Colin W. G. Gibson

Transcription

[applause] Robert J. Sawyer: Thank you. I'll say, Bill, that the best thing that ever happened to me is the media and the publicity departments deciding not to refer to you as a science fiction writer anymore, 'cause it opened up an ecological niche for me to move into and I'm very, very grateful for that, as is my accountant. So, I'm thrilled to be here tonight in conversation with you. We were just reminiscing, Bill and I, about Toronto of old, back in the green room there. Bill lived here 40 years ago and now lives, as you know, in Vancouver. We're gonna talk a little bit about that as that goes on, but the Canadian-ness is significant because I've been charged with a duty that I have to perform before we get into this. RS: There's... For 30 years now, there have been Canadian science fiction and fantasy awards known as the Aurora Awards, and Bill has been repeatedly nominated for said awards and won said awards. And in honour of the 30th anniversary at conventions across Canada last year, Aurora Award nominee pins were presented. They're lovely pins that show a little silhouette or a profile of the trophy, and Bill did not show up at any of these science fiction conventions to collect his 30th anniversary pin, so I have promised the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Society to pin you tonight. [laughter] RS: And here you are, sir, if you want to put this on. Careful of the thing there and there's one of these little grommets or whatever you call it at the back there. And I also have one for you to pass on to Bruce Sterling, your collaborator, on one of your wonderful books together, which was, of course, "The Difference Engine," quite arguably... Quite sustainably arguably, the first steam punk work. We all owe a great debt to that. A fascinating work about artificial intelligence and Babbage and all of that. So, at the end of the evening, I'll give you one to pass onto Bruce, as well. But congratulations on your many Aurora nominations and wins, and we're honoured to have you here tonight. The book that you're here to talk about tonight, specifically the one that back... Back has several of Bill's books at the back and even one or two of mine, but the book we're here to talk about tonight... Subtle, aren't I? [laughter] RS: Is called "Distrust That Particular Flavor," and I want to start off with the title, "Distrust That Particular Flavor," because I kept reading... I read the entire book, of course, in preparation for this, and kept looking for the reference, and finally came to it. And the sentence actually is, "Distrust that particular flavour of italics" referring to certain passages that are emphasized in science fiction of yore. This book, although it's non-fiction, is very much in dialogue with the science fiction work that you yourself have produced, and has been produced by people that went before you. And I wonder if you wanna just talk a little bit about the title and what it was that you are, in fact, telling people to distrust here with this. William Gibson: Well, I accepted... Unwisely accepted an assignment to write an introduction for a new standard. I think it was actually a Penguin Classics, new standard British paperback of "The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells. And I loved "The Time Machine" and I thought I could do it, but then I started looking at what those introductions in that series are really like and they're extremely, really quite academic. And I started trying to put something together, but I kept finding that my autobiographical involvement with Wells' novel impinged, I thought, on the introduction. It always wound up being about me, so eventually I... [laughter] WG: I told them that, I just said, "I'm sorry I'm not qualified to do this." But I kept what I had written and eventually, edited it slightly, and my friend, Eileen Gunn, published it on her web magazine and it was one of the things I thought should be in the book. And it's an account of my discovery of science fiction as a child and my simultaneous discovery of the historical fact of the Second World War, and how I... Because I was reading in the late '50s science fiction that had been written in the mid '40s, I had to reverse engineer all of modern history in order to place timelines, say, in context of what was real and what he had made up. WG: And I was doing reasonably well with that, and the Cuban missile crisis came along. And I was an imaginative kid who had already read a certain amount of science fiction and it scared me. It scared me more than anything had ever scared me, and I became absolutely convinced that the world was going to end right about then or that I would be forced into one of the new civil defense fallout shelters with my neighbours, who I already thought of as Morlock. [laughter] WG: It all reached the kind of unbearable pitch and just evaporated overnight. And that had a profound effect on me, it was a kind of loss of innocence but in a good way and I never, after that, trusted the italics of the exclamation points of the immediate doomsayers. So, the day after the Y2K bug was supposed to have taken down the entire Internet and everything else, there were people coming up to me saying, "You never believed it, why didn't you believe it?" And I said, "Well, I was around for the