Many out there are not going to understand the fascination with William Gibson, because history will remember him as the coiner of cyberpunk as a genre, writer of two quality novels, Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, and otherwise relegate him to the bin where they place over-intellectualized stoners who didn’t just get nose to grindstone for a “serious” job when they were in their 20s, like everyone else.
I think there’s more to him than that. Neuromancer, for example, is science fiction of that darker calibre that produces works like Blade Runner and is hinted at in Naked Lunch. The story is simple: humankind travels through technology to find its soul, only to see it nakedly missing and so to seize whatever spiritual sustenance it can from endurance and hoping for a better day. It’s an apocalyptic story in anticlimax, one where most natural species are dead and the earth is wrapped in concrete and steel, littered with plastic and the plastic remnants of human beings. We could read Gibson’s exuberance with this world as an endorsement, or as a way of finally getting us the reader engaged with what it might be like to want to battle an imaginary but probable future before it occurs.
Pattern Recognition could be seen as the prototype and parent for this year’s Spook Country, a journal of ratified paranoia in which Gibson looks at a new America he considers to be completely out of touch with reality, and living on a symbolic or emotional level that represents fear not rationality. This theme was illustrated most clearly in Neuromancer through the cheery “Freeside: Why Wait?” posters that promised a better life to those trapped in dreary industrial hellholes. He took things further in Pattern Recognition where he directly attacked brand names as Soviet in an Orwell-inspired symbolic juxtaposition between the clarity of mind found in Cayce Pollard, and the neurotic nastiness of her ad-agency tormentors.
“Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness,” Gibson acknowledges. “I can work with this,” he says, thinking of recent turns of events. “I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That’s what makes it work. It’s interesting. I’d like to see it get less interesting. But I don’t know that it necessarily will.” ^
Gibson sort of hops on the anti-Bush, maybe-progressivism-will-work bandwagon for Spook Country, but his heart’s not in it. Like his heroes Burroughs and Pynchon (and probably DeLilo), Gibson speaks from an entirely outsider’s voice, with the gravely tones of someone looking in at a disaster that will go unrecognized until it’s too late. He is Vonnegut’s canary in a coal mine, but how do you sing to people deaf to that one warning sign? A theme of Spook Country is the proliferation of signals meshing into noise, a warming of chaos and a consequent intensity of paranoia. Who do you trust, when everyone has an agenda outside of the acknowledged roles we serve in society?
A few gems:
A friend of mine was mining YouTube last month and he came up with footage shot in the street in New York on a particular day, in the evening. And he knew that this footage was shot the day before broadcast television began in New York. So this footage is of the last night that streets in New York were the way they were before everyone started staying home to watch television. All the footage that he’s been able to find afterward is dramatically different. It changed. It changed the night they turned it on. The night they started to broadcast television in New York, New York ceased to be what it had been before. Because everyone stayed home to watch television.
…
I think a lack of concern about virtual and real maybe telling us as much about what we used to call real as it is about what we now call virtual. I think that everything we’ve been doing since we sat around camp fires telling stories and started making cave paintings, everything we’ve been doing as a species seems to me to be part of this [desire and ability] to create prosthetic aspects of the self that are capable of surviving the death of the individual or indeed the death of an entire society. Other animals don’t do that. And we’ve been doing it forever.
…
You know, the Internet, for the first 25 years of its existence, has been almost exclusively text based. And so [people] are writing with frequency unseen since the Victorian heyday of the British Empire, when there were three mail deliveries a day, and people wrote and communicated constantly. We went back to it. It wasn’t new. Very few things in the last 45 years have caused me to go ‘Whoa! That’s new!’”
^
Although Spook Country isn’t my favorite Gibson work, it’s not bad. Like those works by famed authors Pynchon and Burroughs that came later in their lives, it is aimless. It makes its points with its “the medium is the message,” by being chaotic and yet having all paths lead to a Mecca which points to an undiscovered reality in the sea of messages including the book itself, but then can’t tie the plot it’s glued to into something resembling a shape, so the novel deteriorates into loose string that ends in an almost Boolean yes/no to all the components of the book. But if you find meaning in Gibson’s work, it makes sense to study his body of work, including the two highly perceptive interviews linked here.
[...] Gibson and Burroughs have been featured on this blog [...]