William Gibson

There are people who are talking about knitting. There are people who are really interested in vintage electric guitars. They get together and talk to each other all the time about vintage electric guitars. But then other stuff happens and they start to have real personal interaction and feel real connected to one another when they stopped talking about the guitars.

No I just called myself on it. Or maybe it seemed like the world was reaching a pitch of such adequate weirdness that I had to do it. If you had written a science fiction in 1965 that depicted the world as it is today with all its science fictional scenarios running simultaneously like global warming, AIDS and genetic manipulation, people would have thought you were crazy. Nobody would have published it. It’s got too many moving parts for a science fiction novel. The future has turned out so much weirder than anyone could have imagined it to be. Which is what always happens. In a way that was also my point.

No I was already committed to it. I had started writing this book about a year before 9/11. I had reset three parameters. I was going to have it set in the summer of 2002 which was the near future. I was only going to have one viewpoint character which is something I had never done before. I wanted to keep the narrative real time and have no jump cuts. I didn’t think that would be particularly challenging but it turned out to be very hard. I proceeded very slowly and I had Cayse waking up in London but I couldn’t figure out what she was there for or what was going on or why she felt the way she felt. I was writing in the present. It was new and hard for me. While I was trying to get it going I was working on her backstory in New York. A couple of weeks after 9/11 I realized that my novel had been erased by circumstances. The character of the world had changed. I told my publisher it was going to take more time than I thought. I had to reinhabit the story with this catastrophic piece of knowledge. What they ended up doing was twisting the story into something that I could never have imagined it would have become. Not that I have that clear idea of what it would become to begin with. I can’t imagine what this book would have been like if 9/11 hadn’t happened. For someone who had always pretended that he was writing about the near future it was very strange. It was like I accepted this challenge to write about the present and the present had become something stranger and more apocalyptic than I could have imagined.

It’s the only time I like it. Its one of the reasons I don’t produce as many books as some people do. I have to wait for that. My work is really just inducing that stage of writing where the characters are taking over.

Coffee. Triple shot lattes. Jet lag.

Not anymore than telephone calls are. You and I don’t think anything about having this miraculous long distance conversation but it actually depends on an enormous technological infrastructure. The telephone system is not as straight forward as we think it is. It’s quite trippy when you look at how it works.

A hundred years from now people will find a novel like Pattern Recognition kind of interesting and charming in that these characters in this novel are so conscious of using the internet. If we go along the way we’re going it will be instantaneous. When you answer your cell phone you don’t think “Damn it’s neat, I can do this. I can call my girlfriend in Malaysia.” I don’t think they will be calling it the internet by then.

Not really anymore or less than anything else I’ve done. I have to have some kind of life experience in order to have stuff to knit together to make the stuff that becomes the novel. The London parts are all places I know pretty well. That works better for me. If Cayse goes somewhere in London it’s a place I’ve been too a lot. There’s no point in sending her to a part of London I’ve never been.

Louis Vitton makes me a little queasy. My daughter for some inexplicable reason since early childhood has been terrified of the Michelin Man. That’s where I got that for the book. I think that Cayse’s logo phobia came from the fact that I think that everyone has that on some level.

That’s exactly the sort of thing I was reacting to. That is spooky.

Well I think all artists have influences. But they are things you want to have and then get over. If people can spot your influences too easily then you haven’t digested your meal. When there’s bits of gristle of whoever floating around in your work then you need to work harder and get some Tums.

I think it is. If it has any usefulness at all today, it’s as a cliché. If you say to somebody “Hey did you see that video? Its kind of cyberpunk.” They probably know what you mean but it doesn’t make them want to check it out.

Oh no [laughs]. I would blame Sony Pictures Imageworks. Nobody got to see the film that Robert Longo shot. Longo shot the script I wrote which I was happy with. The tragedy with Johnny Mnemonic is that we shot an ironic broadly comic action film that at some level was supposed to be about bad science fiction movies. We were not trying to make a blockbuster mainstream adventure film starring Keanu Reeves. When we started shooting that film Keanu wasn’t a movie star. Speed came out while we were shooting. As soon as it was a hit we had guys from the studio coming out of the woodwork telling us that we shouldn’t shoot a funny movie, where’s the bus? It just got worse from there. We kept doing what we wanted to do. Keanu and Dolph were both doing exactly what we told them to do. Sony cut 90 % of Dolph’s role because they said it would offend the religious right. He doesn’t even have a character in the movie they put out. He’s just this insane caveman who comes rushing in and flinging people around. It doesn’t make any sense. In the film we shot you get his backstory where he is preaching stark naked to churches full of women whoa re afflicted with the weird disease in the movie. He completely got into doing this comic villain and it just ended up making him look like an idiot. I personally felt very bad about that because he was doing what he was told to do.

Yeah I’m curious to see where they go with it. I’m looking forward to that. I think the Matrix is the ultimate cyberpunk artifact. Once that’s done it could be put to rest. Nobody else can top that including me.

I don’t know at this point. We haven’t had contact for a while. I’m trying to get in touch with him.

This is all I’m doing right now. Novels are like my day job. It’s what I actually do and anything else I do, I do for fun. That’s a good thing to know for people who want to hire me for other mediums. If I was making a really expensive project I wouldn’t want to hire a guy who wants to do it for fun.

There’s one particular kind of weird 1960’s celluloid animal. That’s along story. I can’t get into it because I don’t want people buying them and inflate the market [laughs].