Conversations with William Gibson by Patrick A. Smith

Author:Patrick A. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626740938
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

William Gibson Interview

Andy Diggle / 1997

A version of this interview first appeared in Fusion webzine in 1997. Reprinted with permission of and interview text provided by Andy Diggle.

William Gibson’s first novel Neuromancer, a dense fusion of hard-boiled thriller and data-overload prose, hit the science-fiction scene in 1984 about as unobtrusively as a major star system going supernova. With the exponential growth of the Internet in the decade since Gibson’s coinage of the term cyberspace, his skewed premonitions have never seemed more relevant. After all, cyberspace is where you are reading this interview, right now.

Andy Diggle: Every month seems to see some weird riff from a Gibson novel make the transition from science fiction into reality. Whilst hailed as a visionary both by techno-nerds and sci-fi geeks alike, Gibson has regarded the hype with a healthy combination of detached interest and dry irony, and remains modest about his own early writing—confessing that when he began Neuromancer, he didn’t really know what he was doing …

William Gibson: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I tried to weasel out of it, because it was sort of a commission thing. This editor had come in and said, “Yeah, I want you to do this,” and I said, “No way, I’m not ready. Come back in four years.” And he said, “No, take this check.” He sort of wrote me a check and gave it to me and he said, “Write it. The book’ll be about this thick [holding his fingers about four inches apart]. Give it to me and if I like it, I’ll give you another check just like this one.” But I felt very uneasy doing it, and when I look at Neuromancer today, a lot of things people take for literary and science-fictional innovation are in fact the desperate moves of an under-skilled practitioner.

When I started with the short fiction that led up to Neuromancer, I couldn’t do the transitions. I could describe a character in a room, but I couldn’t get him to the street. It’s one of the first things that you learn as a writer, and I didn’t really know how to do it. And that’s why, like, at the very beginning of my career I was playing around with this kind of jump-cut technology.

Film and television had a big influence on me. I’ve certainly noticed the real pain in the butt with translating my fiction to the screen is that some of the really cool moves are essentially cinematic, and if you do a literal translation, it’s just cinema. If you think about how you’re going to represent those first-person POV shifting moves in Neuromancer, it’s a nightmare.

It’s interesting to see, when I wrote Neuromancer, I was so frightened of letting go of the narrative coat hanger that runs through it—it’s very driving stuff, almost like it’s got a backbeat—and I was terrified that I would bore anyone for even a paragraph. But because of that there are other things you can’t do in the narrative. Actually, I think the

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