Cyberpunk 2

The sky above the Shelbourne was the colour of...

But seriously, here is the text of the interview as promised. I'm sorry it took so long but his accent is really strong and the tape wasn't so good and I was busy with a deadline.

At his reading of Virtual Light later that night he read the text slowly, almost ponderously, which gave me a new insight into his composition. His stresses rendered what might have been a frenzied narrative into a more reflective, metered tract. I'll certainly reread his books with a new angle.

He said some good things during the question session. Postmodernism was a phrase that used to make him grit his teeth and think of party hats on tower blocks, but now it's kind of diluted. Sylvester Stallone owns the rights to the Burning Chrome film version. Earlier, he asked what the reaction was of an Irish person to the section at the end of The Difference Engine concerning the Famine in Ireland in the 19th Century that pretty much devastated the country to this day. He seemed a little hesitant, and mentioned that the piece was supposed to be a sarcastic rant, but that if it didn't come across like that then that was what you deserved for messing with other people's cultures. He had a special disdain for that RPG 'that mixes cyberpunk with elves'. I think Shadowrun sucks incredibly as well.

The ellipses try to capture his frequent pauses. I found his sentence structure fascinating. As a English-speaking Irish person, the rather bizarre formulations that reach here via the films, etc., can seem outrageous. I'm thinking of 'Slackers'. But it's all true. Apparently. Even the incredible lassitude of the Southern US speech. Quite distinctive.

I have, like, ten or so very long interviews from his present tour and he was getting asked the same questions in a lot of them and parroting the same answers so here I've tried to avoid the usual questions. I was not always successful. I didn't get hardly any of the questions covered that I'd intended to, even though I was quite peremptory. This can come across as impatience (maybe, maybe) or sarcasm, even rudeness. But it *was* a short interview slot.

I have not rendered the dialogue into dialect, but have stuck to standard English, 'don't know' for dunnoe, etc. This is kinder to non-English speakers, and using that can look patronising and corny.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interview with William Gibson by Mike Rogers.

a) no hardcopy is produced save for comment or reference extracts;

and

b) that this notice accompany all electronic copies.

October 1st, Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, Ireland.

35 minutes.

MR: So you've never been to Ireland before?

WG: No. no... and it's a, you know, in a sense I've been reading about it all my life... because it's a, you know...

MR: Joyce? the Modernists?

WG: Yeah. Such a literate, yeah, such a literary land. So it all seems... vaguely familiar. But sort of more remarkable... and that's always the way, you know. Sort of the details... the details that do it. That you couldn't have imagined.

MR: You came to Europe when you were in your teens, or just out of your teens, didn't you?

WG: Well, how old was I?

MR: The Grand Tour. Around 20?

WG: Yeah. Yeah. About 20, 21... We couldn't afford... we couldn't afford to stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency. So we landed in... we landed in London and... and you know, like a round trip on the subway was sort of... sort of, the base. So we only had a little time there and then...

MR: So what's it like now, travelling around in hotels like this?

WG: Oh, it's... I've had a couple of years to get used to it. It's sort of a gradual thing.

MR: What was it you called it? The Rubber Chicken Circuit?

WG: Yeah, that was actually a goof break... breakthrough. Because there were all those vr... there was a whole string of vr festivals that were funded by various European governments.

MR: I know. Lot's of people kept stopping over, Myron Kreuger and all...

WG: Yeah. Those people were all bouncing... bouncing around. But we got to get to Barcelona, Venice, Linz Austria, Den Haag, probably a couple more I can't...

MR: You're more used to it then? You can handle it now?

WG: Yeah, I can.

MR: You don't feel like... the dissolution?

WG: But this is sort of... this is a... this is a lot more intense than going on one of those things, 'cos it's sort of the end of... three months of... no, not three months, it just feels like three months. Three previous weeks of promotion before I came... In the States and Canada before I came and started... started in London.

