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TITLES BY WILLIAM GIBSON
Neuromancer
Count Zero
Burning Chrome
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Virtual Light
Idoru
All Tomorrow's Parties
Pattern Recognition
Spook Country
Zero History
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WILLIAM GIBSON
G. P. Putnam's Sons New York
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA * Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) * Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England * Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) * Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) * Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India * Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) * Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright (c) 2012 by William Gibson Ent. Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Pages 257-259 constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Photograph on facing page courtesy Calvin Greenwood
EISBN 9781101559413
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
BOOK DESIGN BY NICOLE LAROCHE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
CONTENTS
Introduction: African Thumb Piano
Rocket Radio
Since 1948
Any 'Mount of World
The Baddest Dude on Earth
Talk for Book Expo, New York
Dead Man Sings
Up the Line
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
Mr. Buk's Window
Shiny Balls of Mud: Hikaru Dorodango and Tokyu Hands
An Invitation
Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Great Cities
Modern Boys and Mobile Girls
My Obsession
My Own Private Tokyo
The Road to Oceania
Skip Spence's Jeans
Terminal City
Introduction: "The Body"
The Net Is a Waste of Time
Time Machine Cuba
Will We Have Computer Chips in Our Heads?
William Gibson's Filmless Festival
Johnny: Notes on a Process
Googling the Cyborg
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INTRODUCTION:
AFRICAN THUMB PIANO
When I started to try to learn to write fiction, I knew that I had no idea how to write fiction. This was actually a plus, that I knew I didn't know, but at the time it was scary. I was afraid that people who were somehow destined to write fiction came to the task already knowing how. I clearly didn't, so likely I wasn't so destined. I sat at the typewriter, the one on which I'd written undergraduate essays, trying to figure out how to try.
Eventually I began to try to write a sentence. I tried to write it for months. It grew longer. Eventually it became: "Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Graham came gradually to see the targeted numerals of the academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film." I'm not sure it was Graham. Maybe it was Bannister. It was a sentence far too obviously in the manner of J. G. Ballard, and Ballard gave his protagonists sturdy, everyman British middle-class surnames.
I had no idea what my sentence meant, in terms of where any narrative might go, but I now know that that was not a bad thing. I was in the first place of fiction, as was my protagonist. A door was opening, however slightly. I began to imagine that the deserted (recently deserted?) office building in which Graham/Bannister reviewed film had a fountain in its atrium, and in this fountain, submerged, along with the usual coins, were dozens of wristwatches, some of them very expensive. Time had ended, perhaps, or the awareness of its passage had become somehow undesirable. And that was as far as I went, the door closing. I may have sensed, correctly, that a Ballard pastiche, no matter how earnest, was somehow not the thing.
Later attempts sometimes involved outer space, though outer space more in the manner, I hoped, of Alfred Bester or Samuel R. Delany. I don't remember them. My wife parodied them all, not unkindly, as "His long green ears quivering, Fimo slipped from the rig." Today this reminds me that I was having trouble with character names. At one point I seriously considered borrowing them from products in the IKEA catalog. But there was always something akin to "the rig." Some unimagined (by me), hence unnamed, element of technology. But already I sensed that even if I had somehow come to know what the rig was, what it was for, it was better not to tell the reader just then. "Javnaker slipped from the quantum universe-splitter that wasn't actually a time machine" would not be good for the reader.
And therein, I think, lies most of how one learns to write fiction. We have to learn to write fiction, but we have already, to varying degrees, had to learn to read it. And I felt like quite a good reader of fiction, when I began to write fiction, or at least a good reader of that fiction which I most keenly enjoyed. And thus are we shaped as writers, I believe, not so much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction has provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture.
Knowing how seriously aspiring writers of fiction can take advice from more established writers of fiction, I'm generally reluctant to say more than: If you wish to learn to write fiction, it helps if you've read a lot of it before you begin to try. And that in any case, you'll likely need to spend a lot of time discovering how to try, and then a lot more time trying. I don't really remember anything very specific about learning to drive, other than a neat trick for parallel parking, and learning to write fiction is a lot like that (except for no terrified instructor in the passenger seat, though in a way we each provide one of those as well).
