Category: art

All year, I have been eagerly awaiting William Gibson’s new novel Zero History – a work he describes as “speculative fiction of the recent past.” Finding out that he was going to be visiting the Twin Cities on his book tour was just a bonus, but I nonetheless cleared my schedule to be able to attend his reading at the Minneapolis Central Library on Thursday, September 16. The event was excellent, start to finish – just the right mix of otaku obsessiveness about minutiae and readerly curiosity about how a great novelist puts together a great novel.

I arrived about an hour early, bought my ticket, grabbed a decaf americano at the library’s coffeeshop, and found a good seat – which ended up being right behind a guy whose t-shirt aptly read,

64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY

By the scheduled reading time, the room had filled up, but never reached capacity, much less the SRO conditions I’d heard about at other venues – or for that matter at the other Gibson reading I’d attended, for Pattern Recognition in 2005. Right around 7:30, a library staffer came out to introduce Gibson, but the man missed his entrance, only coming onstage after the applause (and laughter) died down.

Finally taking his spot at the podium, he explained that he’d been giving so many readings at bookstores that he’d grown accustomed to grabbing a “fresh copy” of the book. At the library, he had to dig into his own bag to get his personal copy of the novel. Without other ado, he jumped into the reading, telling us that he was going to read the first chapter, “the kind of chapter I write to scare away people who wouldn’t get the rest of the book.” This got a good laugh, since chapter 1 is in fact hyper-Gibsonian.

Gibson’s reading voice was nasal, but his style was right on. I was fascinated to hear how the rhythm of his own reading differed from the rhythm of my reading in my head. In particular, he really punched the adjectives and adverbs – the parts of speech which lend such an identifiable quality to his writing. Gibson also inserted “he said” and “she said” as he read, even though those phrases are almost completely absent from his prose. He read the entire first chapter, finishing with a nice flourish at the chapter’s slightly forbidding, slightly funny end, and then switched right to the Q&A. (The following account consists mostly of close paraphrases – though I tried to capture the sense of each question and answer and the exact wording of particularly choice lines, which are marked as quotes.)

Question 1 was one that I’d written down to ask, if I had the chance: “When you started the book, did you know who was behind Gabriel Hounds [the “secret brand” of clothes around which much of the plot of ZH revolves]?”
Answer 1: “I didn’t really know, but I had an idea. I didn’t know the plot of the book when I started it.” He went on to say that he only gets a sense of the overall narrative of a book after he reaches the “third act,” at which point he loops back to clean up earlier sections before finally finishing the book. “The more mysterious the narrative is to me and the longer it retains its mystery, generally the more satisfied I’ll be” with the final book.

Question 2: “What drives you to write a book, and how do you know when you’re done?”
Answer 2: “I know I’m done when I hear The Click” at the end of a sentence, paragraph, chapter, book. He said he’s driven by his unconscious, and that his writing process entails “sitting still until that which writes novels checks in.”

Q3: “Can you respond to the claim that you have prescribed the future we’re living?”
A3: After saying, “I don’t know,” he elaborated by saying that in the 20th century he behaved like a futurist, describing a 21st century. Now in the 21st century, “I have earned the right” to write like a naturalist, using the toolkit of SF writers to describe the present.

Q4: A) Do you write your novels sequentially? B) Do the Curfew and the Bollards [bands that feature in ZH and its precursor, Spook Country] line up with real bands?”
A4: A)He said his writing process is sequential insofar as “prose fiction consists of putting words in a row,” but that he does not work from outlines or drafts. B) “I don’t know what the Curfew sounds like,” and he doesn’t much care. He said that his take on the Curfew was informed by his experience of talking to musicians and learning that they talk very little about their music but a great deal about the music business.

Q5: “What’s the takeaway from your book?” (asked an MBA type who confessed to not having read all of WG’s novels).
A5: “I can’t answer. The text is not didactic. The text is not constructed to do that. It’s made to offer an experience.” The author has no more special understanding of the novel than a reader.

Q6: Why are there no supernatural elements in the book, akin to the loa that guide Tito [a key character in Spook Country]?
A6: This wasn’t a conscious decision, but then again there’s no proof that anything supernatural is happening in Pattern Recognition or Spook Country. Tito believes he’s having natural experiences that some would call “religious,” but that are not necessarily supernatural. The “follies” in the paintings in hotel at the center of Zero History are another example of phenomena that may or may not be supernatural. “It’s just another way I’ve found to violate the rules of genre.”

Q7: “What’s the first bedtime story you remember?”
A7: He says he doesn’t remember his first bedtime story, but that he does remember that he had problems learning to read, a situation his mother and grandmother solved by using an old-fashioned technique involving the use of pins to mark words as he read them. His mom had him read Walt Kelly’s Pogo, which has surely been influential on his work.

Q8: What do you think you nailed regarding technology, and what do you think you missed?
A8: Being right or wrong about technology was never his concern. “I don’t worry about my prescience.” He understands that he’ll be remembered for coining the word “cyberspace,” but “not for the fact that it meant absolutely nothing.” “Cyberspace” was akin to an advertising term for the book, “one that migrated out into the world, which has filled it with the world’s meaning,” not his own. “Actually predicting things technologically is the furthest thing from my mind. To the extent it happens, it’s literally a side effect. I’m much fonder of things I didn’t predict” – cell phones, for example. “Every work of science fiction acquires a charming patina of anachronism… I regard futurists for the most part as charlatans… I don’t try to predict things so much as I look for things in the present that took like they have legs to make it into the future… I’m interested in what humans to with emergent technology. That’s where the interesting stuff happens.”

Q9: “Can you comment on the design of your books?”
A9: No. “I’m not literate in book design,” but generally speaking they’ve come a long way. His Arbor House book covers were drawn by a friend of the editor’s daughter!

Q10: “Do you have a favorite texture or reflective surface?” (big laugh)
A10: “No, I like them all. I like the variety of textures and reflective surfaces and how they lend themselves to description… When I was younger, I thought of myself in terms of short lists: favorite bands, books, textures, reflective surfaces [big laugh]. When you get older, you know who you are, and what you’re stuck with, and you say, ‘Whoo! Lots of textures!'”

Q11: Your mid-period books were interested in consciousness and focused on the way that technology expressed that consciousness.”
A11: The early books were concerned with finding a modality to expose themes that have always been with us, such as religion. “There’s something hardwired into us that induces us to look for first causes and agency in the world around us.” Pattern recognition is a key to our species’ success and to “prosthetic forms of memory.” The apophenia that comes up in Pattern Recognition has benign forms – children seeing harmless shapes in the clouds – and malign forms – “believing that your president is a crypto-Muslim. Part of our mind demands agency, but that doesn’t mean that there’s agency there.”

Later, in the book-signing line, I had the chance to ask him about something a key character in ZH says on p. 372: “Is ‘Win’ a proper noun there?” He smiled and said, “It’s ambiguous, intentionally.”