William Gibson

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety nine, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a writer. As the age of the personal computer dawned, he it was who created the concept of cyberspace. He invented a world where people wire their brains into computer systems and inhabit a nightmare future of data, deception, and designer drugs. This world was revealed to the public in 1984 in a book called Neuromancer, Neuro as in Brain. It was hugely successful, and its author, who'd become, by his own admission, a prototype slacker, was hailed as the saviour of science fiction. There have been many more books since in which high tech and low life are natural partners, where information junkies travel at a fast forward pace through a world that has no countries. But their creator isn't turned on by computers and enjoys a conventional lifestyle in Vancouver. He sees himself, he says, almost as a surrealist. Science fiction is my excuse for what I do rather than what I do. He is William Gibson. It's a kind of flag of convenience, then, is it, William?

William Gibson1:33

Yes, it is, and I I sometimes feel ambivalent about it, but then I remember that science fiction is my native literary culture.

William Gibson1:43

So it's it's where I'm from rather than what I am.

Presenter1:47

But why do you feel ambivalent about it somehow you don't want to be called a science fiction writer?

William Gibson1:52

But I think I was

William Gibson1:53

I I I was coming from two directions when I started to write. I I did have this sort of underlying roots culture of SF, but my agenda had been much more informed by the beats and the whole alternative American tradition.

Presenter2:15

But if it isn't science fiction, I mean, one has to ask, what is it? It's certainly.

Presenter2:22

Well, i the only phrase I could come up with is it's it's the kind of cutting edge of the now, isn't it?

William Gibson2:28

Well, I think that's also the cutting edge of the now is is also a a good definition for mimetic naturalist fiction in any era. It's simply that we live in a a world that consists today of overlapping science fiction scenarios.

Presenter2:45

I suppose we could say Martin Amis is at the cutting edge of the now when he writes about low life and in a world where there's no society, as it were, everybody's kind of out for themselves. But what yours has on top of that is that futuristic quality.

William Gibson3:00

Well, I noticed that in London feels Martin Amis needed in order I believe in order to convey what he felt to be the particular malais of living in London in the late twentieth century, he had to introduce science fiction elements at the fringes of of the narrative. There's a there was a war going on somewhere.

William Gibson3:24

But no one quite knew where. Something's gone wrong with the weather in London Fields. Actually, London Fields seems quite prescient in in that way.

Presenter3:35

Which is of course a word that that people use about your stuff, because I mean, let's have a look at it. Cyberspace, you invented the word in in in nineteen eighty four, just as we were beginning to understand that we might all have a personal computer which we visualized as a as a kind of rather sophisticated uh word processor really. What you realized was you moved it a step further than that, that it could be the beginning of a whole new internal world, as it were.

Presenter4:02

How did you make that leap? Was there a moment when you thought

Presenter4:05

Hey.

William Gibson4:05

Well, I think I've always been lucky in that it it seems to be easy for me to spot those bits of the future that have arrived a little early. With Cyberspace I found the first Sony Walkman, which is still my favorite piece of late twentieth century technology. I for the first time in my life I was able to

William Gibson4:29

To take the music I wanted to listen to into any environment and while moving through space with it.

William Gibson4:38

I saw a poster in a shop window for the the first Apple II C, which immediately preceded the first Mac. And I I looked at that and I thought, what if the relationship to the information that this this machine processes could be like the relationship I'm having to the to the music that my Walkman processes?

William Gibson5:04

And somehow I could see that this stuff was going to get under our skin. You know, the the Walkman is very very physically intimate technology. And computing, uh, as it as it was then, wasn't very physically intimate, but I thought

Presenter5:21

Hmm.

William Gibson5:21

Why not?

Presenter5:22

Tell me about your first record.

William Gibson5:24

This is Alejandro Escovedo playing Amsterdam, which is a a song by John Cale, who's one of my favorite favorite songwriters.

Speaker 25:34

And I do believe the church.

Presenter6:05

Alejandro Escovido and Amsterdam. So, William Gibson, can you describe your vision of this cyberspace that you created? What's it made up of?

