William Gibson’s Second Sight : In Meetings of Man and Machine, Ecstacy and Dread, the Cyberpunk Guru Divines the Future

A good deal of William Gibson’s peculiar gift rests in what has been called “The White Wall Thing.” It’s a relatively simple concept: Show Gibson a large white wall and have him tell you what he sees. It is virtually certain the wall he sees is not the wall you see. And the more he tells you about his wall, the more your wall will change. You’ll see, perhaps, that it isn’t white, but some kind of strange, opaque chrome. It’s not a wall but a door. And it’s covered with some kind of clear artificial flesh--factory-second stuff from a botched vat-job, now good only for shingles.

It’s fascinating to watch how effortlessly Gibson can find ways to say the wall is not white. It’s unsettling, too, because invariably he generates ideas that raise haunting, complex questions. Take his vision of high-definition television. Looking beyond those who either see it as the new industry of the 1990s or as the beginning of an unprecedented Age of Surveillance, Gibson just sees Marge with her housecoat on, hair up in curlers, having a great time--with Fred.

“We have people addicted to the soaps today,” Gibson says in his soft Virginia drawl. “But in the real future it will be something like: Marge is in this interactive relationship with her television set and it actually talks to her. She comes in and sits down and it says, ‘Hi, Marge, how are you? You look like you need a drink. Gosh, I was talking to Fred today and he said’--and of course Fred doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t matter because it’s like only for her. (The TV) knows her name, and the longer she watches it, the more it knows about her.”

Gibson has brought his peculiar vision to bear in his latest novel, “Virtual Light,” which was published in August. It’s set in the near future and centers on Berry Rydell, an ex-cop from Knoxville, Tenn., who is looking for professional redemption working as a rent-a-cop in Los Angeles. He winds up in San Francisco, tracking down a pair of mysterious sunglasses, which have been stolen by a young bicycle messenger, Chevette Washington. That’s where the real story begins. The sunglasses, in fact, are virtual-light glasses--glasses that contain a multinational corporation’s plan to redevelop San Francisco. And they mean big money to whoever wears them.

The book is a significant departure from Gibson’s earlier, more futuristic works. He describes the plot as “Elmore Leonard meets the 21st Century”: The characters are relatively normal, they even hold real jobs and the future is pretty recognizable. The Bay Bridge, for example, is still around in “Virtual Light.” But it’s been taken over by the disenfranchised--hustlers, gangsters, the homeless--who have transformed the lower roadways into street bazaars reminiscent of 19th-Century Istanbul, and erected jury-rigged housing in the bridge’s superstructure. His Los Angeles is populated by immigrant Mongolian throat-singers working at carwashes and by rent-a-cops like Sublett, who is “a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect . . . people (who) figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush.”

This is Gibson’s first solo novel in five years, and once again it seems he is trying to push the limits of his work. He earned his audience with short stories in the science-fiction magazines, made his name with “Neuromancer” in 1984 and gained an international reputation with his next two books, “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive.” He then quit cyberspace to spend two years with a close friend, Bruce Sterling, writing “The Difference Engine,” a novel set in a fantastical Victorian England that had invented a steam-driven computer.

Determined to keep exploring new forms, Gibson collaborated with two architects, Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung, on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 1990 “Visionary San Francisco” exhibit of architectural drawings and renderings. All of this defies the prevailing publishing wisdom, which virtually commands a writer to find a niche and mine it. But then Gibson, an orphan from the South who went to Canada to evade the draft, has never fit traditional molds. He still prides himself on being just a “science-fiction writer.”

Now, at just 45, he’s known worldwide, books are being written on him and he’s in demand to speak at virtually any conference that has the word future in it. But he doesn’t consider himself a prophet, and he’s not really interested in technology--any kind of technology--except as a metaphor. His real gift, say people like his friend Hodgetts, a Santa Monica architect, is to see what is happening today. As Hodgetts explains it, Gibson sees a discarded motor by the road and it winds up in “Virtual Light” running an elevator on the Bay Bridge that connects the bazaars on the roadways to the shanties in the superstructure.

