William Gibson: Zero History
Tags: Zero History, William Gibson
William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem with sex, drugs and political skullduggery, introduced the notion of “cyberspace” to the public and predicted the emergence of a world wide web, along with computers of ever-increasing intelligence and dubious motive. In the post-September 11th world, however, his attention has increasingly focused not on a new imagined future (the branch of Matrix-style cyber fiction his work spawned chugs along regardless) but on the complexities of the present. In a recent NYT op-ed about Google’s tightening grip on our lives, Gibson conceded that “science fiction never imagined Google” and characterized the search engine as a “coral reef of human minds” with an impact so potentially transformative that it should cause us to consider new ideas like “training wheel” identities for today’s minors, whose every stupid, impolitic thought is being cached to their potential future detriment.
Gibson’s recent fiction has echoed his contemporary concerns. His aughts-focused Bigend Trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and the newly-released Zero History) follows the atypical adventures of a handful of iPhone-obsessed, cosmopolitan scrappers such as ex-rock star/freelance journalist Hollis Henry, myopic drug addict and talented translator Milgrim, and the titular Hubertus Bigend, an amoral advertising entrepreneur and “cool hunter” whose appearance has been described by Gibson as “Tom Cruise on a diet of virgin blood and truffled chocolates,” and whose latest ephemeral fixation in Zero History is a high-end toy called a Festo Penguin, which is a remote-controlled airship shaped like a flying bird. The rootless nature of these characters, the flexibility of their identities, the volume of cultural data they must process moment to moment: it’s all indicative of a decade of whiplash change, and one in which the future points in infinite directions, depending on your vantage point. SuicideGirls recently called up William Gibson in a Seattle hotel to discuss his current state of mind.
Ryan Stewart: How’s the room service there?
William Gibson: Well, I haven’t had a chance to get into it yet, but I think it’s going to be okay!
RS:
I was surprised to learn just now, from Google, that those Festo Air Penguins you write about are real. What is it about them that fascinates you?
WG:
Well, I was initially attracted by their extraordinary beauty and elegance. And I assumed that, as with everything I’ve published since Pattern Recognition, that someone somewhere will Google every term and gizmo mentioned in the book just to figure out which ones are made up and which ones are real. [laughs] If you check out any of the Festo balloon remotes, they’re just hypnotic, I think. They’re hypnotically beautiful. The company has this really interesting design philosophy, in that they base everything on biologics. They actually move because they’re like animals, not because they’re built to move like animals. They work because they’re shaped like Manta rays and penguins, and I find that to be an inherently, extremely interesting way to design. So, they’re there in the book as these gorgeous things that a very wealthy man can buy to play with, but which have been turned to comically sinister usage.
RS:
Speaking of sinister, you open the book by giving the lay of the land in Myrtle Beach, where the main character is traveling, and he casually notes Confederate flags among many other details that fill that environment. I’m sure that wasn’t meant to go unnoticed, though. Was that a comment on the inescapability of geography?
WG:
Not exactly, but I wouldn’t be unhappy for someone to assume that. In retrospect I think it was an instinctive move to indicate that geopolitics – even local geopolitics – survive in what we increasingly take for granted as a post-geographical world. And Milgrim is really good at noticing details, but he’s also good at not telling you what he thinks about them. [laughs] He just sort of slides it by, like ‘And there’s a Confederate flag…’ What’s more telling about that chapter for me would be the traditional concrete lawn jockey boy who’s been painted green like a Martian in order to be more politically correct. And that’s something that I’ve actually seen. That’s an option in concrete lawn jockey boys, and I assume it’s done for that reason.
RS:
The recent Wikileaks scandal was also a good reminder of the continued battle for preeminence between geography and cyberspace, I think. The long arm of the law couldn’t reach him.
