William Gibson Interview

The texture of William Gibson's landscapes, his ability to construct fascinatingly compelling characters, his eye for design and culture - historical, present and future - these aspects of Gibson's writing have held me captive as I've worked my way through his novels, beginning with 1984's prize-sweeping Neuromancer and ending with his most recent work, Pattern Recognition. Most captivating perhaps has been the writing itself, as Gibson's work is permeated by his phraseological genius. Take for instance the first few lines of Pattern Recognition:

"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."

William Gibson was gracious enough to speak with me over the phone from his home in Vancouver, and what resulted was a riveting discussion of design, culture, and Pattern Recognition.

mf: Pattern Recognition is unique among your novels in that it is set in the present. Is that because technology has finally caught up with you?

William Gibson: Actually, if you went back and checked the interviews for the last three books, I've been threatening to do this for years - saying that it looked to me like the world at large was providing everything I needed to do exactly what I do without having to make very much stuff up at all, which was probably the case from the beginning. I don't think I had the knowledge and experience of the world that I needed to write a book like Pattern Recognition. Like I hadn't been to Tokyo; I hadn't spent enough time in London; and I hadn't spent enough time in New York to really do that. I was conscious of that when I started writing novels, and that probably was a factor in doing that near-future thing that I'm generally known for. Because you get to make stuff up. If you take somebody to Prague, you're making up Prague in the mid-21st century, it's easy. You're not going to be caught out. I was amazed at the amount of research and fact checking, mainly fact-checking of a sort, that I had to do for Pattern Recognition because I just couldn't wing it. I got into something much more obsessively reality-oriented.

mf: So you spent a lot of time in your research just for accuracy's sake?

William Gibson: Yeah, well more than I would have done for the previous books. And that was both facilitated and I think fueled by search engines, because I discovered that I could look literally anything up. For instance there's a scene in the book where the protagonist goes into Kensington Gardens in London. It's something I've done many many times, but in the way of things I didn't have a very specific memory of where different landmarks are in the park in relationship to one another offhand. And I needed that for spatial orientation. So I was looking for a map, and I found myself in a controllable 3-D photographic virtual reality of Kensington Gardens, where I could rotate 360 from whatever point I wanted to be in the park, so I chose a place where she was going to have her experience and I went through this thing making notes of what I could see and I thought, "This is really really strange." And I knew that things like that existed, but like in terms of what like a novelist needs and does and how it effects the novelistic imagination… There's another section of the book where she goes off to have dinner with some people in a part of London that I've never actually been to, but I found her destination by searching upscale condos on London real estate web sites, and then I found myself in VR simulations of actual condos, one of which turns out to be the one that she visits - complete with the name of the complex. That sort of thing is just extraordinary, and I've never really used search engines for that sort of thing before.