“When you walk down the street with Bill, it’s like someone has spiked your drink. He immediately apprehends this incredible detail all around you,” Hodgetts says. “And I really think, in his books, he is talking about right now, not the future, now . Most of us, when we talk about ‘now’ are really talking about a lag time of 10 years--we’re reluctant to give up our memories. Not Bill.

“He really looks at every thing in a Robinson Crusoe native way,” Hodgetts says. “He looks at a thing as it is and makes an assessment of its uses, not based on its designed use, or advertised use, but its essence.”

That penetrating vision permeates nearly everything he writes, along with a singular belief: Simply put, he doesn’t think we have any choices about how much or how little technology we can have anymore. The only determinant is the market, not man. And as a result, he says, we already have lost a good deal of our humanity and become machine-dependent creatures, hooked on systems as deadly as any drug, that just keep replicating themselves in new forms.

“When you say, ‘The machines are winning,’ it sounds like we are in competition with the machines,” Gibson says wryly. “But in fact we are making these machines. It’s what we do. And why do we do it? Well, it’s one of the functions of late-stage capitalism. We have to keep making more and more of these things. It’s more like the machines have won, you know. We’re becoming the machines--Machines “R” Us--like in Toys “R” Us. Machines “R” Us. Computers “R” Us. That’s more my anxiety.

“We’ve become this strange artificial thing. In the process, we may have destroyed the biosphere. We may have f----- life on this planet simply by becoming this industrial animal that we are. But that’s what we are.”

“THE SKY ABOVE THE PORT WAS THE COLOR OF TELEVISION, TUNED TO A dead channel.” With those words, Gibson began “Neuromancer” and stepped into literary history. It begins like a 1940s hard-boiled detective story: A down-and-out loser named Case is hired in a bar by a stunning woman named Molly to help track someone down. But the book quickly slams into another dimension. Case is no private eye, but a burned-out computer cowboy who made (and lost) his reputation rustling data in cyberspace. Molly is no damsel in distress but a hired assassin, a “street samurai” with mirrorshades embedded in her eyes and razors implanted under her nails. The “guy” they are after turns out to be a third-generation artificial-intelligence program that has learned to replicate itself endlessly in human forms.

Gibson sets his story in a terrifying world desolated by corporate greed, environmental disasters and overpopulation. Japanese gangsters and global corporation have replaced nations and battle each other for the new gold of this future, information. The rich indulge in plastic surgery for sport; the poor are mugged for their body parts. And a vast middle-class is kept sedated with a televised entertainment called “stim” that is as addictive as heroin.

To create this world, Gibson drew on material ranging from Dashiell Hammett’s novels to Steely Dan’s songs and blended them into what one reviewer called “high-tech electric poetry.” Along the way, Gibson introduced new words to the language-- cyberspace , black ice , meat puppet --and helped launch (along with writers John Shirley and Sterling) a literary genre called “cyberpunk,” which is obsessed with the relationship between men and the machines they make.

“The whole package was simply dazzling,” says Ellen Datlow, fiction editor for Omni magazine in New York City. “And very romantic, too, in a kind of 1940s film noir way--you knew the girl (Molly) was going to dump the guy (Case) in the end, but he couldn’t help himself.”

“Neuromancer” won an unprecedented Triple Crown of science-fiction awards (the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick) in 1985, and by the late ‘80s, Gibson’s books were selling at the rate of 3,000 a day, at one point, in Japan. Thousands of young hackers around the world saw in Gibson’s fictional accounts of outlaw hackers a confirmation of their real-life delinquencies. And the books helped shape a particular aesthetic that spawned a cyberpunk counterculture.

“Before cyberpunk science fiction,” says R.U. Sirius, co-founder of the magazine Mondo 2000, “no one considered the obvious fact that (urban) subcultures would be projected into the future--with the appropriate technological know-how. Bill was probably the first one to do that in a way that was real. He gave us razor-headed people with bones through their noses hanging out in some club in Night City, exchanging strange designer drugs and DNA chips.

