William Gibson needs little introduction. It’s been thirty years since his first novel “Neuromancer” was published and while it’s long been a cliché to say that the book was more than just a significant science fiction novel, but a cultural touchstone. Since then Gibson has published eight more novels and a collection of essays. His new novel is “The Peripheral.” The novel takes place in the near future and the farther future. It has some interesting thoughts about time travel and offers a critique about how we think about it, but he also presents a vision of two very different futures. Gibson spoke about the book, how he works and more.
ALEX DUEBEN: This is your first novel in five years.
WILLIAM GIBSON: It’s actually my first imaginary future book in the 21st Century.
AD: I like how you phrase that and I’m curious where this book started.
WG: Well when I got to the end of All Tomorrow's Parties, my sixth novel, I had to have some sense of how weird the world outside my window was before I could make a decision about how much to widen the bandwidth on that weirdness to induce the the kind of cognitive dissonance that I think people come to the sort of fiction that I write for. That’s not a very good way of explaining it, but that’s the best I’ve been able to do so far. I felt that in some way I was working with an eighties quota of weirdness outside my window, but I knew the world had gotten a lot weirder. I decided to undertake a program of taking the temperature of the weirdness of the world outside the window, which resulted in Pattern Recognition, my seventh novel. That was, in effect, a piece of speculative fiction about the year before the book was published. Then I did two more books that are connected to Pattern Recognition. When I finished Zero History, which was my ninth novel, I said, okay, I’ve either got what I set out to get or I don’t have it. The only way to truly test it is to write a novel set in an imaginary future using my revised yardstick of weirdness. That novel is The Peripheral.
AD: What was harder to envision for you, the near future set in America or the far future set in London?
WG: Oh the further was by far the more labor intensive. The near future is just Winter’s Bone with better smartphones. Or it’s Justified with drones. It’s all too familiar and all too believable. Given the 1-2 1-2 chapter structure I was using, whenever I came back to the near future it was like, whoa, give me a cup of coffee, this is good. I’m somewhere where I know what most things look like. The book’s further future was a stretch. Even though they’ve contrived to make things look like a lot of things we have, you don’t know what those things are capable of doing. Indeed it seems that everything in that world is protean and capable of shape shifting. That was stretching and it’s good to stretch.
AD: In the far future scenes in London, it’s not that it doesn’t feel real but it’s not as tactile in a sense both as a reader and for the characters it felt like
WG: I agree in a way but I think it’s inevitable–and to a certain sense it was deliberate. It’s a fairy tale environment. It even has a fairy godmother in Lowbeer.
AD: The book is about a group of rural Americans are confronted with the future in London. Typically in a time travel tale the people from past are rubes walking around amazed and that’s not the dynamic here at all.
WG: No. I was interested in that way that by and large we have tended to imagine the inhabitants of the past as being unsophisticated. They’re temporal hicks and our shit would blow their minds. They wouldn’t know what to make of it and we could probably take unfair advantage of them. I think that the piece of work that most brilliantly shows that up was Deadwood. We were shown that little street–that we’ve all grown up seeing in westerns–inhabited by, we would think, relatively unsophisticated and rather harmless creatures. As Deadwood went along we realized that that street was inhabited by formidably clever and absolutely ruthless individuals–who if they appeared in our timeline would pose a very very serious threat to our well being. I loved that about that show and I’ve never actually seen it remarked on, but I think they must have consciously had that going on. I wanted a bit of that. I wanted the delirious decadence of the 22nd century to bite off a bit more original gangster than they were going to be able to chew. Although granted, it’s only possible because Lowbeer is crazy enough to side with our guys.
AD: Reading your vision of rural America, with a few changes, that could have described a large chunk of the country.
WG: Well I grew up in a very old quite small town in Southwestern Virginia fairly close to the Tennessee line. My mother’s family had been there since forever, so I had that. I was out of there before the change winds blew. It’s not exactly the town in Justified by any means, but it’s got a little bit of that going on. Main Street certainly isn’t what it was when I was a boy and so I had the fractal texture of it from my childhood. I had the cultural shape of it from things like Winter’s Bone and Justified and I went with that. I was trying–I think unsuccessfully, ultimately–to make it “every town.” It was inevitably colored by childhood memory. It wasn’t even conscious, just as I wrote it, I found it had a lot of incidental texture. Also the language of the characters in that town comes out of people I’ve known who talk that way.
AD: The characters in the near future have had to be so inventive just to get by that in a decadent future they can utilize those skills and take advantage in a way that was fun to see.
WG: One thing I particularly like is how the people of this small town, confronted with this unthinkable, absurd situation that they find themselves in, just look at one another and say, okay, fuck it. It’s money. Nobody else is offering us any money. That gets them into the next chapter and it’s arguably realistic in that regard.
AD: You mentioned Winter’s Bone, which is a book I love, and that book like many of yours use the thriller armature as a way to tell a story. I kept thinking of The Peripheral as like PI novel where the character is hired to follow someone and gets sucked into this huge world.
WG: Yeah it’s a very classic–or indeed, deliberately cliched–plot point, but it still works.
AD: The book is sad–even the ending.
WG: It is–although not every reader perceives that. I’ve actually seen a few reviews that take me to task for ridiculously happy ending. I think that as it worked out, the two final chapters are a perfect litmus test for the experiential sophistication of the given reader.
AD: I’m fascinated that they think it’s happy. I mean, the second to last chapter is hopeful, but happy?