Cuban missile crisis." [laughter] So, that's basically that. RS: Stephen Jay Gould was very much in vogue 20 years ago for a book that he wrote called "Wonderful Life" which proposed that if you restarted the tape of life, going back to the Cambrian explosion, it would unroll in a very different way from the initial conditions. And I think of you and me as being quite different authors. I think of you as a friend and a colleague but we're very different writers. But I was very pleased to read in this that part of what, in that same essay, your start was classic illustrated comic books and indeed the adaptation of HG Wells' "The Time Machine" which was absolutely one of the things that got me into this genre, too. Very powerful seed planted there. WG: Indeed. Indeed. And it remains... That version of "The Time Machine" remains very much my imagery. If I read "The Time Machine" now, I tend to see it in those. Although it was very coloured by the time... That edition was very coloured by that version. The artwork is very coloured by the time in which it exists. "The Time Machine" actually looks like an atom. RS: Yes, it does. Exactly. Well, I always thought of it as two hula hoops which is also up at the time it was written, mutually perpendicular to each other, maybe three hula hoops, mutually... WG: I secretly, as I say in the essay, I secretly filled the blue horse notebooks with blueprints for actual time machines. I thought that if you could build something that simultaneously moved in three dimensions, perhaps you could move in four? [laughter] RS: It's a wonderful essay and it touches on a theme that's pervasive throughout the collection which is this notion of whether science fiction writers are actually futurists or actually extrapolating or actually predicting. I like to say 'cause sometimes, I do business under the rubric science fiction writer and sometimes under the rubric futurist. And the difference is, that a good night for giving a talk as a science fiction writer is 500 bucks, and a bad night for giving a talk as a futurist is $10,000. So, there's a reason to invoke the names. But Wells, you give a passing grade too because he's so far in the future, nobody can gainsay him. RS: It happens that we're speaking here tonight on the 12th of January 2002... 2012, excuse me. I'm slipping decades here, which is the 20th anniversary of the birth of HAL 9000, one of the seminal creations in the area that you and I both mind in our fiction in very different ways, which is artificial intelligence and the World Wide Web. So I want to talk to you and get... You articulate it well in the book, but for people here who haven't heard you articulate it outside of your fiction, your take on science fiction and prediction. WG: Well, science fiction was my native literary culture. Absolutely. I was bitten by the science fiction book long before I was able to read because in the '50s, life in North America was permeated with science fiction imagery. Most of which was remarkably upbeat. I think I probably assumed that the tale fins on my father's Oldsmobile Rocket '88 and the "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Show" that I watched everyday, I thought they were all part and parcel of something, and it was something I really liked, and I wanted more of it. And it gradually led me to reading actual adult prose science fiction. And then, probably, so I was like a full-blown science fiction fan really by age 12. But by age 15, I was starting to edge away from it. Puberty had arrived. I was interested in other things. And really the '60s, what we called the '60s was arriving at the same time, so I put away childish things and I didn't read much science fiction after that. WG: I kept up with a few favourite writers. And something like a decade later, I found myself an English major, English Honours student at UBC, mostly reading comparative literary critical methodologies, and wondering how the hell I was gonna be able to make a living, because everyone else I'd known at UBC was like signing up with CBC, and getting real jobs and I didn't get that. And so, I thought, well there's... Somehow, I thought I'd try to do some science fiction. I thought I understood the entry-level mechanism to science fiction better than anything else, even though I hadn't really read much science fiction for a decade. So, I began to try in various ways to see what I could do. I went to science fiction conventions to check out the state of the genre and started in small ways trying to write fiction, but when I did it, I did it in the mindset of somebody who had been a native science fiction reader who had just spent four years reading about comparative literary critical methodology. WG: And one thing that gave me was a conviction that historically, one reads science fiction of any era, as though it were, in fact, about the era in which it is written. Because in my opinion, it is. It invariably is. It cannot be about what was the future when it was written, because the author can only guess, and that was a kind of self-awareness that I took into my program of attempting to write science fiction. Whatever I was going to write was actually gonna be about the moment in which it was written and consequently, the answer to a lot of questions that would turn up in the process, the process of the