“He took in the complete breakdown of social structures and infrastructures, and the resulting idea that everything can be bought, sold and advertised,” Sirius adds. “Warner Records’ defending (rapper) Ice T was something predicted by the world of ‘Neuromancer.’ ”

Given the strange, gritty worlds of his books, one can easily imagine Gibson as looking like something out of “Blade Runner,” an intense, wiry young man, favoring leather jackets and mirrorshades, obsessed with hacking. So it is surprising to find the “real Mr. Gibson” standing outside his rambling Victorian shingle home in the Kitsalano section of Vancouver, trying to unravel a Gordian knot of nylon parachute cord. He is dressed for yardwork and looks pretty much like the suburban dad he is. (He still takes a noon break to make lunch for his two children, Graeme, 15, and Claire, 10.)

The disparity between the man with the manners of a Southern gentleman and his street-smart books brings to mind a favorite line of his--”You don’t meet what writes the books when you meet a writer. You meet where it lives.” But the clue to another world is there in his denim shirt pocket: a sleek, silver-colored, aluminum-alloy Rotring pen that looks as if it came from outer space. And that world begins to unfold as Gibson stoops (he’s 6 foot 5) through a side door to his basement study.

It’s a small office, big on minimalism--light gray walls, a black carpet with red geometric shapes, halogen track lighting--and neat as a monk’s cell. Only the tools of his trade stand out, the phone, fax, the Mac SE 30 on his desk. A Robert Longo painting on one wall, “Just Another Johnny,” which shows a corporate man caught in a whirlwind scream, catches the eye.

Gibson’s work style is minimal as well--no outlines, no plot summaries. In his words, he just works “without a net.’ He sits down at his computer at about 10 a.m., logs on and hopes, he says, “there’s incoming mail.” He starts with anything that sticks in his head--a phrase, a sentence, an image, a sound--and builds from that, until he gets what he calls a “big ball of stuff.”

“When I do these things, I learn to treasure the potential of randomness very much. Whatever life, novelty (there is in my books), a lot of it is owed to just very random encounters and pleasingly perverse juxtapositions,” he explains. “When I’m working really, really hard on a book, I can’t just go off and read a novel, but I get into this thing where I read the most random possible odds and ends of anything that I can find, sort of halfway looking for this ‘thing’ I can take and plug into the narrative and produce an effect of adequate strangeness. I hesitate to admit that I do that because it sounds too crazy. But I do. And the final result doesn’t necessarily feel random.”

A classic example of that sits on his desk, next to his Mac. It’s a clipboard made from discarded green computer board. He uses it to hold the printed copies of text he’s working on, and he put the material of the clipboard to good use in the future.

“Somewhere in ‘Virtual Light,’ there’s a stall on the bridge that’s made out of panels like that. That stuff is immortal,” he adds. “It’s phenolic resin, it’s linen and some kind of fiberglass-like substance. I do my part for recycling and use part of it to build that stall on the bridge.”

He’s friendly and generous (an agreed-upon four-hour interview over two days spills into nearly 12), but he’s extremely shy. He tends to look at the floor or stare out the window when talking. At times, you feel you’re talking with a man driving a car. Yet Gibson is a natural storyteller and can talk for a long time before stopping. Expectably, the subject matter is madcap to diverse: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, the quality of heroin on Vancouver streets, dengue fever, the elaborate chrome tool kits that rock band U2’s road crew carries around on tour.

Like a great jazz musician, he seems able to pick up any riff and make it into his music. “It’s a funny thing,” he says at one point. “Here we are living in the world that (futurist) Marshall McLuhan predicted, where the world is united under this kind of overarching umbrella of almost instantaneous electronic communication: satellites and satellite dishes, CNN and all this stuff.

“But what’s happening to the map--everything is Balkanizing itself as quickly as possible,” he adds. “The Soviet Union was the last 19th-Century empire, and the reason I suspect what’s happening there is so messy and horrible is that they are so late in changing that it makes the changes cataclysmic. Everything is breaking down into smaller and smaller cohesive units under the electronic umbrella, which I find, like, fascinating.”