WG:
Well, yeah, and that’s something that’s been around as a concept since the early days of the Internet, but I think it’s the biggest and bluntest example. It’s the biggest one-shot example that we’ve seen. Organized Internet piracy of copyrighted material is some ways similar, in that it can become business as usual and we can become used to it. The Wikileaks case is sort of like all of those Bruce Sterling rants about the post-national digital world. There it is – it just happened!
RS:
The federal agent character in the book, Winnie, was one I couldn’t help but find irritating because of her phonetic twitter grammar, which is frequently displayed. “Where R U?” and so forth.
WG:
I may have been stretching a bit, with that. She was obviously texting, in a sense. I assumed that she wouldn’t have had any presence on twitter other than as a Fed and a mom, so I gave her that texty thing, you know?
RS:
Do you tend to notice that, when people you’re communicating with do it?
WG:
I’ll tell you where I notice it a lot -- I notice it in Youtube comment threads. But I didn’t think that Winnie would waste the keystrokes on Milgrim until something really started happening. Actually, something I was working on last night required me to look at all the tweets that appear in the book, and her tweets do become terser, but more grammatically correct. Once she’s got something to work with, she’s sending like one-word tweets, but they aren’t really abbreviated.
RS:
She’s able to get her point across.
WG:
Yeah.
RS:
When a pop star like, say, Britney Spears puts out an album and the song titles have those deliberate misspellings, what message do you think is being communicated?
WG:
I don’t think of it as a message, necessarily, although I haven’t actually thought of what Britney or her songwriters might see as a motive in doing that. I suspect that they would be shooting for identification. They want the reader to recognize them as just another person. I think they want to be relatable.
RS:
The English major in me bristles at it, I guess.
WG:
I was an English major too, but I married a socio-linguist, and that sort of cured me. [laughs] It really cured me of looking down on people who don’t use proper English. Languages don’t stabilize until they’re dead. That’s rule number one of socio-linguistics. And societies that have these huge, formal governmental bodies that attempt to keep their language from changing – they have languages that change just as much as anybody else’s. Like France. So, yeah, I think that God help us, Britney Spears is what’s happening to the evolution of our language. It’s an evolution that is, in my view, nothing more than an infinite number of accidents. Some of the things that are going to change the English language are incredibly stupid. But it’ll happen because that kind of evolution works, apparently, the way biological evolution works. If we could access spoken English from fifty years from now, I’m not sure how much of it we’d be able to understand, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the people fifty years could be said to be speaking some degraded form of English. I mean, God only knows what the Elizabethans would think of us.
RS:
The book’s ostensible subject is marketing, but not really mass marketing; you’re interested in exploring a kind of niche, anti-marketing that attracts by making a product seem scarce.
WG:
Well, I’m inclined to think that many of the people I know are functionally immune to a lot of mass marketing, but they’re not immune to other kinds of marketing. And if marketing is what we now do, in our supposedly largely post-industrial society, then marketing will find new ways. People will be coming up with marketing that gets you in the places the old marketing couldn’t.
RS:
Marketing that sells us on the exclusivity of a thing is something I would normally associate with the rich, but the book’s vibe seems to be that there are other, positive attributes to it, in that it can attract pro-active types. It’s deep, sociological stuff.
WG:
Yeah, interviews after the fact of writing a book are difficult for me, because I don’t want to present myself as someone who knows what he’s talking about. [laughs] If a book is working for me, I sort of help it write itself. I don’t start with a number of ideas that I’ve come to and then attempt to illustrate them with an act of fiction. When I commit an act of fiction I often find within it questions that I’m unable to answer. So, my position after the fact is to gesture, to point at the text and say ‘What do you think it is?’ There’s an assumption that I serve a didactic function, but I actually don’t. My motive is just to try to get people to wonder about the place of marketing in our culture and our society. I’m not going to hand them a token that says ‘Fear marketing, flee now!’ or something like that. If we did that, how would we even make a living? It’s what we do.
RS:
It’s interesting how this trilogy of present-day books you’ve now completed falls neatly within a decade that’s still very undefined. Do you imagine that this decade will continue to be thought of as a decade of interruption? The September 11th decade?
