William Gibson Serves Up Zero History

When William Gibson was 7 years old, in 1955, his father, a civilian contractor for the military, choked to death in a restaurant. Gibson’s mother immediately moved the family to a small town in the Appalachians, where he grew up bright and nerdy and lonely.

Gibson read a lot: mostly science fiction but also the Beats. He spent one summer devouring the two Burroughs — Edgar Rice and William S. — side by side, a volatile mix even under ideal conditions. “I was reading A Princess of Mars and excerpts from Naked Lunch,” he says. “I was 14 years old. Trying to understand Naked Lunch — it was like something from another planet. But I recognized science-fiction DNA in that text. There was some very basic part of me that was activated, maybe for the first time.”

Gibson’s mother would die early too, orphaning him at 18. He was interested in girls and drugs and not interested in going to Vietnam, so he moved to Canada. By 1972 he was married and settled in Vancouver, working odd jobs and thinking about becoming a writer.

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In the early 1970s, the future wasn’t what it used to be. Science fiction — the genre that had first attracted Gibson — now felt like a backwater, formulaic and conservative. “There was a kind of sadness in it for me,” he says. “It was just like, Wow, look at this thing! This is one of the great viable forms of American pop art. Look at the dust on it!” After writing a few short stories, he tried his hand at a novel. That book, Neuromancer, published in 1984, is one of the most important works of fiction of the late 20th century.

Neuromancer is a vicious, violently intelligent vision of a future made from the broken shards of the present. Urban sprawl has overrun the planet. Prosthetics, neural implants and artificial intelligence have made the distinctions between human and computer, and between virtual and real, problematic at best. Just like George Orwell’s 1984, Neuromancer was less a prediction of the future than a critique of the present. It was a distorted reflection of 1980s America’s most toxic obsessions — money, sex, technology, drugs, weapons.

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Back then, Gibson didn’t have a computer. But he thought a lot about computers — not so much how they worked as how they changed the people who used them. It occurred to him that at some point, people would probably get around to connecting a lot of computers together, and the result would be an entirely virtual space — a digital alter ego of everyday reality, where much of Neuromancer‘s action would take place.

It would need a name. He wrote the word digispace in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad, then crossed it out and wrote under it cyberspace. The name stuck.

Future, Present, Past
Gibson still lives in Vancouver. The man whose vision of the future was so powerful that it changed the present lives on a posh, tree-lined street that looks like something out of the 19th century. His house is a Tudor Revival beauty so venerable it has a plaque on it.

Gibson himself is startlingly tall and thin. At 62, he doesn’t just write like William Burroughs; he looks like him too. He speaks softly, with a faint Southern twang left over from his Virginia boyhood.

He knows he’s not what people expect. “I was doing a signing once in San Francisco,” he says. “These two big motorcycles roared up outside the bookstore, and two guys walked in with black leather and tattoos and plastic bags, out of which they produced their copies of Neuromancer. And they sort of saw me there …” Gibson mimes incredulous disappointment. “And one of them sort of sighed and said, ‘Well … you can sign it anyway.'”

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Neuromancer won every major science-fiction award and became the first novel of a series informally known as the Sprawl trilogy. The Sprawl books were followed by a second trilogy, set in 2006 — which, when it was published in the mid-1990s, was still the future. Gibson’s new novel, Zero History, is his 10th, and the third in a trilogy that is set more or less now. Its heroine is a woman named Hollis Henry, who was once an indie rock star and is now, in early middle age, a little bit lost. Hollis’ employer is a man named Hubertus Bigend — Gibson enjoys names — who specializes in spotting trends, latent data patterns in the culture, and has built a colossal fortune betting on the next big thing. Hubertus has taken an interest in a fashion label so infinitely cool that nobody even knows who the designer behind it is. He sends Hollis to find out.

The joke of Zero History, although it’s only half a joke, is that while the novel is plotted like a high-tech thriller, a lot of the action revolves around clothes; the characters treat a pair of jeans as if they were bleeding-edge skunk-works military gear. Which, if you follow the strange mirror logic of the information economy, as Gibson does, makes a certain kind of sense. In an age when information circulates so rapidly and uncontrollably, secrets, and the dark niches where they reside, are increasingly rare. Under such conditions, the extreme reaches of aesthetic coolness and the bolt-holes of military black ops increasingly resemble each other.

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Often in Zero History, Gibson slo-mos the action simply to describe, precisely and expressively, the way people handle and work with objects. In doing so, he brings into the domain of literature the mundane technological interactions that have become part of our daily lives: “British electricity,” one character notes, “was some brutal other breed, their plugs three-pronged, massive, wall sockets often equipped with their own little switches, a particularly ominous belt-and-suspenders touch.”

It’s a basic tenet of science fiction that our tools shape us as much as we shape them, and for that reason, Gibson likes to keep a watchful eye on our tools. “It can be dismissed as trivial or superficial or an obsession with surfacey things,” he says. “But I don’t think we’re actually seeing the surface of things. I think we’re seeing cultural code.”

Gibson isn’t writing about the future anymore, as he did in Neuromancer. He is writing about the present as if it were the future — as if he were a time traveler to whom everything seems fresh and new and strange. (Or as if he were a shy, orphaned kid from a tiny town in the Appalachians.) This, more than an ability to make educated guesses about the future, is his gift. He’s the first to point out what he got wrong in Neuromancer: nobody in the book has a cell phone, for example. And cyberspace hasn’t turned out to be much of a space at all — it remains stubbornly two-dimensional, trapped in the flat plane of the browser. If anything, it has entered our space, via mobile devices and augmented reality, rather than the other way round. “My guess has always been that the thing our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we made the distinction between here and the Internet,” Gibson says. “‘Here’ has been colonized by what used to be the other place.”

If anything, what Gibson has is a sense of the past — the past that our present is constantly, relentlessly, irreversibly becoming. He floats the idea that he might return to writing science fiction next, but he also throws out the idea of writing something set during the Civil War. “I always took it for granted that I was living in somebody else’s past,” he says. “And somebody else’s future. And that my position on the time line was where it was. But in my imagination? I could move both ways.”

This article originally appeared in the September 13, 2010 issue of Time magazine.

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