narrative were best found in, by example, in the world around me rather than in my own imagination. WG: And as I was working my way through... As I was writing the early short stories that, from which the world of "Neuromancer" came for instance, I took it for granted that the socioeconomics of the world I was depicting was simply Reaganomics with the volume turned up to 11. The world of those stories of the "Neuromancer" was simply what I got when I ran the tapes on, what in those days, was very conservative ideology, it no longer is. It's now vaguely leftist but... RS: Yes. WG: And I wound up with the "Sprawl" and it satisfied me because to me, it felt convincing and I thought that it felt convincing because its bone structure was drawn on the world around me. Virtually, everything in those early books I either looked at my best interpretation of the present or I looked at my best interpretation of the past. For instance, I thought, the criminal underworld of "Neuromancer" is based on the British Victorian criminal underworld, very, very closely, which actually involved a sort of apprenticeship system. It was a like a... There was like a guild system for pickpockets and various kinds of, really esoteric different kinds of burglars. And if you find a... You can go and find... WG: If you're lucky enough to be able to find a very wonderful book called the "Victorian Underworld" by Kellow Chesney, you can actually read the model if you wanted to, you could read the model I used for the world that Molly Millions and her friends come from. And so, very early for me, it became more, it was more satisfying for me to use found objects in an imaginative context, than to sit there, sort of like, "What can I imagine that's far out and trippy?" And I found that what works for me is to find wonderfully strange and trippy things, kicking around in a reference library and re-contextualize them in my narrative and then I can do my own little bits of imagining on top of that. RS: You mentioned "Neuromancer", of course, which came out in 1984 and I just wanted you to know all the trouble we went to, to make you feel welcome here because we ordered up a sky that was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel, in honour of your appearance here in Toronto today. The collection is fascinating because it is your first non-fiction collection, but it covers well over 20 years of material that's been called from Wired, and Rolling Stone, and you name it, all sorts of different publications including The Globe and Mail, and you seem to have a... There's a tension and I very much understand this tension because I made my first 10 years living as a writer, as a non-fiction writer, segued entirely into doing fiction. RS: You write in the introduction, "The itch to become a writer could be scratched, I suspected, too easily with other kinds of writing. Self-discipline, never having been my strong suit, I became uncharacteristically strict with myself about writing only fiction." And, there's definitely a tension 'cause each of the essays, may I say to the audience here, is followed with Bill's afterword about why he wrote the essay, how it came to be written, what he feels about the piece in retrospect which is a very interesting part of the book. RS: There's a definite tension here between taking time away from writing the books that you're famous for, the novels that you're famous for, and doing this sort of thing and I know that in some cases, the temptation is simply somebody's wagging a whole lot of zeros on a check, and in other cases, it's something you passionately want to talk about. You're candid enough to say at the end of a couple of the pieces that you think they're actually failures, the HG Wells introduction, and the piece that you wrote about contemporary China, and that one fascinates me in particular, because you say at the end of it, "I think I owe Wired... " I'm sorry, contemporary Japan, excuse me. "I think I owe Wired a piece about Japan because I kept all the good bits to use in the novel instead of in the article." RS: So, when you sit down to do these non-fiction pieces, just how much of a struggle is it to make that mind space? And I'm gonna say one more thing before letting you speak. There's autobiography in here which you are notoriously uninterested in talking about yourself and there's more glimpses of Bill Gibson, the man in this book, than there are overtly, in anything else you've written. Whereas, a lot of people say, "Oh, I know all about Rob's story 'cause I read this novel. I know what kind of guy he is." This is Bill naked on the page here in a way that you aren't in your novels. WG: Well, I was conscious of that as in a way, every time I wrote one of those pieces and I would look at it and think, "Well, there's nothing too revealing in this Wired article, but were someone to get out the cardboard box under my desk and lay these things out in a row, it would actually produce a kind of autobiographical document." So, I was always aware of that and I thought, "Fair enough. It's... I could live with that." And as it turns out, I can live that. I didn't choose to publish everything that was in the cardboard box, but not because the things I left out weren't revealing, but just because they so strongly suggested to me that I'm not always that good a writer. [laughter] RS: