And it seems to me that had he not sat at his typewriter in 1983 and written that sentence, and the book in which it is found, our present condition—cybercondition, if you must—would be considerably different than it would have otherwise been. William Gibson did something that every writer hopes to do and very—very—rarely does: change the world. Whether for better or worse, Microsoft (or something similar) will tell, but that in no way lessens the awe you should feel, seeing the elephant.
Charles Fort, another American treasure, wrote: “A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine time.” As steam engines go, Neuromancer turns out to be the Twenty-first Century Limited, and all of us find ourselves on board.
A COUPLE OF YEARS PASSED BEFORE BILL GIBSON AND I FIRST MET. Prior to that time we’d spoken on the phone, he’d written a fine blurb for my second novel, sent me my own copies of Count Zero and Mona Lisa, and proffered a comment about my work and its ambience during an interview he had with Spin magazine, which my publishers’ publicists fed on for years. (He is better than anyone else I know of at coming up with the pithy and infinitely reusable remark, the quotable phrase, the perfect literary sound-bite—I’ve been attempting to learn from his example for years.) In other words, without trying we were making favorable impressions on one another from the start.
When we did at last meet it was in 1991, at a party here in New York for The Difference Engine. Most of the usual local suspects were present, zeroing in on the action, and so whenever possible we hied ourselves to more secure parts of the room, the better to escape the purveyors of phonus bolognus. He gave me a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and I told him about that day’s big news in New York, the finding of a box of frozen human heads down on Avenue A, said box having apparently tumbled off a truck on route to the cryogenics clinic. Suffice to say we were as impressed with one another in person, in our own inimitable ways, as we had been at a distance. He and I knew from the start that we had much in common, little of which involved science fiction. At the instant each of us first heard the other speak, and detected in our voices a familiar tonality, we realized we were members of the same tribe.
Although Bill had been living in British Columbia, Canada, for well over twenty years (and that year in New York was my twelfth), we had both started out as boys of the mountains and valleys; the hills and the hollers, as folks still say, down there. We’d grown up on either side of the scleriotic spine of the eastern mountains—he in Virginia, not far into the postwar era, and me in Kentucky, eight years after that. The importance of his beginnings to what Gibson has written and continues to write may perhaps be hard to grasp for those who imagine that past and future, like oil and water, are discrete entities, but its magnitude cannot, and must not, be ignored. Cyberspace is infinite but starts with each person who chooses to step into it; and I speak now of he who in the first place dreamed it into life.
Cyberspace was born where the laurel grows lush and verdant; where the dogwoods blossom and the whippoorwills cry in the wind-whipped limbs of the tulip trees. It was born between the ridges, deep in the glades where streams rush cold along their limestone courses; born high on the mountainsides not yet strip-mined for their coal, atop the lone green knobs of Mars. The Southern Highlands, this region was once called; we now call it Appalachia. This part of the United States has been since the Revolution (and even now, to some degree remains) not merely rural, but distant, in time as well as place; its light filters down through the branches from another world’s sun.
Bill Gibson remembered that world, however often or for whatever reasons he might try to forget it. He remembered the raw-boned old men with faces lined like dry riverbeds, sun-bleached fedoras on their heads and white shirts beneath their overalls as they hoed the fields; remembered the five-and-dime store with wooden floors worn glass-smooth, and countertops lined with trays top-full with marvels, notions, and jimcrackery. He recalled the sound of a fired gun echoing off the hill on the far side of an autumnal field, and the mysterious way a shard of grandparental history excavated during some slow summer afternoon, whether in the basement’s icebox or the attic’s bake-oven, could possess such limitless fascination. He still understood the nature of the private commentary of men, cognizant of the sort of words and kind of phrasing barber shop regulars stopped using the moment a stranger, or mother, stepped through the door. He still saw the stare in the eyes of old women who might have been recalling the day their husbands headed east to the Western front, or the look on their fathers’ faces when they heard that a friend wouldn’t be coming back from the hole. He still tapped a foot to radio ballads as they poured ethereally from a barn dance or fiddle festival two states away, marking the rhythm in the same manner as did the community elders, although unlike him the ancients remembered a day when everything they heard would be heard solely in the instant it was produced, never again, and leaving no more lasting trace than snowflakes falling onto the tongue. And he could still listen to the far-off plaint of a train horn as the express rolled through the night, wailing through a darkness lit solely by moon and fireflies; a sound that planted in his mind the awareness that one day he too would travel far away from that country of heart and home; would necessarily flee, as if pursued by hounds, a world that essentialed abrogation as it demanded honorific, a sound endlessly entrancing yet infinitely sad, the unignorable siren call of the wider world without. The wider world waited, and he would go there.
