William Gibson talk notes
I saw yesterday in the Toronto Star that William Gibson was coming to town that night for a talk as part of This is not a Reading Series to promote his new work, Spook Country. I didn’t have time to pick up tickets, but gave it a shot at the door and sure enough there was room, so for less than the cost of a beer I got to spend an hour or so listening to Gibson on a variety of topics.
It’s funny, I can remember buying Neuromancer, down to a mental picture of the shelf of the store I picked it up at (W.H. Smith in the Quinte Mall in Belleville), and I remember that I knew to look for the book and it had some important ideas that I should read, but this was the late ’80s, so how did I know to buy it? The internet didn’t exist as we know it back then, so what was my recommendation engine?
Given the speaker and the topic, I thought it would be fun to try to take notes on the talk on my Nokia e61. I’m not an contender for the Blackberry Olympics, but fortunately Gibson has a bit of a drawl in his speech that slows him to a point where I could capture about one in every five sentences, so here are some quotes I picked out - in a lot of cases the quotes are verbatim, but due to the relatively low bandwidth provided by my thumbs, they shouldn’t be attributed directly to the speaker as they’re written here.
On the MacGuffin in Spook Country
For a while I didn’t know what was in the box… I had a list of possibilities, but they were no more than the standard items that a reasonably educated person would think of after reading the setup. When I finally knew what was in the box, it was a lovely day in the basement, a lovely day indeed.
On his writing process
“He writes with Google on…” That’s the meme that’s replaced “William Gibson writes with a mechanical typewriter.” Bruce Sterling used to write with a 12 inch television on top of his computer and headphones on to listen to something else, so compared to that what’s a little Google?
If it disappeared tomorrow, you’d miss your Google.
On eBay
eBay is a vast and constant rationalization of the world’s attics… The ultimate democratization of connoisseurship… You become Sotheby’s worst nightmare. This goes on all the time.
You can see every toy you ever had as a child. I’ve collected jpegs of every frog toy… I don’t want them… that would be sad… eBay’s an interesting tool with which to explore one’s life.
On books and novels
Books are the oldest mass [media? meme?]… We’re still making wheels. They’re titanium, they’re really fancy, but they’re still wheels, so we’ll still be making books.
Learning to read novels is a very culturally complex activity… We don’t recognize the creative contribution of the reader versus the writer… (tree falls in the forest thing)… The person who reads the marks [Gibson refers to writing as “putting marks on paper”] performs an equally creative act. The movie of your favourite novel never equals the one you’ve seen in your forehead. Nobody else has seen that movie.
On the settings of his works
Science fiction is always about the day in which it’s written. Having written about the 21st century since 1979, the ability to write about it as the present is really a hoot.
When I wrote Neuromancer I thought I was committing an act of almost ludicrous optimism… Nuclear armament was getting us all down… [Neuromancer’s setting was] a very simple extension of Reagonomics… Mexico city as North America… It’s not commented on in the text but I think it’s there… People think it’s dystopian but there are so many people in the world who would instantly and happily move to that world.
The final question yielded a fitting closing:
As wonderful as life is a fair bit of it is fairly creepy… Happy endings are about when you close the curtain, more a part of art than a part of life because life goes on and usually ends kind of creepy.
Tags: WilliamGibson, Spook Country