when I think about it. Part of it is because we have this cultural expectation that the author is trying to tell us something. I’m inclined to believe—and this is another thing that I got from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel when I was an undergraduate—is that works of fiction that are intended to teach us anything in particular are inherently inferior works of fiction. Any didactic work of fiction, according to Forster, is going to suffer from the author thinking they know something that they want to tell us.

It also tends to be kind of obvious when the author thinks they’re teaching us something. It rarely sits well with people.

No, it rarely does. An exception to that, I think, would be Orwell’s 1984, where he’s full-on lecturing us the whole time, but somehow it never feels didactic. It feels like, “Whoa, he’s telling the truth.” When he was telling that truth, he was telling it for the first time. No one had ever written that way about fascism and totalitarianism and the authoritarian state before Orwell, that I know of.

Something I see in your work, that speaks to the idea that you’re not necessarily trying to say anything specific, is that your books feel as though they're as much about exploration for yourself. You’re outlining the textures of these worlds and…not discovering them at the same time as the reader, necessarily, but following an intuitive thread.

That’s the thing that keeps me going while I’m writing the book. The more I allow myself to do it, the more I enjoy it. But, I think it’s probably possible to take it a bit too far. I can get really, really, really interested in something that very few people in the world might actually be that interested in. Although, there are always a few [who are]—“My god, I’ve waited for somebody to write a book about combat pants all my life!”

You definitely have a community that’s picking up what you’re putting down. I’ve described the plot of Zero History to friends who aren’t necessarily huge fashion people, and certainly aren’t people you’d expect to be interested in the pipeline from military garment construction to streetwear, but they seem to find it fascinating, as well.

It’s a real thing. It’s actually happening. When I started to write fiction, I was conscious of a list of things that the genre of science fiction generally doesn’t do, and often wasn’t commenting on. One was any sense whatsoever of fashion, what anyone is wearing. So, I kind of had a big Post-It Note stuck inside my forehead that said: What are they wearing? And why? I thought about it more, and I realized that something I’d always known, but took so much for granted that I never articulated it to myself, is that what we wear is a language. And what we wear reflects culture, and cultures within cultures within cultures. We size people up in large part when we first see them in terms of what they’re wearing. We do that without thinking about it, and we all do it. It’s not just something that wealthy, privileged people do. Everyone does it, because what we’re seeing is some expression of the person in what amounts to a shared language. Or we see someone and they’re wearing something that’s no part of our shared language at all, and it’s startling. And actually very rare, to see someone that’s completely outside of every clothing ballpark you’re familiar with.

Travel used to be a way to get some unfamiliar visual stimulus, but perhaps that’s not so much the case anymore.

Well, you know, there was an experience I had on the tour that I was really curious about, but I couldn’t come to any conclusion. At one point on the tour, I was in very close sequence in New York and London. In both cities I was in areas where people tend to be younger and they tend to dress very fashionably. I was trying to figure out the difference, and yet, the people in New York around the hotel I was staying in in Soho—the people I was seeing on the street, particularly on weekdays when the tourist factor is removed—and then the people in London, which was between Covent Garden and Charing Cross Road, were wearing the same garments, pretty much, but looked completely different. I have no language for that, but I believe it’s a real thing—I don’t think it’s just subjective on my part. But I can’t really explain it. Maybe it’s the general culture of a country expressing itself through whatever the current thing is. It really puzzled me. It sounds old fashioned to say “different countries,” even, because they’re all part of the same global culture of fashion, but it’s still different. What is that?

You’ve mentioned having a sort of ambient anxiety around people discovering that you’d lost it. How would you explain the “it” you’re worried about people figuring out you’ve potentially lost?

The “it” would be whatever it is that my anxiety can now afford to imagine I once had that caused people to value my work. Nothing more specific than that. Although, a more specific anxiety I had while writing Agency was that I was realizing for the first time that I had never before in my career appreciated what a feat of memory it is to write a novel-length fiction. It’s the equivalent of telling a lie that would take several days to tell, and as you do it, you have to imagine you’re telling the lie to someone who’s got a very good memory for detail and continuity and will flag you if you get anything wrong. I kept wondering if I was seeing the beginning of some kind of decline—I couldn’t keep the plot straight, and there were more incidences of unconscious repetition than I think I’ve had before. Anyway, I was really glad to have an extremely talented and conscientious young editor to get in there and catch all that stuff.

With the past two novels, you’ve ratcheted up the degree of difficulty for yourself where continuity is concerned, just by virtue of how many different timelines you’re operating in.

Oh, I know. Writing those, I kick myself daily because I knew what I was biting off as soon as I got into the multiple timeline thing. But, there are a lot of things that I find unusually entertaining—at this point, at least—about working within that modality of science fiction. One, for instance, is the way contemporary reality has already made virtually all of the sci-fi written in my lifetime archaic. Almost every imagined future, written over that period, misses the havoc we were already wreaking, in the author’s day, with unanticipated long-term outcomes of our technology. The absence of the climate crisis dates virtually all of it. I constantly have that in mind as I write, now, though I doubt readers would be aware of it. And I constantly wonder what I myself am unknowingly leaving out! Definitely there will be a third, and, I assume, final, volume to go with The Peripheral and Agency. I’m still up for it, anyway. I’m hoping this next one—which, I’m beginning to suspect almost has to be called Jackpot—won’t take so long.

I was reading, the other day, an interview you gave to Spin in the late eighties, and the introduction mentioned dealing with that era’s informational overload. This feeling that we’re being overloaded, inundated with information—it’s not a new dynamic for us. In your mind, what is a really distinct, contemporary challenge that we’re facing today?

Well, I probably won’t be able to narrow down even to a shortlist. But, something that I found myself thinking about a fair bit on the tour was how optimistic the real early adopters of the nascent internet were back in the eighties. The first people to get on BBS [ed: short for bulletin board system; servers that functioned as precursors to the internet as we know it], to have social lives there. Those people tended to be very keen on my early novels, but it seemed to me that they never saw the downside. They never saw what we’d now call the dystopian aspects of it. There was an assumption that there would be disruption—the word was even used in that context—but that the disruption somehow could only lead to good. I can remember almost being on the verge of articulating my skepticism of that to these people a few times, and then thinking, “Mmm, no, my intuition tells me that it wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Let them enjoy this moment and we’ll see how it goes.”

Originally Appeared on GQ