William Gibson6:16

Well, it's it's a notional space, and that seems to be the thing about it that's that's difficult for people to grasp prior to having had individual hands on experience of the Internet or the World Wide Web. It seems

William Gibson6:35

You know, twenty years later it seemed i immediately apprehendible.

William Gibson6:41

To almost everyone, because almost everyone has had that experience. When I started writing about it and it didn't exist,

William Gibson6:49

It was a bit more difficult. A lot of my challenge was.

William Gibson6:54

describing it in a way that made it real for people. When I met years later, when I met the people who were busy inventing virtual reality, they thanked me for having given them in Neuromancer a document that they could hand to their backers and say, This is what I'm trying to build.

Presenter7:11

This

Presenter7:14

Well, precisely. I mean, you were really giving giving voice, painting word pictures, as it were, of of everything that the the nerds were trying to create, weren't you?

William Gibson7:23

I was, but I was also giving them a better costume department.

William Gibson7:28

I gave them permission to wear black leather and have surly attitudes.

Presenter7:33

And have kind of implanted mirror specs or shades, as I should say. What do you think Bill Gates was inspired by you?

William Gibson7:35

Yeah.

William Gibson7:42

No, although actually when I was writing Neuromancer I vaguely knew that there was a company in Seattle that had something to do with computers, and it was called Microsoft.

William Gibson7:53

And I liked the word Microsoft, so I appropriated it lower case and used it as the name for a particular gizmo in in Neuromancer. It's a um in Neuromancer a Microsoft is a tiny sliver of data that kids insert into sockets they have surgically implanted behind their ears.

Presenter8:17

Record number two.

William Gibson8:18

is a very, very early

William Gibson8:21

Demo of All Tomorrow's Parties by Louie, John Cale and Sterling Morrison.

William Gibson8:27

who had not yet become the Velvet Underground and were, I believe, sitting around recording this on a reel-to-reel in John Cale's apartment.

Speaker 28:37

Silks and linens of yesterday's counts To all tomorrow's parties

Speaker 28:46

And what will she do with Thursday's rags when Monday comes around?

Speaker 28:54

She'll turn once more to Sunday's clown, And cry me

Presenter8:56

Uh

William Gibson8:56

Uh

Presenter8:56

Bye.

William Gibson8:57

This time

Speaker 38:58

Please clown and cry.

Presenter9:02

Velvet Underground and all to morrow's parties. I suppose it's not surprising, William, that you created places where there's lots going on, because you were brought up in a place where very little happened, weren't you?

William Gibson9:12

Yes, I was brought up in a well, not really a one street town, but in a

William Gibson9:18

quite small town.

Presenter9:20

This was in the South, in Virginia. What was it called?

William Gibson9:21

Virginia.

William Gibson9:22

to Wytheville.

Presenter9:24

And did you did you feel then even as a child this is the nineteen fifties did you feel it was backward? Did you feel frustrated by it? Or was it just everything you knew? Oh, all of it you knew?

William Gibson9:32

Was it just

William Gibson9:34

I had been taken there very suddenly immediately after my father's death, and uh I was uh eight years old, I think. And and up until then we had lived

William Gibson9:49

in a sort of transient middle class way as my father moved around the south working for a large early Sunbelt construction company. And I have a sort of key visual memory of being in this little brick box suburb with very new turf that was kind of unnaturally green and looked like astroturf. And at the the perfectly dead straight edge of the turf there was this bright Martian orange clay that uh had been underneath whatever original landscape had been scraped away to make room for the suburb. And I can remember standing at the edge of it and looking over into this other older world.

Presenter10:38

And how different from that then was it when you went back with your mother after your father's death and he died very suddenly, didn't he? When you went back and you lived in this very rural place? W you know, did you have a sense of time then? Did you feel you'd left the modern box behind?

William Gibson10:55

I had a profound sense of dislocation at a at a number of levels, I suppose both from

William Gibson11:02

the trauma of my father's sudden death and

William Gibson11:06

And the move into a place that wasn't entirely moored in the twentieth century. And rural Virginia in those days was the sort of place that as you turned your head from left to right, you'd go from looking at the twentieth century to l looking at the nineteenth to to looking at what it might have been like in the seventeenth.

Presenter11:29

In what sense, what were you seeing?