WG:
I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see this, but I keep waiting for the first person to call it the turn of the century. [laughs] There’s going to come a day when someone says ‘Back at the turn of the century…’ and everybody will instantly nod and go ‘Yeah...’ and ever after we will refer to it as the turn of the century. I think that will be what we call the first ten years of this century by the time we get to the 2020s or the 2030s. As to what it will be characterized by, there’s really no telling. If I were somehow magically offered a body of knowledge from the real future, but only one body of knowledge, what I would want to know is: what do they think of us? I think that would tell me everything I need to know about where they are at, and it would tell me so much more about the world I live in than I could possibly know now, because so many things are going to happen in the meantime. History is a speculative discipline, it’s not the study of a fixed body of information. Our view of the Victorians is nothing like the Victorians’ view of themselves, and I would assume that our view of ourselves is nothing remotely like the future’s view of us. And I’m inclined to think that we know way more about the Victorians than they knew about themselves. So, I don’t see any reason to think that we know more about ourselves than the future will be able to uncover.
RS:
Do you feel like you’ve been well-placed to give the aughts some degree of shaping, through your work?
WG:
Well, I sort of feel like I came to it with the oven mitts of genre science-fiction, which turned out to be marvelous things with which to heft the crazy, steaming casserole of the first decade of the 21st century, the contents of which we all still find quite baffling. I basically came to the task because I had the toolkit, you know? I had my standard-issue science-fiction writer toolkit that I earned sometime around 1981, and it’s really the only toolkit that I ever learned to work with. Having been an English major, I was taught that the only way to look at the science-fiction of the past, historically, is to look at the past in which it was written, which is invariably what gave it life and meaning for its author. So, when I began to write near-future science-fiction around 1981, I was very self-conscious about that, like ‘I’m writing some 1980s science-fiction here, and one day if anyone cares to look at it they’ll have to make sense of it in terms of what was going on at the moment I wrote it.’ So, I’ve kept that awareness as I’ve kept writing, but as I’ve kept writing the world outside the window was getting weirder and weirder.
RS:
Weirder in what sense?
WG :
Because of exponential technologically-driven change. I would look at the imaginary future on my computer screen and then look out the window or look at CNN and think that pretty soon we’re going to be past this [piece that I’m writing]. The window or CNN will offer a higher quota of cognitive dissonance than this stuff I’m sitting here imagining, I’d think. And that was really the beginning of the project that led to these three books, although the three previous books were also a kind of conscious segue into the present, but I did it in a way that was much less obvious. Those books were set in what is essentially now, or what has become an alternate past, and the thing that I kept to myself was my assumption that almost all of the characters were characters from the day in which I was writing those books, rather than the result of any attempt of mine to imagine how someone from the near future would perceive things. A character like Rydell, the hapless policeman [in the Bridge trilogy], really feels like a 90s guy. He thinks like a 90s guy and he speaks like a 90s guy and he basically is a 90s guy – there’s a lot of that in those books. And I found that this delighted me to do that, and to my amazement nobody complained. Nobody called me on it and said ‘Why do you have these archaic protagonists running around in this near future that you want us to believe in?’
RS:
Your protagonists in Zero History , along with ones in Spook Country and other books, are very cosmopolitan. Their ability to function in a culturally dense cityscape is a key to their success. Do you think cosmopolitanism should be taught? Is it a form of literacy?
WG:
I suppose it is a form a literacy. I try not to be too didactic a novelist, because I think that if I was I would be serving a fairly low function as an artist. But none of us are free of our biases, and I would think that it would be quite remarkable for me to write a protagonist who was a sympathetic character to any degree, who was either a racist, a tribalist, a nationalist, or a fundamentalist ideologue. Those are negatives for me, so I guess I would see the sympathetic characters in Spook Country as being defined more by their absence of characteristics like that than by anything in particular that they are into. They all seem to be people who are, to some extent, capable of caring about the people who are immediately around them. They also tend to be what I would see as not overly ambitious, although sometimes they just kind of take off. I sort of wind a character up and then set it down in a book and it goes off and develops its own mean, competitive edge, in which case I just let it do what it’s going to do, and I think that way in the end I’ll have a more naturalistic depiction of how people actually behave.
