The writer William Gibson is the guy who invented the term “cyberspace” in his 1984 book Neuromancer and who, more recently, brilliantly summarized the postmodern condition by saying, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” After writing a lot of pretty good science fiction, he’s recently started writing novels set in a world that is “more or less the same one we live in now.”
These present-day books – Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) – deal with technology, art and music, post-9/11 security-statism, marketing, and a lot of other familiar stuff. His new novel, Zero History, is due out this fall, and Gibson is taking advantage of the lull before the book’s publication to answer readers’ questions on his blog. A lot of what he says is pretty damn good:
Artistic Influences
Influence is more like weather, when you’ve been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can’t say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it’s present.
Brands and Brand Names
It’s one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren’t really that many of those. It’s not about clothes, though, or branding; it’s about code, subtext.
Subject Matter
There isn’t anything that I think I know that would, in itself, warrant the writing of a novel.
The Writing Process
The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work.
Research
I don’t regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing.