Queen Victoria's Personal Spook, Psychic Legbreakers,
Snakes and Catfood:
An Interview with William Gibson and Tom Maddox
by Darren Wershler-Henry
(source: _Virus 23_ #0 [Fall 1989], 28-36)
A conversation with William Gibson is kind of like a full-immersion
baptism in all of the weird and disturbing gomi [1] that comprises late
twentieth century culture (Arthur Kroker would call it "excremental" culture,
but then again, he's also capable of calling "the post-Einsteinian individual"
a "hyper-Hobbesian energy pack." Screw that noise). Japanese Nazi geneticists
in white bathrobes and terrycloth tennis hats, Luddite death squads, catfish
farms, high rollers drawing voodoo designs in lines of cocaine, guinea pig-
driven flamethrowers, unlicensed denturists... these are a few of his favorite
things.
Gibson's writing is, on the most basic level, a testament to this
obsession with the bizzarre and the disturbing: he takes these random,
abandoned fragments of our shattered society and fuses them together into a
strange and beautiful mosaic of words. The resulting gestalt, though, is more
just than an artistic curiosity. Out of this odd assortment of cultural
detritus, Gibson creates some genuinely new ideas, and redefines many old
ones. "Scramble and resequence; but, in the process of borrowing symbolic
energy from the past, new simultaneities and odd juxtapositions, like dreams,
emerge" [2]. Take Gibson's most famous creation, cyberspace, as a prime
example. The Media Lab (MIT) and Autodesk (California) are all lathered up
about the possibility of actually building the thing. "Ether, having once
failed as a concept, is in the process of being reinvented. Information is the
ultimate mediational ether" [3]. As much as he is an entertainer, Gibson is
also vitally important as a writer of ideas.
Tom Maddox, a long-time friend of Gibson's, is a professor at Evergreen
State College, an excellent science fiction writer, and an astute critic. In
the short biography of Gibson he wrote for the ConText 89 program, he points
out that the public's reaction to Gibson has often been a mixed one: "[Many SF
writers and readers say] Gibson's work is all 'surface' or 'flash,' 'never
passes from ugly to ennobling.'" In other words, the reasons given by Gibson's
detractors for their (often violent) dislike of his works rarely varies from
typical conservative distaste for Postmodern writing techniques [4]. (On the
other hand, it could be jealousy....) The explanation Maddox provides for this
kind of reaction ia a blunt and simple one: Gibson's writing can be a colossal
mindfuck for those unprepared to deal with the issues it raises.
It's a truism of SF criticism that speculative fiction is more about the
author's lifetime than any hypothetical "future." Reading Neuromancer is like
putting on a pair of the X-ray specs from John Carpenter's They Live, and
seeing the subliminal underbelly of North American capitalist culture. A trip