RS:
Another author recently described to me a book he’s writing, which takes place in a future decimated by worst-case scenario global warming, but that’s in the background because the characters are focused on their own lives, finding happiness. That reminded me of your work, which often deals with thriving in whatever reality is given.
WG:
Yeah, yeah, and the book you describe sounds like an entirely worthy project, as described. I’ve often thought about the real future, what it might be, since that’s the way science-fiction works in our society, but the kind of book you describe is one that we too seldom see, in which there’s been some extremely big and possibly bad change, and yet if you’re shooting for high naturalism you have to depict the characters going through everything that humans go through as they grow and get old and die. It’s not all about your plot points, you know? But closer to the traditional core of genre science-fiction, it’s all about the plot. The traditional version of that [book] would be that it’s all about the climate change. And it would also be about androgenic climate change, and the characters would get some time machine and go back and kill the guy who was about to invent the internal combustion engine. That’s a deliberately childish example, but that’s closer to what genre science-fiction has done, something broad like that. There are very few books that have attempted that sort of future. It’s probably easier to do something like that with alternative histories. You change one factor and Protestantism never happens and the Catholic church is ruling the world and you come in on characters who are just fully living their lives. So, it’s been done, though we think of works like that as falling outside the genre, but nonetheless they’re obviously science-fiction.
RS:
What did you think of Inception?
WG:
I loved it! Loved it. And I don’t love movies because of what I imagine the director was trying to do, I just love them when they work so brilliantly. I think the previous twelve months have been a really rich film year for me, because there have been three science-fiction films that I found, for different reasons, to be wonderfully satisfying: one was Moon, one was Splice, and one was Inception . I hadn’t thought about the fact that they all have single noun titles. That’s actually kind of scary. [laughs] Inception was the action film I always wanted to see. There’ve been so many times that I’ll be watching an action film and thinking ‘I could so love this if only it was ten times smarter.’ And Inception felt that way to me.
RS:
I liked it too. I thought it was bold of Nolan to sort of radically re-conceive the idea of a dream state as a kind of stable holodeck.
WG:
Yeah, after thinking about it and reading some reviews, what the script suggests that they’re doing doesn’t really have much to do with any psychological model of dreaming that I know of. I say this only having seen it once, and having subsequently read quite a few reviews, although I was fortunate to see it with almost no idea of what it was about. Just through sheer luck I got a completely spoiler-free viewing, partly because I went to see it the day it came out, which is something I never do, but a friend dragged me along. What they’re doing has very little to do with any experiential model of dreaming that I’ve had in my own life of dreams. They talk about building dreams. If what the characters are saying is true, in terms of what is going on in the movie, they are making these hard constructs into which they will go and also take the victim and play some psychodrama out. But those hard constructs also aren’t really stable, because they start breaking up with spectacular and surrealistically gorgeous CG effects, for no particular reason. Somehow I don’t think that’s what it’s about. It amazes me that people approach Inception as though it were a piece of hard science-fiction, as opposed to being a Borges story. The modality that it works in is the modality of a Borges story like The Aleph or The Circular Ruins . Those are stories that are closer to myth and fairy tale than they are to hard science-fiction. So, when people attack the premise as though the premise was a failure, I think it’s probably one of those cases of the critics’ expectations being the whole thing. Maybe it didn’t meet their expectations, but that could be because it was actually something else. I loved it, and I felt this extraordinary feeling of gratitude on leaving the theater. I think it was gratitude that it had actually been possible for somebody to spend that much money on a movie that I really loved. It’s been a long time since I had that feeling.
Zero History is available in bookstores everywhere.
Zero History is available in bookstores everywhere.
Featured Interviews
All interviews
