SHELBOURNE HOTEL, OCT 11, sitting at a low slung table of polished glass and brass. Waiting for early morning coffee. There is a moment when I feel strangely in place, the neo victorian architecture alternating with the act of assembling a Sony Minidisc recorder. The scene is right out of a Gibson novel and the irony is not lost on him as he sidles up to an easy chair, shakes hands, takes a seat and pours coffee. He tells me about the interview he did for a website: four minidisc recorders, a mixer, a video camera, two photographers, a digital camera; at times like these he must feel like he’s crossed into a netherworld where his own writing feeds the shape of the world; or is it the other way around?
He’s six-six but hangs his head low, perched outwards. The act of reducing his height seems to parallel his manner and the way he speaks of his own work. He doesn’t seem to want to be seen above anybody else and the constant questions thrown his way asking him to predict the future or make a clear statement about the progession of technology itself seems to bother him. Of all the public figures I’ve met in all my years Gibson is the most pleasant, polite, affable celebrity I’ve come close to. At the reading, even the most obtuse of questions gets a fair and partial response. Having first met him two weeks ago at a signing in Seattle, I’m standing at the reading in Hodges Figgis when someone taps my shoulder, I turn around and find Gibson with his hand outstretched saying “Hey, you made it.” With violently intense large blue eyes, heavy fashionable spectacles, a loose limbed body, and a hauntingly beautiful lazy drawl somewhere between Deep South and Vancouver BC, Gibson manages to perfectly convey what he is: an American expatriate science fiction writer with a ton of street cred. That voice draws you into conversation like a sleeping aid might draw you into heavy REM. There is no nervous energy in speaking to Gibson, and many times I was tempted to stop asking questions and just start chatting; to the relief of his publicist and wife who had just flown in, I didn’t. I could’ve been there all year.
His greatest asset, and that which makes him a celebrity, is street cred which he has in spades. To the unitiated, a brief history. Born in Virginia and raised in South Carolina, Gibson found himself escaping to Vancouver at age 19 to avoid the Vietnam draft. After attending college for several years, Gibson found himself approached to write some theory about genre works and returned to the world he inhabited as an adolescent; the scifi novel. Not only was he astonished to find how much of it was bad, but how atrocious it had become in the meantime, with the 70s embracing the visual aesthetic in scifi films such as Star Wars and the attendant deluge of “space operas” which had little to do with the literary aesthetic pushed in the early sixties by a New Wave of sci fi writers, among them William S Burroughs, JG Ballard, Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, and even Kingsley Amis. As Ballard wrote about scifi’s world “the facts of the twentieth century, the first flight of the Wright Brothers, the invention of the Pill, the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.” Star Wars insured that scifi lost such a bearing, the New Wave fell into decline while the successful sci fi writers became those who wrote “hard sf”, a mix of speculative detail, space travel, and hardcore concrete physics.
Gibson was in his own words “Of the first generation to read Burroughs when I was 14.” He decided to try his hand at some experimental short stories try to bring back characterization and stylistics, and maybe make enough money to buy a color tv. The result was completely unpredictible: a new literary aesthetic that would accurately guage the social and cultural feelings of the late 20th century.
The early stories are masterpieces of style, of ambigious feeling, and a fairly common theme emerges about the effects of a technological landscape on human psychopathology. He fell in with a group of writers who found themselves all at the same time, the early eightites, publishing radical stories that brought science fiction back to Earth and reset its scopes; this group became known as the cyberpunks, as nearly all their stories included details of invasive surgery, experimental drugs, global political scope, ubiquitious computational power, and a hard sheen of glossy prose so finely honed you could see your own reflection in it. Another aesthetic was that of seeing a technological society from ground zero; most of the cyberpunks protaginists were gutter level, lowlifes and hustlers, drug dealers and pimps, living in a world “where the street found its own uses for things”. Taking examples from inner city black youths turning record players into instruments, from hackers using computers as a break in tool, the cyberpunks predicted a world where technology and the creative uses that criminal or socially opressed minorities have used it for would allow these classes to liberate themselves in a sense; at least the most cynical sense. This form of science fiction was utterly such a product of its times that it always verged on satire of the present, something that had been lost from science fiction for nearly two decades.
Gibson was the breakaway of the pack with his first novel, published in 1984, called Neuromancer. Unarguably the most gifted poet of the cyberpunks, Gibson also found his aesthetics more determinate of the shape of emerging cyberpunk through some bizarre collusion. Writer Bruce Sterling, punk rocker John Shirley, and mathemetician Rudy Rucker found their own success but none captured the feel of a future just bordering on ours so well as Gibson.
In a Gibson novel, the ideas are so dense that an idea another sci fi writer might use for an entire novel becomes a throwaway sentence. The world is filled with brand names and a new, even more extremely invasive and persuasive media landscape. Innumerable slight details abound; architecture, weapons, clothes, hairstyles, celebrities, and a new poetry formed from the literal language of urban decay - neon, concrete, steel, chrome, plastic, rain, skyscraper. As Neuromancer is now taught in many colleges as the ultimate dystiopian novel, one wonders if there will someday be an annotated version to match Joyce’s Ulysses. He followed with two more novels in this “Sprawl” trilogy.
