William Gibson, a naturalist with a science fiction toolkit

On September 15, 2010, William Gibson gave a reading from his new novel "Zero History" at Barnes & Noble bookstore in Austin. The reading was followed by Q&A and a signing. I attended a similar reading and signing when he was in Austin in 2008, promoting his earlier novel "Spook Country". This year I could clearly see what some critic meant by calling Gibson an unappreciated humorist. A big part of his speech and answers consisted of quotable one-liners. Here are some pearls of his wit.

Austin was not so much Ground Zero in cyberpunk, as it was Patient Zero in cyberpunk. The first reading from "Neuromancer" by Gibson was given here, to about 5 people, at ArmadilloCon.

In the 20th century I was a futurist, but in the 21st century I'm some kind of naturalist with a science fiction toolkit.

It doesn't surprise me that 21sth century is not what I thought it might be, because that's what happens when you get to the real future from the real past. The real future has no capital F. Europeans have been hip to this forever, and they used to laugh at us. [But now we're starting to realize it too].

Somebody in the audience asked him if the similarity between the names of Case in "Neuromancer", and Cayce in "Pattern Recognition" was an accident. Gibson replied that Case in "Neuromancer" is named after Case knife company, that made a very iconic kind of knife. They were so ubiquitous that Case knife became synonymous with pocket knife. And they have a beautiful logo. When Gibson was thinking what to name the guy, he saw that logo, and the name suggested itself to him.

With Cayce Pollard from "Pattern Recognition", he doesn't know where exactly he got that first name. "So there is no symbolic meaning, but you can find one," Gibson added.

Another question from the audience was about antagonists in his books. Gibson replied:

As a grown-up, I didn't believe in villainy the same way I might have done when I was younger, and the way our pop culture encourages us to. [...] The real antagonist in all my work is the way the world is. And the way it undoes the good guys AND the bad guys.

Question: why doesn't he write more short stories?

Most very good science fiction stories have as many ideas as most good SF novels. And I'm not a guy who has a lot of ideas. If I wrote short stories now, I would use up my limited narrative ideas.

Question: is he a pessimist or an optimist?

To answer this question, Gibson reminds us that in the years of the Cold War, when he grew up, people were conditioned to think that world was going to end very soon. Thus, he says, he thought he was being optimistic to write a novel set in 2035, in which there still were people.

Here is a link to my post on William Gibson's appearance in Austin in 2008, where he talks much more extensively about cyberpunk, literature, future, and such.

William Gibson in Austin, June 11, 2008

William Gibson gave a reading, answered audience's questions and signed books in Barnes & Noble on June 11, 2008. He started by saying he was glad to be back in Austin, a city that 14 years ago was ground zero for the "so-called" cyberpunk movement. Then the microphone failed. The irony of this happening right before the speech of a writer who pioneered a new attitude towards technology in science fiction did not escape the audience. After a few attempts by B&N staff to fix the microphone, Gibson gave up and said he'll do a reading a capella. "I don't let technology get in my way," he said. "People have been reading books aloud for centuries. I'm gonna do it the way Byron did it, the way Dylan Thomas did it, except sober." And he read part of the first chapter of his latest novel, "Spook Country".

Then Gibson answered audience's questions. A few of those questions were specifically about "Spook Country", and they didn't make much sense without having read the novel. Others were about writing and Gibson's view of the world in general. Here are a few questions and Gibson's answers. Does he consider his works to be dystopian? Does he create his characters deliberately, or do they spontaneously generate themselves? The latter is definitely the case, as in an example of a character that grew out of a white room. Is there really such a cultural phenomenon as cyberpunk? Last, not knowing much about technology can enable a SF writer to see the forest for the trees.

The whole article is available on my web site.

Pictures are in my photo gallery.

eBay as a giant museum

Many words have been spilled on Web 2.0 and how it's supposed to change the world -- from Pulitzer prize-winning pundits to rank-and-file bloggers, everybody seems to have weighed in. Still I haven't read many observations as sharp or fresh as this one from William Gibson. This quote is from William Gibson's interview in Washington Post. Yes, this article is a couple of weeks old, but, as I mentioned before, I'm a leisurely blogger, not a professional one. :-)

"Google is the piece de resistance of weird [stuff] finding," he says. "One of the things I've been doing in the eBay era -- I've become a really keen observer of the rationalization of the world's attic. Every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability. . . . The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world. . . .

"Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement. (emphasis mine -- E.)

"Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I've been able to see on eBay. [...]

"This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn't used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world's premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does."

The whole article can be found here.

I think I may lobby the FACT reading group coordinator to put Gibson's new book, "Spook Country" on the FACT group candidate list. Even though FACT group on the average didn't like Gibson's earlier novel, "Pattern Recognition", I am quite intrigued by Gibson's perspective.