Cyberspaceman: William Gibson on Life Inside and Outside the Internet
It’s a bit disorienting to meet William Gibson for coffee. Coffee exists in the physical world; for his millions of readers, however, Gibson seems to reside in the ether. Since coining the concept and term “cyberspace” in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” the 66-year-old novelist has become the greatest visionary of life on the other side of our screens. From his seminal first novel — 1984’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning Neuromancer — to his current bestseller, The Peripheral, his books read like the dispatches of a writer who just teleported back from some vast imagined future, with pixels on his Converses to prove it.
We met last week in the bar of his SoHo hotel, where he was staying while in New York City promoting The Peripheral, a mix-and-match dystopia tale involving corporate omnipresence, class divisions and Chinese servers. In person, he’s affable, bright and eccentric, a lanky ex-hippie with the slight southern drawl of his Virginia youth. He wore a loose-fitting black jacket over a black sweater, and kept his army-green messenger bag hanging around his shoulder for the duration of our interview. It seemed light enough that he probably just forgot about it — although I preferred to think that he kept in on in case he was abruptly uploaded into one of the many screens around us.
You’ve said that the books of William S. Burroughs, which you began reading at age 12, turned you on to literature. What was it about his work that spoke to you?
Yeah, Burroughs influenced me, and I say this in retrospect, having actually given it considerable thought. His work, for me, was like living in a world where there were electric guitars but there were no effects. And Burroughs was like an electric guitar player who invented effects pedals. He could do things in prose, in the late Fifties or early Sixties, that no other writer on the planet could do. I bought a paperback anthology of Beat writing — I hid from my mother because of bad words and the excepts from Naked Lunch, which I’m sure I initially found almost completely unreadable — but I kept the book and over time, I sort of cracked the code. I recognized it as being akin to science fiction.
You also lost your father when you were a kid. How did that affect your development as a writer?
Well, in the first place, I think there’s simply the mechanism of trauma in early life, which as an adult having watched other people go through that now, I can understand as being profoundly destabilizing. But the other thing it did was it caused my mother to return to the small town in Virginia from which both she and my father were originally from. So my earliest childhood memories were of living in a 1950s universe of Fifties stuff, as the construction company my father worked for built infrastructure projects across the South. . .lots of Levittown-style subdivisions. After my father’s death we returned to this little place in the mountains where you look out the window and in one direction, you might see tailfins and you’d know you were in the early Sixties. In the other, you’d see a guy with a straw hat using a mule to plow a field — and it could have been like 1890 or 1915. It felt to me like being exiled in the past; I was taken away from this sort of modern world, and partially emerged in this strange old place that, perhaps because of the traumatic circumstances of my arrival, I never entirely came to feel a part of. I observed the people around me as though I was something else. I didn’t feel that I was what they were. I can see that as the beginning of the novelistic mind.