It’s after lines like that that Gibson shows an interesting quirk: He’ll suddenly look straight at you with his unusual eyes. They’re a surreal blue; chunks of sky on a perfect beach day. They’re sad eyes, kind eyes, human eyes, and, ultimately, that’s what’s so unsettling: their humanity. Because as the conversation rolls on, Gibson unconsciously uses them as exclamation points to underscore life in our time. “What is normal anymore, we kind of don’t know. That’s what (literary critic) Fredric Jameson called ‘The Post Modern Sublime’--a mingling of dread and ecstasy, that’s it. That’s the feeling. To me, that’s what science fiction has been about--a mingling of dread and ecstasy.”

IN MANY WAYS, GIBSON HAS been forced to view the world as an outsider. He was born in Conway, S.C., the son of a building contractor who, among other things, installed the toilets in the housing of the atom bomb project at Oak Ridge, Tenn. Gibson was 8 when his father died, and his mother took him from the 1950s suburbs of Norfolk, Va., to her hometown of Wytheville, Va., a small Southern Gothic town.

Gibson describes himself as the “original can’t-hit-the-baseball kid” in a place where high school sports were king. He escaped by reading, mostly science fiction, particularly Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber. But at 14, he found a 35-cent paperback anthology of 1950s beat writings that contained William S. Burroughs’ “Interzone” section of “Naked Lunch.” “That was one of the most hallucinatory pieces of prose in the English language,” he says. “Reading that was like being impregnated with a virus.”

By his junior year in high school, Gibson was so alienated from his peers that he persuaded his mother to send him to a boarding school/dude ranch he’d seen in National Geographic: the Southern Arizona School for Boys. The school was just outside Tucson, in a landscape of 1960s suburbs to come: miles of paved roads and streets winding nowhere in the desert.

“It was like a dumping ground for chronically damaged adolescent boys--there were just some weird stories there, from all over the country,” Gibson says. “They ranged from a 17-year old, I think from Louisiana, who was like a total alcoholic, man, a terminal, end-of-the-stage guy who weighed about 300 pounds and could drink two quarts of vodka straight up and pretend he hadn’t any to this incredibly great-looking, I mean, beautiful kid from San Francisco, who was crazy because from age 10 his parents had sent him to plastic surgeons because they didn’t like the way he looked.”

Gibson found his stride there--until his mother died during his senior year. He plunged into an emotional tailspin, wound up wrongly implicated in a drug scandal and the school asked him to leave, without a diploma. When he got back to Wytheville, his guardians gave him a choice: Join the military or go to military shcool. But he worked out a compromise that allowed him to travel for a year. He quickly hopped a Greyhound to a place he’d only heard about, Toronto. This was 1967, the Vietnam War was raging and he prepared to evade the draft if called.

He settled in Yorkville, Toronto’s meager answer to Haight-Ashbury, renting rooms for $7 a week and supporting himself by working in head shops, painting store mannequins and, once, appearing in a Canadian Broadcasting Co. documentary on hippies. He read very little but found some used British editions of J.G. Ballard’s books, including disaster novels like “The Drowned World,” and devoured them. Out of necessity, he developed a knack for studying street codes and systems of power, watching hookers and hustlers in late-night coffee shops and keeping an eye out for “The Man.”

“I found myself in this horrid-enough place where I did not know how anything worked,” Gibson recalls. “So I had to relearn everything--and under this kind of pressure, a kind of semi-surreptitious existence, where I did not want to come to the attention of the authorities.” Eventually, though, he did and was asked to leave. He returned to Canada a year and a half later after traveling around the United States, earning his GED and securing the rights to a small trust fund his mother left him. In Toronto, he met an old friend, Deborah Thompson, whom he later married, and they moved to her hometown, Vancouver, in 1972. Gibson wound up studying English at the University of British Columbia, vaguely looking at a career as a literary critic or animated filmmaker before finally settling on the idea of writing science fiction.

Gibson became a house-husband after Graeme was born, while his wife, who eventually earned a master’s in linguistics at UBC, supported the family by teaching English as a second language. In his spare time, he taught himself to write short stories using a 1927 Hermes portable typewriter set up on a card table in the living room.

