William Gibson Interview

mf: So, you didn't find yourself using search engines for All Tomorrow's Parties - research wasn't done on the web for that at all?

William Gibson: No, that's not the case. I actually did, but not to the same extent. Some of the final couple of chapters of that are set at the top of the Transamerica pyramid, which has become something else in the book - someone else bought it and it has gone through an earthquake and it's covered with carbon-fiber splints, and sort of the bad guy of that book's office has been built in what is now the restaurant atop the pyramid. Actually, that was my first experience of that 360 VR thing in novel research, because I went to the web site of the restaurant and they had views of the cardinal points. Well, I was able to see that he could in fact see The Bridge, and how much of The Bridge he could see from there. I think that was my initial experience of doing that, but I don't recall doing it prior to the end of the book. My web functionality doesn't go back too far. I think it goes back 5 ½ years now that I've been using this stuff.

mf: I recall reading your Wired article a couple years ago concerning your addiction to buying antique watches on eBay prior to reading All Tomorrow's Parties. And when I got to the part about Silencio, who memorizes watch catalogs with autistic savant intensity, the parallel fascinated me.

William Gibson: Well, the Wired article almost preceded my fascination with eBay. I really discovered it in the course of trying to figure out something on the web I could write about for Wired. And then, I decided to recycle my interest in those watches into… well I didn't really decide to recycle it. These characters arrive for me somehow, and they attach themselves to different aspects of my more recent life. And I had come into contact on the web with a lot of guys through doing that who, I suspected, might be rather like Silencio to some extent. That was what they were into, they were into that, and they weren't into much else. That always fascinates me when people have these intense, very narrow bandwidth things going on but super deep. You know? Like super super deep.

mf: Branding is very much an important phenomenon in corporate America today. How did you arrive at Cayce's peculiar branding sensitivities?

William Gibson: Well, probably something as simple as walking through a bookstore, seeing a display of Naomi Kline's book, No Logo, picking it up, reading the back cover, not buying it, walking away, and at some later point remembering having seen that book, and its title triggering the idea of this character actually going into anaphylactic shock if she's exposed to a logo. Like I put an exclamation point after Naomi Kline's title and sort of made a cartoon of it. I also did it, I think, to someone outside the politics of that particular discourse. Like, I actually like to participate in the world of branding. I'm not an entirely unhappy camper in the field of late capitalism. I enjoy cities too much to be even a new-wave Marxist. I don't feel any puritanical aversion when I look at people buying things. Actually, I have nothing against the Michelin Man, but where I go "Cayce" on branding is with Tommy Hilfiger or something like that that seems to be a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of something, just sort of becoming further and further and further from what the initial impulse was. Or the running shoe thing. I couldn't say which of the two largest makers of running shoes in the world Cayce was working on that logo-rethink for, but you know its either one or the other.

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