I mentioned Japan in the prelude there. Last year, a month after the Fukushima meltdown, I went to Japan, and you wrote a very interesting essay about your thoughts about the same time, and it was, of course, one of those moments where science fiction meets science fact and we're having a nuclear disaster and so forth. You often have spoken about Japan and of course, set a great deal of fiction in Japan, and I know you're tired of being asked, "Was Japan still on the cutting edge?" I'm gonna read you a quote and I wanna talk a little bit about this. The Japanese... This is, of course, quoting Bill. "The Japanese seem, to the rest of us, do live several measurable clicks down the timeline. The Japanese are the ultimate early adaptors and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to the Japanese." RS: There are two interesting things I wanna unpack from that. The first is simply the relationship with Japan, and I do think Canada's a great country to live in and I don't think it's a coincidence you've picked the place that's closest to Japan where you can live in this country and the second part I wanna unpack is this notion of all cultural change being technologically-driven, which I think is very much a signature William Gibson approach to viewing civilization. WG: Well, when I began, there were a number of things that came together in my life as I began to try to write science fiction. One of them was that my wife was actually keeping a roof over our head by teaching English as a Second Language at The Language Institute at UBC, and she had her Master's degree in Linguistics, and she became quite a good language teacher, and The Language Institute was a serious cash cow for UBC because Vancouver was a place that Japanese parents felt more comfortable shipping their kids off to learn English. WG: So, every six months or so, she would get this new batch of mostly Japanese kids who spoke relatively little English. And at the end of six months, it was possible to have a sort of conversation with them. And she'd have parties, and have them over, and it was a very social program. And it fascinated... These kids fascinated me, and I started hanging around with them and just garnering bits and pieces of where they were from, from these astonishing things that they would tell me. One thing, and sometimes things that they wouldn't tell me but I would simply infer. For instance that for them, Vancouver was pretty much like Puerto Vallarta is for me, in terms of hustle. [chuckle] WG: Vancouver to them was like this kind of paradise of slack. [laughter] One boy had come back for two terms, running. He'd been there for a year, and at the end of the year, he was like... He sadly said to me, "Well, I'm going home in a few days. It makes me very sad." And I said, "Well, would you ever consider staying?" And he looked at me in horror and he said, "If I stayed any longer, I'll never get my edge back." [laughter] WG: So, I began to like form kind of my own private Japan out of this stuff. And it was almost an annoyance to me that Japan became the bubble and the cutting edge, and all of that. All of that was totally beside the point for me. What I loved about it was just how flaming weird, and dark, and wonderful, it all seemed to be. I mean, had I known that the bubble would pop, as bubbles always do, I think I would have sorted wanted to fast forward to that, and to what came after it. Like my fascination with it was never about it being the Sunday supplement flavour of the week. It was about how profoundly strange a place it is, and it's profoundly strange for, I think, for the historical reasons that I touch on in a couple of the pieces in the book. WG: That it was the first... They had the first military industrial complex in the world. And just prior to that, they came out of a long period of rigidly enforced technological isolation, sent a bunch of young noble men off to England to buy the entire industrial revolution kit, ship it back, got it out of the box, blew their brains out, like major, major future shock, culture shock, just absolute craziness. They never had clock time before. And then they had clock time. Then they had clock time, big time. It made them... [chuckle] WG: Really, it made them really crazy. They turned into a military industrial state, conquered as much Asia around them as they could, and then went and took a pot shot at Pearl Harbour, for which they got two of their cities destroyed by weapons as unimaginable and incomprehensible as anything Wells' Martians could ever have wielded. And then their conquerors, the Americans, showed up with this like elaborate PowerPoint plan to completely restructure their society from the ground up, which unfortunately, was abandoned about 80% of the way through it because the Americans decided they had to go home and fight communism. WG: And so they left parts of feudal Japan still installed in the mechanism, which I think is actually part of the problem they're having today. They never really got to change the whole operating system over. But they did become this very interesting hybrid. Anyway, I could go on about that forever, but I just find that's totally interesting. And whatever happens there now is totally interesting for me because it's always a continuation of that narrative. It can't be anything else.