MR: Yes. I've been reading some interviews on the Net, in papers...

WG: Yeah, and you go home and rest for a week and you feel okay physically but then you get back out on the road and there's some sort of cumulative psychological effect.

MR: I'm just curious, because in the second Sprawl book you had Turner, and he saw himself dissolved from hotel room to hotel room. And yet in Virtual Light Rydell... he likes staying there. He likes the... the opulence of the closed shopping malls and all. So, do you feel you're accepting it more?

WG: Oh I don't know. Oh... you lost me there. Rydell likes?

MR: He seemed to be able to cope with being on Cops in Trouble a lot more naturally.

WG: Oh. Oh. Ah. Right. Oh, well, you know, he doesn't get more than a taste of it you know? That's the thing. It's a... His time in... his time... well he might have... What does he have, like two weeks? It's not really clear from the... It could be a week you know? It just... it just doesn't last very long for him. He never gets to feel that he's a part... a part of this sort of thing. But you know... it's interesting. It's interesting to see it... and it's only once in a while. I mean, Hollywood is like this too. It's kind of their standard worker housing. They put people... they put people in incredibly fancy hotels that... mostly probably collect their money from movie studios and big... big companies.

MR: It's a strange world out there.

WG: Yeah. Like one thing you realise when you spend more time in places like this is that all of them... well, hardly any of them who's staying here is paying their own bill. It's all corporate accounts. This is actually a very amiable kind of place, you know? The thing that's nice about it is that it's real. It's not a reproduction of anything.

MR: If I remember right, when they had a rebellion here in 1916 I think the place was used for barracks.

WG: Yeah. It's sort of a real place and kind of relaxed compared to... you know, in America the equivalent thing would be three simulacra removed from reality and kind of too self conscious to ever be very good.

MR: What music are you listening to right now? What strikes you?

WG: PJ Harvey's second album. A San Francisco band called Come, that's see oh em ee. A West German band called Plan B who have an album out that's unfortunately titled Cyberchords and Sushi Stories.

MR: What about Cybercore Network?

WG: ... Never heard of it.

MR: Oh well.

WG: Yeah.

MR: The in-jokes weren't as heavily larded in Virtual Light.

WG: No, I just think they missed them. No, they're more subtle.

MR: The music jokes?

WG: There were probably more of those in Neuromancer than there were in the later... the other two, I would think. Yeah. Yeah. Virtual Light is filled with in-jokes, but you have to know... It's not fair if I tell them what they are.

MR: The one right at the end where the only thing at the market that failed to be sold, that's thrown on the trash heap, that's the Columbia Literary History of the United States.

WG: Yeah.

MR: That's a bit harsh. An unpopular book?

WG: That's one of them.

MR: There was a large literary conference on here recently. Toni Morrison, big names. The theme was Homelands. What I want to ask you is, well, born in South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, living in Canada. Do you think that that dilutes your sense of nationhood? They were keen on it.

WG: Oh, well... What it means... Yeah...

MR: How do you feel about it?

WG: Yeah. Oh, well. Hmmm. That's a... Oh well, interestingly put... ... ... I think what it's done is it's made me... made me a globalist in some way that's not entirely... ... ... isn't entirely theoretical... ... ... Yeah, I mean, naturally it's put... it's putting it too dramatically, but you could say it was literally true that early on in life I had the experience of, of, of... exilehood, essentially for political reasons which kind of led into a permanent expatriate existence. Canada isn't... it isn't a country. One doesn't... I don't think one comes to feel Canadian. It sort of isn't. It's never really been...

MR: So much wasteland? Empty except for the cities?

