William Gibson

WILLIAM GIBSON

Interview excerpts and photo by Gregory Ego.

You’ve called Neuromancer the “Anti-Star Wars.” Did you dislike the film?

William Gibson: That’s one of those throwaway lines that plague you for years. [laughs] No, Star Wars isn’t science fiction. Star Wars is like unicorn fantasy, except the stage setting is psuedo-technological. Star Wars is more like Tolkien than science fiction. It wasn’t really Star Wars that I was kicking against when I wrote Neuromancer. I was kicking against the whole Robert Heinlein tradition of militaristic, right wing, upper middle class American science fiction. That’s what I didn’t like. I still don’t. [But] that, and unicorn fantasies, are the main trunk of the science fiction industry. The kind of thing I do is actually very marginal. It has a certain popularity, but it’s not really affecting the direction of the rest of the stuff.

Do you view reading as similar to “jacking into the Matrix”?

Oh yeah! I always get disheartened when people get too excited by the imaginary technology, because you don’t need any of that stuff. The Matrix is the world of information and we have access to it anyway. It was a metaphor that I used to deal with these huge flows of information that we’re all faced with. The problem is not that we can’t get information—it’s that we can’t get the information we need out of the river of it that we’re stuck in. When you think that we’re literally sitting there with [radio waves] passing through our bodies…I love that thought.

When I was a kid reading science fiction in the 1960s in a one-horse town in Virginia, I discovered science fiction, and it was my sole source of subversive ideas. There was no other place to get them. It was so far below the notice of the authorities or my parents that it was totally free. So I could walk around, thirteen years old, and Philip K. Dick was addressing me from his amphetamine fog in California. I didn’t realize that until years later; but I was getting strange data from these guys.

Even during the McCarthy era there was never any real censorship of science fiction. It was considered so debased, so far below the notice of any intelligent adult, that its practitioners could do anything they wanted. Unfortunately, that’s no longer true. Not only are academics and others watching us—a bad thing—but science fiction has become something one can consider as a career. You can sit back and think, Do I want to be a dental technician or do I want to be a science fiction writer? I never did that. I have a kind of snobbism about that. Before, it was done by people Bruce Sterling calls “paranoid pervert saints.” People like Dick, who just had not choice.

Why do you do it?

I guess I reached the point in my life where I had no choice. But I started writing very late. Science fiction is the domain of the child prodigy. I think Sterling published his first novel [Involution Ocean] when he was eighteen years old, and that’s been typical in science fiction. The same thing is true of Samuel Delany. But Burroughs didn’t start writing until he was about thirty-five. He told me it was a good thing to wait; you’ll have something to write about.

[Originally appeared in Journal Wired #3, http://www.sfsite.com/lists/mvz08.htm]