Gibson’s own writing, in fact, was so astonishingly well written, filled with real character and emotional space, that he has always straddled a divide between being a genre writer and being read by more serious literary types; every one of his books has been greeted with all manner of superlatives, while the cultural impact has been enormous, everything from the shape of the Internet to the design of rave fliers. Brian Eno and U2 consut him at times, and the Zoo TV tour was directly influenced by his novels. Perhaps more than anybody else Gibson made computers hip, the hackers of his novels as famous as rock stars and a lot more dangerous. It was Gibson who coined the word cyberspace, as we’ll never let him forget.
In fact he’s so hip, that his audiences tend to be a fairly incongruous type; cyber visionaries, hardcore goths, sci fi fans, ravers, literary fans, and those who remain in the cultutral know seem to mix at his signings.
After spending too much time working out film contracts, writing an unused Alien 3 script (“they thought I would make an unfilmable science fiction story they could mine for the good ideas, but then I handed in a clearly thought out movie, which would’ve cost way too much” )and a whole year on the Keanu Reeves starrer Johnny Mnemonic (“we kept arguiung with one of the producers who said we should make the film for the ‘Gibson impaired audience’”) based on one of his first short stories, Gibson has moved on, perhaps without his audience, with a second trilogy begun with Virtual Light and the new novel Idoru, set in the same reality, but not a sequel. The characters are less of the badass type, more cautiously constructed, having real doubts and fears and having that so pearticulary end of the millenium nervosa about just getting by in the world. Gone are the elitist hackers who move through a shadowy underworld, or particulary impressive virtual realities. Now it is the essence of information which is more powerful, and the media landscape beckons and mutates ever more extremely.
On that morning in the Shelbourne Hotel, I felt like Gibson might have had he met Burroughs at age twenty one. We proceeded to discuss everything from the new novel Idoru, his feelings for the decade old Neuromancer, to why Steely Dan is the most subversive band of all time over cigarettes and coffee.
Here he begins by talking about being pigeonholed as a genre writer.
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Idoru begins with the story of Laney, someone who is supernaturally talented at fishing for patterns in the chain of data wich surrounds a person’s life; basically through an advanced form of channel surfing Laney has an innate ability, perhaps heightened by the experimental drugs he was given as a child, to recgonize subconcious signs about a person through the wake of data that trails behind them, credit transfers, store receipts, pictures taken at security cameras, all accessible at one level by ubiquitious computation. But his employers seem to be deficient in what makes him so good at his job, empathy. A particulary vicious celebrity expose program, Slitscan, fires him after a disatrous hunt for a celebrities mistress.
Now he finds himself being mysteriously employed by the handlers of Lo/Rez, one of the last rock bands. Rez, the singer, an aging rock dinosaur who through excess charm and slight alteration of his visual image manages to retain a group of young fans despite being their mothers’ age. And now he’s announced he’s going to marry the Idoru Rei.
An Idoru is a japanese pop idol, very high on Milli Vanilli content. Apparently, Gibson heard the story of a real Idoru who turned out to be a media construct. The girl in the photos was different from the girl who sang the songs, who posed in the pictures, who wrote the poetry, who gave he interviews, etc. When it became known publically, her popularity skyrocketed. The Idoru Rei is a piece of software. She is not a physical being, but a combination of hologram and speech synthesis that appears real. And Rez has announced he’s going to marry her.
Chia is a member of the Lo/Rez Seattle fan club, and a rich member sends her out to post Quake Tokyo, to find out the truth. Her own teenage world introduces her to a world being built around the Idoru, perhaps the last chance to create an anarchic, uncontrollable Internet. While Laney is pursued by his previous employers as he comes closer and closer to the truth of the nature of celebrity and his own abilities, as he searches for the pattern of data at the heart of the Idoru.
Basically, what Laney does is a fairly straightforward reference to Gibson himself, and the subcouncious process of how he assembles a novel. Collecting these “nodal points” or fragments of culutral life and data. He’s also used the metaphor of shopping in thrift stores, in junkyards. His website is called “yardshow” a southern yard display of collected junk which seems to have vanished off the face of the world. Here he describes that process.
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And with that Gibson proceeded to talk personally for awhile, much to the dismay of his publicist, then vanished again, having finished another four week gap in time where he exposes himself; allowing himself to get back to some relaxed time with his wife and kids. At one point of this book tour, Gibson found himself at a bookstore with a very low turnout. He asked what type of publicity had been carried out. All the usual, but there was also a chance to order signed copies of the new novel through the net. After the handful of live audience left, Gibson found himself facing a huge pile of books, all waiting to be signed. Any writer who gives a hand in creating such a culture, and retaining his own humor and affability, has to have some sort of perspective we here at the end of the millenium desperately need.
Special thanks to Gibson’s wife, for allowing him to give his holiday time, Evelyne Coil, an extra special thanks to Paul at Waterstone’s here in Cork, and Gerry McCarthy and Mic Moroney.