William Gibson11:31

I would see of, you know, that year's automobile on on the one hand.

William Gibson11:40

A man in bibovrals and a white shirt and bare feet ploughing a field with a mule in the middle, and then simply the the wilderness that that had would have been there when Raleigh came.

Presenter11:51

And did you have at the same time any kind of sense of the of the future, or a yearning for the future?

William Gibson11:58

Well, at that time in the late fifties, early sixties, America was completely saturated with the future and it it always came with a seemed to come with a capital F.

Presenter12:12

And were you excited by that? Were you hungry for it?

William Gibson12:14

Yes, I was very, very keen. I was very keen for that. I remember I had all of the rockets, missiles and spaceships books and I I was a a big fan of all of the uh wonderfully crude proto SF shows for children that that were popping out in

William Gibson12:37

What I suppose were the early days of broadcast television in in America.

Presenter12:41

Record number three.

William Gibson12:43

This is Doc Boggs singing Sugar Baby, and it's from the Smithsonian Folkways Collection, so called, which is actually the Rosetta Stone of all American popular music since about nineteen sixty.

Speaker 213:02

Oh, I've got no sugar, baby, now. All I can do for see peace with you, And I can't get along this away, can't get along this away. All I can do, that's all I can say, I will send you to your mama next payday.

William Gibson13:11

Yeah.

Speaker 213:23

Sing it to your mammony.

Presenter13:29

Doc Boggs, singing Sugar Baby, from the Smithsonian Folkways Collection. Sir William Gibson, you were you were parentless by the age of nineteen because your mother died then also very suddenly. It was nineteen sixty seven.

Presenter13:42

Vietnam beckoned. What did you do?

William Gibson13:45

I fled immediately to Canada.

Presenter13:48

How did you manage? What were you doing?

William Gibson13:50

I li well, it you know, for a couple of weeks I was essentially homeless, although it was such a delightful, floating, pleasant period that it now seems strange to me to think that that I was in fact homeless. I I w I was eventually well, and actually in quite short order, I was taken on as the manager of Toronto's first

William Gibson14:13

head shop, one of those places in the sixties. They became real institutions later on. The places that sell drugs paraphernalia. In in those days hash pipes and hookahs and Fillmore posters and and Alan Ginsberg books.

Presenter14:31

But you became, as I said at the beginning, a a prototype slacker, your phrase. What did that mean, that you just kind of bummed around? You were a kind of professional student, were you?

William Gibson14:41

Yeah, I was literally a professional student for for about four years in w in when I first got to Vancouver in the early seventies in that I had

William Gibson14:53

My wife was working on a master's degree and I had discovered that it I could be enrolled in the University of British Columbia and that if I took only literature courses I was pretty much guaranteed a phenomenally high grade point average, which meant at that time that the government would forgive me student loans and sometimes very generously give me bursaries.

Presenter15:21

But but obviously you were pursuing by default a a kind of line that interested you in the sense that you'd read a lot and that you were studying literature and so on. At what point did you decide that you could write? Or had you always written along the way?

William Gibson15:35

Well, I think that I had s in some ways such fundamentally low self esteem.

William Gibson15:41

That I never really wanted to put it on the line and

Presenter15:46

Why not? You just didn't have the courage. I

William Gibson15:50

No, I didn't want to be I suppose it's fear it's fear of rejection. I didn't want to find out that whatever it was I I and I think this keeps many, many people

William Gibson16:01

who otherwise might do very well from writing. I I didn't want to find out that whatever I I had to offer wasn't wanted. But what took me across the line was uh f noticing that all of the other people I knew who'd been living the way I was was living were were signing up for CBC radio or going into law school. Like suddenly everyone was looking for a career and I didn't have one. And I think I suspected then, and I think this might easily have happened, that I would become a

William Gibson16:36

Sort of sad

William Gibson16:38

clerk in a second hand book or record store that smells of cats. And and I w sometimes I see that guy in those record stores, and I'm always very nice to him. Record number four.

William Gibson16:52

This is Dirty Work by by Steely Dan, who were my absolute favorites in the

William Gibson16:59

in the early seventies when there was very, very little happening in that I liked in American popular music.