Eventually, I was able to write something like a story, and it was published, however obscurely. Later, after what seemed like dozens of false starts, I wrote several more. I began to meet other people who were attempting to write science fiction, and noticed that most of them had
found ways to write, and to be read, that didn't involve payment. Science fiction had long been surrounded by a generations-deep compost of fanzines, a sort of paper Internet, and this could be extremely engrossing, and apparently gratifying. But after trying that avenue of publication a few times, I decided to avoid it.
My decision, such as it was, ran something like this: I am in the process of discovering that place from which my fiction comes, and the process may best be served by limiting the act of writing to the writing of fiction which I might reasonably expect to sell. (I don't offer this by way of advice, though, because some writers clearly thrive on exactly the opposite path.)
The distinction I was making wasn't between paid versus unpaid, exactly. It wasn't about whatever sum might be involved. It was about a certain demonstration of agency. It involved a harsher dichotomy. Every word written (or written then subtracted, which is often more important) contributed to the possibility, or not, of an event happening in the world outside oneself. Either someone whose rent was paid by their job of selecting stories, someone for whom it actually mattered, could be induced by my words on a page to buy my story, or they couldn't. This seemed like magic to me, and still does. As if the right runes, scratched in the dirt, could produce a bag of groceries. Once you've managed to do this successfully, doing it again isn't quite so much about the groceries as about the peculiar wonder of it.
The door into fiction-writing space began to open more easily, and more regularly. A huge amount of the thing is simply practice, but that practice, for me, had to be practice in the actual writing of fiction. The itch to become a writer could be scratched, I suspected, too easily, with other kinds of writing. Self-discipline never having been my strong suit, I became uncharacteristically strict with myself about writing only fiction.
Which is why I have never felt entirely comfortable with the pieces collected here.
They are violations of that early prime directive. They aren't fiction. Worse, they somehow aren't quite nonfiction either, it feels to me, because they were written from the fiction-writing place, the only writing place I had, with fiction-writing tools, the only writing tools I had. I didn't feel adequately professional, writing nonfiction. I felt as though I was being paid to solo on some instrument vaguely related to one I actually knew how to play.
I had had no formal training in journalism. The idea of keeping a diary or journal had always made me uncomfortable. The idea of direct, unfiltered autobiography made me even more uncomfortable. By the time I began to occasionally be asked to write nonfiction, the membrane surrounding the fiction-writing place had been sanded to a workable thinness, was porous. The world washed in, if I was lucky, and was transformed. On a good working day, I watched as some largely unconscious process turned reality, or what passed for it, into fantasy. Which was what I had wanted, how I had wanted to make my living. To write nonfiction felt worryingly counter to that.
And yet. Opportunities to visit new places, to meet interesting people. A certain permission to ask questions. These things can prove extraordinarily valuable to a writer of fiction. The peculiarity quotient of the stuff washing in through the membrane rises. One is in Tokyo, one is in Singapore, one is in the Zona Rosa or in an after-hours club in Dublin. And someone else is paying for it. Is paying for you to be exactly there, doing approximately that, and the fiction-writing place, though you don't notice it at the time, benefits.
The lure of that got me out there, doing something I secretly felt I probably shouldn't quite be doing. The results are collected here, along with some "talks," an even more problematic form for me, because writers, it seems to me, should write, not make speeches. But speeches, like quasi-journalistic writing assignments, can come attached to plane tickets, to hotel rooms in cities one might never have thought of visiting otherwise. In writing speeches, curiously, one sometimes finds out what one thinks, at that moment, about something. The world at large, say. Or futurity. Or the impossibility of absolutely grasping either. Generally they make me even more uncomfortable to write than articles, but later, back in the place of writing fiction, I often discover that I have been trying to tell myself something.
When I taught myself to write fiction, I eventually accepted that I had learned to do what passes for the writing of fiction when I'm the one doing it. The volume on the imposter-syndrome module decreased. Writing nonfiction, I've often felt as though I'm applying latex paint to the living room walls with a toothbrush. The volume on the module shoots up. Perhaps people will assume that the resulting texture is deliberate. Perhaps not. Writing fiction is a unique activity for me, a neurological territory, an altered state. Writing nonfiction isn't, quite, but I'm gradually coming to accept that I've learned to do what passes for the writing of nonfiction when I'm the one doing it.
The following pieces are performed, then, on the African thumb piano, an instrument I scarcely know how to play.
They were composed, however, on one that has no name, and which I am yet to see.