WG: What I found disturbing about that is that the two final chapters came as very much as surprises for me. I waited with baited breath to see how the whole thing would wrap up. I had this very creepy feeling that in the penultimate chapter, given everything that’s happened, everyone in Flynne’s world is living in a a real life conspiracy theory. [laughs] Their future is going to be decided by this weird secret cabal of time travelers who are manipulating everything and assassinating politicians as necessary. I mean how well is that going to go? Even though the protagonists that we’ve grown to know and love throughout the course of the narrative are good people. I think that Lowbeer herself has the book’s last word when she looks out across the river and says, human, all too human.
It’s up to the reader to complete the text. Given that my undergraduate was literary critical methodology–and given when I studied it–I’m still a firm believer in the interpretive fallacy, which is that each individual reader complete the text. There is in effect, no text. The author of the text has no more entree to a true meaning of the text than any other reader, so my interpretation of the text is simply that.
AD: Your first six books were very much about how we respond to technology and to the “new” and they were all set in the early 21st Century.
WG: The first three I assumed were 2035-2045, approximately, although I was careful never to date them. The second three were about now and have arguably become a kind of alternate history rather than an imagined future. [laughs] They were, in a way, intended to date. I assumed that all of this stuff starts dating before I’ve even finished it. That’s just the nature of imagined future.
AD: The way every science fiction movie looks like–and is about–the decade it was made, rather than when it was set.
WG: Absolutely. Although that’s equally true of westerns, which is always fascinating.
AD: But having written about the early 21st century and thought about it so much, what do you think of actual 21st century?
WG: Well, it’s pretty weird. [laughs] I certainly couldn’t have imagined it–and I didn’t. Not really. I’m just watching it like everybody else. One of the things that I that has come to mind recently out of doing interviews about The Peripheral is that when I was very very young I was surrounded by pop artifacts of all kinds that included the phrase “The Twenty-First Century.” The 21st century had a kind of powerful, magical resonance for me through my whole life. When the millennium arrived, suddenly I was on the other side of this. Holy shit, I’m in the 21st century. Somehow I never dreamed I would make it. It just seemed impossible. I still think, damn, this is the 21st century. Look at those girls over there–those are 21st century girls! [laughs] But when was the last time or when have you ever heard anybody say “the Twenty-Second Century”–or even mentioned it? It doesn’t happen. Something’s changed. We’re not thinking that way about the future now. That’s something that I’m in process of trying to investigate. That strikes me as weird and possibly very significant.
AD: As much as cities have been transforming in interesting way over the past 20-30 years, the way that people respond to cities have changed, especially in the past decade in a way that seems more significant than the physical transformation of places.
WG: I totally agree. One of the great things about the advent of our cellular system was it’s initial unequal distribution. I actually got to see that happen. I went to Tokyo and went out clubbing with a very well connected guy. He had the tiniest cell phone I’d ever seen. I’d only seen those Motorola bricks and I think I’d only seen them on television. This guy had some little Nokia in his pocket and he and his friends were using it all night to coordinate their drift through increasingly esoteric clubs and bars. It was just a revelation to me how they could how it completely changed what they were able to do with their evening. Today is difficult to convey what was so revolutionary about it–because it’s something that we now take utterly for granted. We all do it, but there’s that one evening for me where it was completely new and it was these Japanese hipsters doing this astonishing thing with these tiny telephones.
Then I went back to Vancouver and nobody had the tiny telephones. They weren’t even available yet. A few weeks later I went to London and tiny phones weren’t there. A couple months later I went back to London and the tiny phones were there and London had already changed irrevocably and in some incredibly profound way. One was no longer in solitude on the tube platform. It used to be a journey alone by tube through London was a solitary journey. They don’t speak to strangers on the tube. It was a very interesting aspect of the city and it vanished so quickly. Then I went back to Vancouver and we still didn’t have tiny phones. [laughs] A few months later people started to get them. I felt delighted and privileged at being able to see this. I can dimly remember the advent of broadcast television, and the advent of television in my family’s life, but I was too young to appreciate what it did to my parents and to the rest of the world. It did something unspeakably powerful and it did it very very quickly. The world prior to television, I think, is more difficult for us to imagine than the future.
AD: In your travels have you gotten a sense of some aspect of what’s coming next? Or does The Peripheral represent that in a sense?
WG: No and no. I don’t actually work that way. My alleged predictive capacity tends to be foregrounded in media. [laughs] I don’t actually think of myself as having much of a predictive capacity. I think of myself as someone who uses a toolkit that I got from science fiction and from other forms of futurism and other tools I’ve gotten from elsewhere entirely. I use those tools to examine what strikes me as an increasingly unknowable present. I think those are the tools we need today to practice literary naturalism. As a civilian abroad in the world, I don’t necessarily think that much about what’s coming next. It’s like when I sit down to work, my professional self gears up and whatever it is that I do starts to be done.
The thing that I most see happening is that when I was writing Neuromancer–and for at least a decade afterward–there was “the real world,” which we all experienced and then there was “another realm,” which I called “cyberspace.” Some people called what actually came to exist as cyberspace, but most people just called it “the internet” or “the digital.” That was this other realm where certain things happened. I think in the subsequent twenty years that realm colonized what we used to call “the real world,” so that today I see “cyberspace” as a legacy term. I also see “the real world” as something of a legacy term, because the two are now so thoroughly entwined that some kid walking down the road in Afghanistan can die in an instant through a process that’s primarily digital.