Speaker 217:06

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah

William Gibson17:10

Yeah.

Speaker 217:12

I don't wanna do your dirty work no more.

Speaker 217:19

I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah.

Presenter17:26

Steely Dan and Dirty Work. How did you make the long leap then, William Gibson, from deciding you should write to publishing short stories and then a novel for the mass market?

William Gibson17:36

It was rather a long leap. It was a a a leap in in parts, uh as leaps often are. I had met an American writer named John Shirley, who was a a

William Gibson17:48

His day job was being a singer in a punk band.

William Gibson17:52

And at night he wrote science fiction. And uh I I thought that was that was quite impressive. And John was living much closer to the edge than I had ever wanted to.

William Gibson18:04

And when I met him, he said, I'm a science fiction writer and a singer and a punk band. What do you do? And I said, Oh, I'm a science fiction writer too. I've published a story. And he said, Well, what are you doing now? And I said, Oh, I'm writing some more.

William Gibson18:19

Which wasn't true, so then I had to go home and write some more. And John was so pushy and uh such a

William Gibson18:27

big personality that he shoved me quite against all my instincts to the front and forced me to submit my work to the top markets. And within a year of that I had been commissioned to write a a first novel which became

William Gibson18:51

Near a man surbai, a man named Terry Cod.

Presenter18:54

And in the meantime, though, you'd seen the film Blade Runner and got frightened again, hadn't you?

William Gibson18:59

Well, I was about a third of the way through the manuscript when Blade Runner was released and I went to see it expecting on the basis of the few stills that I'd seen that that it was going to be very interesting, but I I wound up fleeing the theater about fifteen or twenty minutes in because I could see that Ridley Scott's film looked so much like the inside of my own forehead, but so much better that it you know, and it it was all in so much higher resolution and so much more detail, and I thought, oh no, I've only ever had the one idea and now someone's done this film.

Presenter19:39

But the truth is that you might have been frightened by Blade Runner in that moment because of its darkness and some of its style, but it wasn't really what your book was about, was it? Your idea was still different.

William Gibson19:53

Yeah, that's true, and I didn't know.

William Gibson19:57

I had no way of knowing at that point that the concept of cyberspace would be quite as central to the book as it later became. And I think that's what got me back to writing it, was when I realized that I had something new. I had something to replace the spaceship. The spaceship just wouldn't work for me, and that had been both the icon and the arena of fifties SF, and it was just dead in the water for me.

Speaker 220:22

Yeah.

William Gibson20:30

Uh

Presenter20:30

It was out of date.

William Gibson20:31

It was no longer what we were about. I mean, it was after Vietnam, it was after the sixties, it was a after the drugs. And I felt we needed a new language. And having had four years of

William Gibson20:44

comparative literary criticism of of of some sort in in university

William Gibson20:51

I was very conscious of science fiction as a it seemed to me a American science fiction at least as a a moribund but potentially entirely serviceable form of pop art.

Presenter21:06

Tell me about record number five.

William Gibson21:09

This is a a a fairly recent Bruce Springsteen song called Highway Twenty Nine, which I I think of as a two-minute Jim Thompson novel as shot by John Ford.

William Gibson21:22

And the protagonist is a shoe clerk, which I I think is lovely.

Speaker 221:27

It's a small town by.

Speaker 221:32

Was a man

Speaker 221:36

And I had it done.

Speaker 221:40

You know there is.

Speaker 221:44

Money on the floor buds The street was covered in blood and she was crying

Speaker 221:52

Heard me with a song

Presenter21:56

Old Hamlet when in Bruce Springsteen and Highway 29. So New Romancer William Gibson turned out to be the first of a trilogy, and there's been there's been other books and another trilogy in the 1990s. That one began in it was set in the first decade of the next century, where the rich lived in heavily fortified stealth houses, a concept apparently inspired by reality.

William Gibson22:21

Yes, actually. Dennis Hopper was the first celebrity I I read about who who has a stealth house. And my understanding is that Dennis Hopper's house in in Venice, California,

William Gibson22:34

Could easily be mistaken for an abandoned dry cleaning plant.