WG: Well, no. It's never been a requirement of... ... ... It's never been a requirement of their culture with regard to... immigrants, you know? The American metaphor is the Melting Pot for a generation and then they'll become... When they come out of the pots... they'll be American and that really isn't... That hasn't been the Canadian experience. The fashionable government metaphor during the sixties was the... the Cultural mosaic. That's what they consciously took to be their version of the Melting Pot. Where people would immigrate, keep their cultures intact and just, you know, fit them into the grid of the country. I mean, you can't, you know, the concept of becoming Canadian, it doesn't you know, it doesn't compute. It's not... in a sense it's an artificial construction. Really, I mean there's a distinctive Canadian culture but you know... ... you'd almost have to, I think, have to be born right into it so I've never felt, living in Canada for twenty years... Well now I'm truly becoming more and more Canadian. I mean, I'm still a guy from Virginia and my wife is Canadian and I'll never... I'll never really be... I'll never really be Canadian.

MR: Yet the character Rydell in Virtual Light seems much more definitely a Southerner than any others of yours?

WG: Oh yeah. Specifically...

MR: He rediscovers his Southerness after being reproached by a Northerner for not having enough essence of gothic.

WG: Yeah. Well... I think that was partially inspired byhaving read a lot of Cormac McCarthy during the time I was writing the book. I hadn't discovered McCarthy before. McCarthy's from Knoxville Tennessee, which is, like, a few hundred miles from the part of Virginia where I grew up and the voices in a lot of his books, particularly his early books, were very relevent to my own childhood and so I thought I'd create... Also, I had the sense when I grew up in the South of growing up in some sort of time lag.

MR: Agrippa has that same tone.

WG: Yeah.

MR: The timelessness.

MR: Yeah. It's like, so it's like... I felt when I remembered my childhood

in the fifties and the sixties in Virginia that in some ways it's more

like these should be memories of the forties. It's, you know, It's kind

of a backward... It's kind of a backwater place and by making Rydell,

you know, a Southerner I also made him a hick to some extent. So he's

the, you know, he's... he's the hick from Hickograd adrift in the big

city and consequently he gets to wonder about things and ask questions

and that's very convenient for the science fiction writer because it

gets you over the expository lumps quite smoothly. I mean, when you...

In science fiction watch for these naive characters. They're pretty

common because they serve such a convenient purpose for the author.

MR: What struck me was the different portrayal between Virtual Light and

the Sprawl novels in the portrayal of the undergroung, the computer

underground. Especially the hackers. In Virtual Light you didn't seem

to like them and in fact you threw them into ridicule.

WG: Well, they're both based on... the same... you know, to some extent.

MR: Also... The culture of the bridge. That's seen from the outside. Even

Chevette is to a large extent an outsider. And yet with, say, Sam

Delany in, say, Dhalgren, he had his naive characters walk around as

part of the underground. He's from... he writes from an urban...

environment. You and he are from different milieus. His urban

characters never seem as put upon. They survive a lot easier. He's more

sympathetic.

WG: Well, he grew up in New York and my formative, my first real experience

of a real city was living in Toronto in the late sixties from about

'67 on and, yeah, it's given me a different take on urbanism. It's a

very different sort of city. In those days it was more different still.

It hadn't been quite developed into the new neo-Toronto.

MR: They use it for New York movie backdrops nowadays.

WG: Yeah. Neo-Toronto is sort of... It more parallels... you know, the

Docklands in London? It's a bit, you know, it's very expensively built

empty space.

MR: They're doing that here with German money. Temple Bar. It's quite

extraordinary... They take allthe cobblestones from the, like, ghetto

and move them to almost gated streets.

WG: So down in the poor neighbourhoods they now have tarmac?

MR: Yeah, it's like a move up in the world. After hundreds of years they

finally get to have tarmac, flat roads. And the rich people get cobbles

and all.

WG: Isn't that something.

MR: Set in shiny new tar, yeah.

WG: That's truly amazing... That's pure... that's the European version of

Virtual Light. Yeah, that's actually... there's a level of irony about

that that I didn't get to in Virtual Light. Except in the Nightmare

Folk Art shop. All this Southern stuff is being sold, all these kind

racist antiques are being sold to the more affluent blacks of South

Central. But the very recycling of stuff where the very cobbles become

expensive antiques for the rich people... that's amazing.