I remember these things too, and this is how I know where cyberspace was born.
THE PROXIMITY OF our beginnings has proven to be one of our deepest bonds. Only in the past couple of years have we realized to what degree we remember the country that gave form to our souls, and how that remembrance informs every thought we think, every word we write. It is starting to sink in that with the passing of each hour now, as we leave one century and step into another, that place, that past, becomes ever more lost inside the shadows with which time enshrouds its mummy. (Gibson has called it the World Before Television. A talent for the perfect phrase, as said.)
The past lingers in unexpected and unavoidable ways long after we believe it gone. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as they say. Our cultural and historical past is readily accessible to everyone today, so long as you choose to turn it on, or download it. Today, as never before—the information media having become to enlightenment as the cereal aisle is to the supermarket—if you choose not to access the past, you are de facto free to rule it out of existence, at least so far as you might be concerned. But the personal past, while deniable if need be for a while, is far more difficult to tune out; as in a Soviet hotel room, the radio is impossible to turn all the way off. Gibson’s characters (I call them us) know this to be the case as often as you do.
Read his books and reread them, and see anew how many references you find therein to events or incidents that occurred at some unspecified time before the narrative begins, and to nostalgic reveries of That Which Is No Longer the Way It Was; how often his characters grow dimly aware of vague regrets for which they have no name, as if they are haunted unto their deathbeds with not only their own memories, but with someone else’s memories as well. Realize as you read to what degree, and to what effect, Gibson employs the images of evocative clutter and disarray to create a setting against which (as in an individual life) stray pieces of past days linger long enough to meld through coeval existence into an aspect—the major aspect, in many ways—of the contemporary world in which they remain.
I’m not referring to the overwhelming postapocalyptic damage and decay so often used in the set design of contemporary films when their directors attempt to depict a futuristic environment (these visuals usually being variants of those created for Bladerunner and The Road Warrior, and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange first of all), although such images have been omnipresent in near-future fiction as well. No, I speak instead of the scattered objects glimpsed within Chiba City bars and market-stalls or most espec
ially in Skinner’s room, in Virtual Light; each token of mundane temporality made rare by the passage of time, each described by Gibson with watchmakers’ precision and unconditional love—the black-and-white family photographs in their crumbling albums, the outmoded toaster ovens, the mildewed paperbacks, the scratched LPs, which today go unsold at yard sales or gather dust in thrift stores, but which tomorrow will prove to be pearls beyond price. The box of stuff in the back of the closet, detritus that accumulates in the desk’s bottom drawers; the lint in the navel of a private civilization, hinting at an apocalypse that (if apocalypse at all) could have been nothing other than personal. When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.
Surely it is the constant awareness of that faraway past, in which he lived intensely if not always happily, that so crystallizes Bill Gibson’s sense of what the future will hold, and what will be most sorely missed there.
A COUPLE OF years ago I was sealed up for a month in one of the hospitals here in New York with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (the cyberpunk variety, it would be fair if painful to say). Although Bill, like me, had always been pretty iffy about the general atmosphere that clings to hospitals, he nonetheless came to visit me (I suspect I piqued his interest by alerting him to the fact that my isolation unit rather resembled the ultimate Phillipe Starck hotel room). He passed through the double doors and strapped on a mask and there sat at my bedside while we spoke of the evasive ways of doctors, admired the perfect dread inherent to the design of the biohazard symbol, watched the sun setting over New Jersey and I tried not to cough. His visit meant a lot to me.
The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your friends, but once you have met them you can’t imagine that you could have gone through life without ever knowing them. Bill and I have been through our own difficult moments in our respective lives, and while I hope I’ve always been there for him, there’s no question that he’s always been there for me. Doubtless I am not the only person who can say this. I think anyone who knows him knows that there is no better nor more generous person, both as a writer and as a friend, than Bill Gibson. His creative intelligence is wicked, but his soul is pure.