Presenter22:40

But inside

William Gibson22:41

But inside it's it's uh a fully luxurious Hollywood Hollywood mansion with uh an astonishing and very, very valuable collection of modern art. But the outside's just a

William Gibson22:52

A dirty ol' cube covered with gang graffiti.

Presenter22:56

And also in this uh trilogy that the poor live in in no go areas called barrios, aren't they? and monitored by police satellite, again inspired by reality, I gather.

William Gibson23:08

Yes, the LAPD under Chief Darrell Gates was very, very keen on establishing their own geosynchronous satellite.

William Gibson23:20

Referred to apparently on the Force as the Death Star.

Presenter23:25

And then i in a sequel a a a rock star falls in love with a a a virtual woman, a kind of Lara Croft figure, again an inspiration from real life, yes?

William Gibson23:36

Well, I'd been fascinated by the a a certain kind of Japanese popular music in which they produce on almost on a weekly basis new little rock singer, singer girls. And these singer girls don't necessarily sing

Speaker 223:50

Code.

William Gibson23:54

on their own records, and they aren't necessarily the girls who photographed on the album covers. In a way they're scarcely they're scarcely there. But what really got me was when I ran across the story of a a a glitch in the production line which had released product when there was no human girl attached to it at all. And when the audience found out that there was no person there, they fell deeply, deeply uh in love with

William Gibson24:23

the singer who didn't didn't exist, and she became very, very popular, had gallery shows of her watercolours and published uh published volumes of haiku.

William Gibson24:35

And I thought, this is this is interesting but it was very resonant for me because somehow it felt like what we do anyway. I mean, so much of what we do today as a civilization seems to be about celebrity.

Presenter24:49

It's about and it's about consumerism, isn't it? It's about consumerism gone mad.

William Gibson24:53

But can

William Gibson24:54

Yes, it's about marketing human beings or or marketing virtual approximations of human beings.

Presenter25:03

Record number six.

William Gibson25:06

This is Nick Cave singing Are You the One That I've Been Waiting For? And I've always thought that all good love songs aspire in some way to the condition of him.

Speaker 225:17

Well that in time my heart will reward me that all

Speaker 225:30

So I've sat and I've watched, and I sage Thor Are you the

Speaker 225:40

I've been waiting for

Presenter25:46

Are you the one I've been waiting for? Nick Cave singing there.

Presenter25:50

You also um have worked, and are working, I think, William, on the X Files, a series that's been enormously popular over here. I would have thought you'd have found that quite confining, that it wasn't somehow w as wild or as fast as you would like.

William Gibson26:04

I got involved with X-Files because I was commuting to and from Los Angeles on

William Gibson26:11

film writing jobs, and I kept bumping into Chris Carter, who who would always be in the business class compartment of the

William Gibson26:19

The same plane. The producer of it. Yes, and he he probably has has gone up and down that route more than any.

Presenter26:20

The the producer of it.

William Gibson26:27

any living human being. And my daughter had become

William Gibson26:31

a rabid fan of the show in the first season.

William Gibson26:35

and eventually he said You could do one.

William Gibson26:38

And it is very

William Gibson26:41

I I had never imagined how r weirdly formal.

William Gibson26:47

it is to write for episodic television, because in America you have to do it to the commercial breaks and the the dramatic arc. It must be very odd here where there are no commercials to to account for these strange arcs.

Presenter27:00

Yeah, you'd see

William Gibson27:02

Yeah, you'd see the joins are there, but it's just other.

William Gibson27:05

The commercials aren't part of the dramatic material, but they're the the walls of the theater. You have to play everything against.

William Gibson27:14

against the commercials. But Chris's method for coming up with a show i i i is is so th smooth and and thoroughly honed in at at this point that you just have to sort of jump in and slide through it. When you get to the bottom you have a Chris Carter version of whatever it was you were you started out with.

Presenter27:38

But in the meantime you have the the gratification, if if that's what it is, of knowing that your word, the word you coined, cyberspace, is in the Oxford English Dictionary. Does that make you swell with pride?

William Gibson27:49

I'm quite proud of that really. I was worried about it not getting in with proper citation, but I understand that's being taken care of if it hasn't already.

Presenter28:00

Your name is there, sir.