MR: The blacks in South Central Los Angeles. I mean, the book was set there

and, I mean, you read City of Quartz which dealt a great deal with the

chicano and black development, and postulated their development in the

future, and yet they didn't feature very largely in Virtual Light. Do

youfeel that yuo were't qualified?

WG: No. I didn't want to... It wasn't the time for me to take that on...

Yeah, I would generally say. Yeah. I'm not actually qualified to do

that now, and particularly not in a more realistic near future setting,

so I mean, they're there and there's a sprinkling of them to indicate

their presence in the mix. One thing that's not really underlined

enough to be clear in the Los Angeles sections is that I was assuming

that I was writing about a Los Angeles where the caucasians are the

minority, which is something that is demographically expected to happen

in L.A. eventually.

MR: Yeah. I was stunned the first time I was in new York and found all the

subway signs in Spanish after a lifetime of growing up with the Starsky

and Hutch white English American thing.

WG: Yeah. We have a neighbourhood in Vancouver where they've changed...

they've translated all the streetsigns into Bengali. And there's

Chinatown. That's quite the trend.

MR: And yet you find that you can write about women? All of your books

since Count Zero have had a female protagonist.

WG: I've always felt an obligation to try. And you know, in fact I think I

would tend to get pretty bored with the narrative if there weren't...

a few women around.

MR: And yet the only woman that featured, apart from your relatives, in

Agrippa was the likening of the shooting of a gun to the first kissing

of a woman in objective terms.

WG: Yeah. But don't ask me what that means.

MR: You'll just have to write more books to work it out?

WG: Yeah. No. I don't know. I mean, it's something that I... I do all this

stuff... kind of random exploratory... I'm exploring I know not what.

The completed narrative is a sort of artifact, but in some real way

I'm no more capable of explicating it than the next guy. You know, if

you know much about... at least the sort of... what passed for

contemporary literary critical theory when I was studying it... the

assumption was that the critic has as much... that the reader had as

chance of knowing what the text was going to be about as the author

did. That was sort of a formal assumption; that the author had no more

access to it...

MR: They're just words?

WG: Yeah. No more access to some deeper,more symbolic level than the critic

did. Because the critic could argue, the critic... the author could say

that, well, it's really about this and that and the critic could argue

that, well, you think it's about this and that but actually it's about

that and this. And you're simply... I'm simply able to interpret your

own conscious intention. I'm not sure whether... I was never sure

whether I believed that or not. But now that I've written a few books I

know that I... that I cannot explicate them more. Or that I could

explicate them differently at different times.

MR: And yet you have this gift for... for semiotic regurgitation.

WG: Well, yeah.

MR: Does it worry you?

WG: What?

MR: Do you occasionally get puzzled, or self-conscious.

WG: Magpie-like?

MR: Like a collage too mannered.

WG: Bricolage. no, it doesn't bother me. It's what I do.

MR: But if you think about it too much? Do you have to make a conscious

effort not to make it a... conscious effort?

WG: Well, it requires... In my own case it requires a kind of pathological

concentration, after which something snaps and the narrative proceeds

as though by... it's almost... I mean, it's really good, it feels like

automatic writing. I'm able to sit back and watch myself write without

having much idea of where it's going along. But unfortunately that

requires endless chewing of pencils.

MR: They used to call it the Muse.

WG: Yeah. Waiting for the Muse. All I've ever figured out is you have to

make a deal with the Muse to, you know, go every day at approximately

the same time; sit down for a couple of hours and wait to see if the

Muse is going to come around.

MR: When do you write?

WG: Well, pretty much on a kind of nine to five basis on weekdays. That's

well, you know, that's in the early days, the saner stages of

composition. So for the first two thirds of a book I'll get up in the

morning at seven o'clock,have breakfast, get my kids off to school.