He sold his first story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” in 1976 to a small magazine, UnEarth, for $23, and followed that by selling “The Gernsback Continuum” to Terry Carr, the legendary sci-fi editor who was then putting out the magazine Universe. Then he met John Shirley at a sci-fi convention in Vancouver.

Shirley “walked in with no shirt on, wearing a long, dirty raincoat and some kind of studded dog collar wrapped around his neck,” Gibson says. “And I said, ‘What do you do?’ And he said, ‘I’m a punk rocker.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ And then he said, ‘Yeah, my day job is science fiction.’ Which was true.”

That contact opened doors, and soon he was selling stories to Omni, the Rolls-Royce of sci-fi magazines, for what was to him an unheard-of sum: nearly $1,000 a story. Success led him to think his future lay in short stories, which he continued to write until Carr offered him a small advance to do a novel.

“It wasn’t that vast forces were silently urging me to write. It’s just that Terry Carr had given me this money and I had to make up some kind of story,” Gibson says. “I didn’t have a clue, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll plagiarize myself and see what comes of it.’ ” What came of it was “Neuromancer.”

GIBSON’S VARIED NEW work is driven by a fear that he could end up as the literary equivalent of a Las Vegas act from the Cyber Age. That anxiety was chillingly played out last spring on the “Wild Palms” TV series. Gibson plays himself--in the future. He’s stopped by a corporate fan, who points him out as the man who invented “cyberspace.” Gibson lopes by and says simply, “Yeah, and they’ll never let me forget it.”

“Sometimes people kind of say, ‘Why don’t you write another ‘Neuromancer?’--which is always an alarming question when it’s your first novel they are talking about,” he says. “But my real answer to that is, I don’t know how, and the reason I don’t know is that I’ve learned too much.”

Determined to keep exploring new forms, he ventured into the world of multimedia art last summer with New York City artist Dennis Ashbaugh and book publisher Kevin Begos. On a family vacation to Wytheville, Gibson had discovered an old family photo album, and the memories they generated triggered a short story about his early years there, for which Ashbaugh later did illustrations.

The project, however, had a twist. Gibson had his story encoded on a computer disk that was programmed with a virus to destroy the text as soon as it was read--once. That disk fit into a photograph-album-type book with Ashbaugh’s illustrations, many of which contained collages of 1950s American advertisements. Those ads slowly vanished when exposed to air, and as they went, paintings of genetic strands, Ashbaugh’s specialty, began to emerge.

The book was designed to work on many levels, but in one real sense it was intended to replicate Gibson’s memories of his late father--vanishing words and fading pictures that change with each glance.

Now he’s writing a script for his cyberpunk short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” with another friend, Robert Longo, the New York City artist, who hopes to make “Johnny” his directorial debut. They’ve spent four years on the project and were making last-minute revisions in June, aiming for pre-production. Gibson has written several scripts so far--including adaptations of “Burning Chrome” and “New Rose Hotel.” (They remain unproduced.) Each one was a different writing experience. “It’s like cutting sushi to order,” Gibson says. It’s a nice change,too. He doesn’t have to limit himself to watching TV, which he does when he writes his books. He can read novels. And, in a weird way, it’s fun. Call it an adventure in the postmodern sublime.

The future seems to be moving him into his own past, perhaps toward a novel set in the 1960s, at a boys’ school in Arizona. That may sound like science fiction itself--Gibson writing a novel set in the 1960s. But in some ways it’s not. He thinks a lot about his time in boarding school. He’s got a cast of characters--including a 300-pound teen-age alcoholic and a beautiful victim of plastic surgery; a nice setting--a desolated landscape of suburban America in the desert; and drama--he did, after all, get kicked out. Now all he needs is an image or phrase, something to get the big ball of stuff going.

“We just live in this world of stuff and we’ve got to do something with it, make some sort of sense out of it,” says Gibson. “And I just sort of make it into science-fiction novels.

“What I hope attracts people to the kind of work I do is that they recognize the effects of their own world in it, maybe for the first time. We can’t open ourselves to how weird contemporary reality is because we would be paralyzed by doing so. So I suspect the only way we can sneak up on it is to read science fiction--or write it.”