William Gibson28:01

Uh y I'm so I'm told, although I I've yet to go out and and buy the full on fifty pound edition that I would need to to see my name.

Presenter28:12

Record number seven.

William Gibson28:14

This is Tom Waits doing sixteen shells from a thirty odd six, which I think is just from the beginning of the period in which most of his percussion was provided by beating on broken tractors with sledgehammers.

Speaker 228:28

It's with some long man children

Speaker 228:34

I'm on a wheel you in a killer.

Speaker 228:37

Black gold six feet jail plum a thirty

Speaker 228:42

With a camera

Speaker 228:46

Uh

Presenter28:49

Tom Waits and sixteen shells from a thirty ought six. I described you as as a surrealist at the beginning of the programme, William Gibson. Do you have a a surreal vision of this desert island we're sending you to?

William Gibson29:01

I have the wishful thinking version. I'd like Caribbean style desert island, white sand beach, coconut palms with coconuts, pleasant weather, nothing too aggressive in the way of wildlife.

Presenter29:05

Which is

Presenter29:20

What would you do? Would you, do you think, accept your fate and and just live it? Or would you try and do something about it, try and escape? Or would you lie down and die?

William Gibson29:31

I think I'd try to make myself as comfortable as as possible and then

William Gibson29:40

probably embark on some sort of project to get myself ev eventually discovered.

Presenter29:49

You are deeply conventional at heart, then, aren't you?

Presenter29:53

Perhaps

William Gibson29:53

Caps. Uh, I I think I may be uh I'm from the the bohemian end of the conventional spectrum.

Presenter30:02

But having got to fifty, you're kind of getting nearer to the convention.

William Gibson30:08

Possib possibly. It's I you know, one of the things I'm most concerned with lately, and it it it pops up in my my recent novel, is the idea that we can't really do bohemias anymore, that we've come to the end of the is the industrial era, and that that bohemias and alternative cultures were the dream time of the industrial, and that we

William Gibson30:33

can't have that anymore. And I look at young people today and I I have a a sort of certain sorrow on on their behalf that the marketing machine is so quick that they'll never be able to to find

William Gibson30:47

that sort of conceptual desert island where where they can develop their own styles.

Presenter30:53

Because all their dreams have been done.

William Gibson30:55

Their dream well, it's the marketing machine is so voracious and and finely honed that it's it's sort of hanging there poised to snatch the first indication of an alternative and there thereby marketable dream.

Presenter31:12

Last record

William Gibson31:15

This is Taj Mahal singing Johnny Toobad, and he's accompanied by an a an astonishingly ancient East Indian metal slide instrument. This this one's a favorite of my son Graham's.

Speaker 231:30

Teena from Shanti Dong with the Rajit in your way Challenge Trooper

Speaker 231:38

Whoa whoa

Speaker 231:41

Hi ya roomina yes tomina ya lootina ya shootin' viato bab

Speaker 231:48

Now you sober, now you looting, now you shooting, no you're trooper.

Presenter31:54

Taj Mahan singing Johnny Too Bad. If you could only take one of those eight records, William, which one would you take?

William Gibson32:01

Actually, I think I'd take the the Nick Cave song, which has depth. I find real inspiration in this sort of thing. And actually I in I I've found direct inspiration for my work in everything that I chose to play to day.

Presenter32:20

What about your book? We give you the Bible and we give you the complete works of Shakespeare on the island.

William Gibson32:26

Well, uh it's a very, very difficult choice. If I were say if I were going to parachute onto this island from a plane,

William Gibson32:36

And there were copies of Joyce's Ulysses, an omnibus edition of of the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, and the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges. The one I grabbed as I went through the hatch would would just depend on which side of bed I'd gotten out on.

Presenter33:00

It's a sneaky way of taking of choosing three books, though. If you could only take one, which one would you would you grab today then?

William Gibson33:02

Yeah.

William Gibson33:06

I probably grab the the Borges because it contains the the higher the the highest available clinical dosage of the infinite.

Presenter33:19

And what about your luxury?

William Gibson33:21

I'd like a junk yard.

Presenter33:23

William Gibson, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

William Gibson33:27

Thank you.

Presenter33:27

Thank you.

Speaker 333:35

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.