Then downstairs about nine thirty, knock off at twelve for lunch, come

back, stay on there 'til three or four or five and call it a day.

Unless I get down there and something is... there's no Muse and I can't

get anything done. Then I go mow the lawn or do the laundry or

something. but when I get toward the end of it, it becomes... it's such

an effort to juggle all those bits and thousands of words in your head

that sometimes the only way to get it done is to, like, work an 18 hour

day 'til it's finished, you know? You're filled up with it at a certain

point and you just have... there are times when you just have to get

all through real quickly at one go and then go collapse and then go

back to it a few weeks later and kind of do it in your right mind. I

don't think I've ever managed to avoid that. In one way or another that

always happens. It usually follows a period of very intense despair.

Despair at the quality of the text by that time.

MR: Do you still despair of the text?

WG: Oh yeah.

MR: The finished? The product?

WG: Well, you know, once they're finished,once they're... once they're...

you know.

MR: How do you decide that the text will go?

WG: Well, that's one of the really tricky parts. It's a good trick. I don't

know. I wish I could... I mean, I wish I could tell you. Nobody could

ever really tell me. You just have to know when it's done. You have to

know when you've taken off... when you've taken out as many of the

wrong words and put in as many of the right words as you're likely to

be able to do. And then there's a point beyond which anything you could

do to it would cause it to diminish. And its... to know where that

point is... I just don't...

MR: One fascinating piece I saw in Virtual Light was... I remember reading

a story of yours years ago: Academy leader. That had a paragraph in it

related to virtual reality architectur and then it gave a listing,

a lush description of arcades, sushi, etc.; and then in Skinner's Room

it had become the Bridge. The people, the ideas were the same. And then

in Virtual Light it appeared. Watching the paragraph through three

incarnations was interesting.

WG: Yeah, I think that... I suspect that Academy Leader was written after

Skinner's Room. That book, that Michael Benedict collection of

cyberspace essays, that's pretty recent. I think maybe more recent than

Skinner's Room. All of... all of that... all of the bits in Academy

Leader are recycled from other pieces. Some of them appeared in an

op-ed piece in Rolling Stone years ago. I mean, it's really only the

little Burroughsian bit, where I'm directly addressing the audience

in a Burroughs cut-up, that's the only... that is the only bit that I

think I actually custom-wrote: the rest of it is a cut-up.

MR: Do you see yourself in your characters? I'm just thinking, here, of

Shapely being tragically misunderstood,distorted, worshipped.

WG: No. No.

MR: And yet Skinner seemd to be very scornful of people that wanted to

Shapely up. For example, on the Net there's a persistent rumour, a

belief fable, that you have an email address. Despite hundreds of

denials in thousands of interviews.

WG: Well... No. No.

MR: I mean, there are people out there who will refuse to believe there

isn't a secret... I'd compare it to a loa. There are people utterly

convinced that some elite has your true name.

WG: Yes.

MR: That these email you. They all want to be watched by you, invisibly.

WG: I think that's a very good... Yeah, I think that's an excellent...

That's an excellent... That's an excellent comparison. No, I'm more

like the... you know, there is... there is a big god in Voudoun

religion, you know? There is... At the top of the pantheon it's

actually monotheistic. But he's so far away... and he just doesn't care

at all. That's actually where I am. I don't care. No, I'm not even...

I'm not even looking. What they have to do is... To come directly to my

attention, they have to... They have to say something that will cause

one or another of my correspondents who does hang out on the Net to

download their bit to a fax modem which'll fax it to me. Virtually

everything... virtually everything I read off the Net comes off of a

fax machine via, sort of, people's fax modems.

MR: That's pretty clever.

WG: And you know, there is the other thing that when you can afford long

distance telephone service and you have a telephone and a fax machine

you've got... you've got an amazing... it's expensive, but it sure is

a convenient user interface. So I mean if I want to... if I want to

talk to someone in Tokyo I don't