A few months after I was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was re-released in our present-day country, on CD. Every young person needs one, Luc Sante said at the time, and I agree; especially everyone who comes from that part of the country where so much of the music was originally recorded, up in the hills and down in the hollers. As soon as I was able I bought Bill a set and sent it off to him, where he tells me he has spent considerable time driving through Vancouver nights, often with his son, listening repeatedly to a soundtrack that might seem (but isn’t) utterly at odds with his or anyone’s landscape today, seventy-odd years after the fact. After he had the opportunity to listen to the discs at length we talked, among much else, about the particular songs that made the deepest impression on us, and the particular artists who contained in their electronically preserved voices those sounds most evocative of what has been lost, and how it is possible to take from them all that can be recovered in order to be—partially, truly—reborn.
I think every writer would wish to evoke in a thousand words what can be evoked in a single line of music. There were a number of textual variants of the song “East Virginia Blues” recorded during the great period of 1927 to 1932. The version on the Anthology is Buell Kazee’s, and it is a good one (although my personal favorite is Clarence Ashley’s). One line of the song, which is often found interpolated into other songs, by other artists, sears into my heart each time I hear it, no matter who the singer might be. Bill has quoted it himself, I believe. It is one of the lines I’d give a million words to have written.
I’d rather be in some dark holler where the sun don’t never shine.
The sensibility that underlay American science fiction for many years was one of purest optimism: an unquestioning faith that no matter how dire things were at any one moment, or how impossible seemed the troubles remaining to be made right, as long as a heaping helping of reason and loads of gung-ho inventiveness were put to good use everything that was not as it should be would be sorted out, and life unimaginably improved. (This sensibility, as we all know, makes up as well the largest part of what still passes as the archetypal American spirit, for better or worse.) Although such blind optimism lingers in that species of science fiction that today enjoys the largest sales, reason has nothing to do with it and gung-ho inventiveness is most often employed to market-test the potential salability of collectible tie-in merchandise. Their critical success notwithstanding, the fact that Bill’s books have enjoyed such commercial success in the face of Star Wars, Star Trek, triple-decker fantasy, and any number of shoot-’em-up video and computer games testifies to their undeniable power. (In the parallel world there may be a Molly action figure, complete with spring-out fingernails, but don’t wait for one to turn up on eBay here.) Plainly his readers recognize, if but subcutaneously, that there’s quite a lot more in a William Gibson book than great characters and a good story.
To be truly ready to confront the future—actual or imagined, societal or personal—and to live reasonably within it once you are ready, an entente cordiale must first be made with the past, and the past is always the more frightening of the two. Traveling from past to future means looking and leaping, stepping blindly into the void, passing through the darkest of hollers. Sometimes the leap needed seems too far, the void too empty, the holler too oddly reassuring in its darkness. But there is no avoiding it: Hope that you’ll emerge on the far side with minimal trauma; have faith, pray, wish as you will, but as science fiction writers know so well, there’s no predicting what will be. Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. That goes for readers as well as writers.
In transversing the passage through his own dark holler, William Gibson learned, as all writers who matter learn, to emit one of quite a different nature—a warning shout, yes, but an exclamation of wonder as well, one that will echo across more landscapes than we can imagine for many years. It seems to me that in these interesting times of ours, in the maelstrom of pomo distractions, not only have attention spans shortened, but so as well have memories. I have no way of knowing what today’s young people will recall, years hence, when they remember the World Before Cyberspace. I am positive, however, that they’ll not forget Bill Gibson.
My colleague, my friend, my brother: In the middle of your great career, I salute you.
Keep reading for an exciting preview of
William Gibson's new novel
THE PERIPHERAL
1.
THE HAPTICS
They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.
Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that
foam, packed down hard in the dark earth. He had the trailer’s lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics off, like the skin was dusted with something dead-fish silver. They said they could get that off too, but he didn’t want to keep going back.
“Hey, Burton,” she called.
“Easy Ice,” he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the door open, the other tugging a new white t-shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.
Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Hefty Mart amber. She’d helped him sweep it out, before he moved in. He hadn’t bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and flexible. You could see stubs of burnt matches down inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette, older than she was. She knew where to find a rusty jeweler’s screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter.
Now he just got his stuff out before he hosed the inside, every week or two, like washing out Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial, how you could peel it all out before you put your American classic up on eBay. Let it take the dirt with it.
Burton took her hand, squeezed, pulling her up and in.
“You going to Davisville?” she asked.
“Leon’s picking me up.”
“Luke 4:5’s protesting there. Shaylene said.”
Neuromancer Page 27
