In 1984, Neuromancer by William Gibson became the first novel to win the three top prizes for science fiction (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards). It established a new literary subgenre—“cyberpunk,” or digital, fiction—and helped inspire the Matrix film trilogy. In his debut novel, Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” and described the Internet and virtual reality long before they were part of the cultural landscape. In subsequent works, such as Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtual Light, and Pattern Recognition, he continued his habit of prescience, forecasting developments in such complex and diverse fields as nanotechnology, identity theft, virtual art, computer viruses, and information control.
Oddly, Gibson, a former English major, knows little about computers or technology of any kind. And he has always insisted that his fiction was a way to comment on the present day and not to suggest the future. Indeed, his latest work, Spook Country—a high-style political techno-thriller out this month—actually takes place in the (very recent) past, February 2006. The affable and thought-provoking writer talked with DISCOVER from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The publicity materials call Spook Country “a contemporary novel of political paranoia.” Do you agree?
To the extent that it’s an American novel of its time, I think it’s necessarily a novel of political paranoia. Cyberpunk’s got it right. In Neuromancer—although it’s never dated in the book, I always assumed it was happening around 2035—you glimpse the United States, and it’s not that great a place. There doesn’t seem to be any middle class. There’s nothing between these post-human superrich people and the Street, with a capital S. Nobody’s ever more than one door away from the Street. It’s quite grim and maybe it’s become a kind of cliché, but on the other hand, it’s exactly like Mexico City. It’s really similar to a lot of the Third World. And so I think that the cyberpunk future, if you want to generalize it, is a future in which globalization really does work both ways, and everybody—unless they’re very, very, very rich—winds up getting to be part of the Third World.
How do you account for your ability to identify and write about things before other people perceive them?
It sometimes must have involved leaps of induction that I wasn’t conscious of. And the way I experience it myself, it’s like pattern recognition. Something fits in a certain way. For instance, I remember the first time I saw a picture of a personal computer of any kind: It was sort of portable-looking, and it had a little handle. I knew that everybody would have one of those, and from that, knowing nothing about the technology and all the things they would have to overcome to get there, I just took it for granted that everybody’s machine would be connected with everybody else’s and that they’d be typing to one another, or whatever it was they did. In that regard, I guess I got it right, but I think I got it right because of the profundity of my ignorance. Because when I was doing that, there were guys who already had their own kind of Radio Shack computers that they’d built, and I knew some of those guys, and I would talk to them and say, “Yeah, they’re going to hook them all up, and then, and then. . . .” And they would always say: “But there’s not enough bandwidth!” I never knew what bandwidth was, and I probably don’t really know today, but I just knew that they were wrong—that it wasn’t going to matter about the bandwidth. It was amazing to me: These guys were so smart, so technical. They were doing this stuff, but they couldn’t see its potential.