--VANCOUVER, AUGUST 2011
THE BOY CROUCHES beside a fence in Virginia, listening to Chubby Checker on the Rocket Radio. The fence is iron, very old, unpainted, its uprights shaved down by rain and the steady turning of seasons. The Rocket Radio is red plastic, fastened to the fence with an alligator clip. Chubby Checker sings into the boy's ear through a plastic plug. The wires that connect the plug and the clip to the Rocket Radio are the color his model kits call "flesh." The Rocket Radio is something he can hide in his palm. His mother says the Rocket Radio is a crystal radio: She says she remembers boys building them before you could buy them, to catch the signals spilling out of the sky.
The Rocket Radio requires no battery at all. Uses a quarter mile of neighbor's rusting fence for an antenna.
Chubby Checker says do the twist.
The boy with the Rocket Radio reads a lot of science fiction--very little of which will help to prepare him for the coming realities of the Net.
He doesn't even know that Chubby Checker and the Rocket Radio are part of the Net.
ONCE PERFECTED, communication technologies rarely die out entirely; rather, they shrink to fit particular niches in the global info-structure. Crystal radios have been proposed as a means of conveying optimal seed-planting times to isolated agrarian tribes. The mimeograph, one of many recent dinosaurs of the urban office place, still shines with undiminished samizdat potential in the century's backwaters, the late-Victorian answer to desktop publishing. Banks in uncounted third-world villages still crank the day's totals on black Burroughs adding machines, spooling out yards of faint indigo figures on long, oddly festive curls of paper, while the Soviet Union, not yet sold on throwaway new-tech fun, has become the last reliable source of vacuum tubes. The eight-track-tape format survives in the truck stops of the Deep South, as a medium for country music and spoken-word pornography.
The Street finds its own uses for things--uses the manufacturers never imagined. The microcassette recorder, originally intended for on-the-jump executive dictation, becomes the revolutionary medium of magnitizdat, allowing the covert spread of suppressed political speeches in Poland and China. The beeper and the cellular telephone become tools in an increasingly competitive market in illicit drugs. Other technological artifacts unexpectedly become means of communication, either through opportunity or necessity. The aerosol can gives birth to the urban graffiti matrix. Soviet rockers press homemade flexi-discs out of used chest X rays.
THE KID with the Rocket Radio gets older. One day he discovers sixty feet of weirdly skinny magnetic tape snarled in roadside Ontario brush. This is toward the end of the Eight-Track Era. He deduces the existence of the new and exotic cassette format: this semi-alien substance, jettisoned in frustration from the smooth hull of some hurtling 'Vette, settling like new-tech angel hair.
I BELONG to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television. Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well,
the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net--the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human.
The Net, in our lifetime, has propagated itself with viral rapidity, and continues to do so.
In Japan, where so many of the Net's components are developed and manufactured, this frantic evolution of form has been embraced with unequaled enthusiasm. Akihabara, Tokyo's vast retail electronics market, vibrates with a constant hum of biz in a city where antiquated three-year-old Trinitrons regularly find their way into landfill. But even in Tokyo one finds a reassuring degree of Net-induced transitional anxiety, as I learned when I met Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of Akira, a vastly popular multivolume graphic novel. Neither of us spoke the other's language: Our mutual publisher had supplied a translator, and our "conversation" was relentlessly documented. But Otomo and I were still able to share a moment of universal techno-angst.
HIS LIVING ROOM was dominated by a vast matte-black media node that would put most Hollywood producers to shame. He pointed to an eight-inch stack of remote-control devices.
"I don't know how to use them," he said, "but my children do."
"I don't know how to use mine, either."
Otomo laughed.
Today, Otomo's collection of remotes is probably part of some artfully bulldozed gomi plain, landfill for Neo-Tokyo. Gomi: Japanese for "garbage," a lot of which consists of outmoded consumer electronics--such as those recently redundant remotes. Wisely assuming a constant source, the Japanese build themselves more island out of it.
The sexiness of newness, and how it wears thin. The metaphysics of consumer desire, in these final years of the twentieth century . . .
Two years ago I was finally shamed into acquiring a decent audio system. A friend had turned up in the new guise of high-end-audio importer, and my old "system," so to speak, caused him actual pain. He offered to go wholesale on a total package, provided I let him select the bits and pieces.