The Legend: Part 1

There's an unexpected optical illusion when you see the cover of William Gibson's new novel Agency from a distance.

Held in your hands, the book looks normal, but the combination of the sharp text and the blurred face just looks wrong from 40 or 50 feet away - the distance between me and the stage at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Theatre, where Gibson is about to discuss Agency, his latest novel, with Marsha Lederman, the Western Arts Correspondent for The Globe and Mail.

I repeatedly adjust my glasses in an attempt to bring the cover photo into focus, until I finally realize what the problem is and force myself to stop.

To the audience's amusement, Marsha Lederman starts her introduction by saying, "I'm so excited!".  This is a common thread: there's a strong feeling of "we're not worthy" when people talk about William Gibson.* 

She provides us with a brief overview of his life and career, concludes her introduction by saying, "Tonight we are in the presence of a legend," and William Gibson ambles up to the microphone.

As legends go, Bill has aged well. In her intro, Ms. Lederman mentions that he was born in South Carolina in 1948, which seems wrong, somehow - in my mind, William Gibson will always be the tousle-haired alt-rock dissident in Harry Potter glasses who spawned the cyberpunk genre in 1984 with the publication of Neuromancer, his breakout novel.

Nonetheless, there he is at the age of 72: the tousled hair has receded and been cut short, his posture is stooped and his pace a bit slower, but the signature round glasses remain, along with the unique view of the world that makes his writing so distinctive.

Agency, his 14th novel, is the sequel to his 2014 novel The Peripheral, in which Flynne, a woman living in a near-future version of the United States, discovers that rather than working in a virtual environment, she and her brother Burton have been operating remote devices - peripherals - in the future.

The future to which they’ve become connected is a hundred years later than their own, a world in which a series of cataclysmic events ironically referred to as the Jackpot have eliminated 80% of the population.

Agency continues to explore alternate timelines – referred to as stubs - and maintain dual storylines in the near and far future. It's set in an alternate universe (which is aware that there are alternate universes) in which Hillary Clinton won the 2017 election and the United Kingdom voted against Brexit.

Gibson does a brief reading from Agency, mentioning that he was adding them up on his way to the theatre, and that this would be the 15th and final reading from the Agency launch tour, a prospect which he seems to greet with some relief.  He explains that the reading is set in what London has become about a hundred years in the future and that the characters are discussing an alternate "stub" timeline that forks away from their history - which is our future. It occurs to me that this is the most explanation that I've ever received for a Gibson storyline, even while reading one.

In the conversation he reads, one of the characters comments, "They're still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least," which gets an appreciative if slightly nervous laugh from the audience.

After the reading, Gibson joins Lederman at a pair of centre stage seats, and she starts the conversations by asking if Agency is written as a warning.  Gibson considers this, and says no, but explains that when he began writing The Peripheral, he didn't realize how staggering the Jackpot would be, and that it floored him when Wilf, one of the characters from future London, described the full extent of the Jackpot, because he had never seen it all at once.

Lederman questions this: "You make Wilf sound like he's separate from you!"

In response, Gibson explains that before he began writing fiction as an undergrad, he read Aspects of the Novel  - he blanks on the author's name, although he's convinced it will come to him later. 

"It said that a novelist wasn't fully doing their job as long as the characters weren't entirely in control. That impressed me.

When I started to write - try to write - I discovered that the only way I could do it was to get to a point where I was sort of watching the characters doing what they were doing and listening to them saying what they were saying and taking it down, with very little sense of where it's going. That's where that comes from.

"I don't think I could do it in any other way. For one thing, if I knew how it was going to end, I'd be so bored."

Lederman discusses the dichotomy between the technological changes after the Jackpot and the changed, emptied world that it left behind, asking if this reflects his view of technology, "this bifurcated experience that makes life easier but creates destruction?"

"It's become apparent to me since I've been working with sort of material** is that often the most powerful changes driven by new technology are unanticipated consequences as far as the inventors and developers of the technology, and people who embrace it, they have no idea.

I can almost remember the world before completely ubiquitous plastics. In my earliest baby pictures, the toys I'm playing with are for the most part wood and metal.

So I can remember my mother showing me a letter opener that the Fuller Brush Man*** had given her when he’d come to the door. It was shaped like a Fuller Brush man, so it was kind of a ... trippy thing. And she said, 'Look at this, it's made of plastic.' it was really novel, it was this lightweight, slightly flexible, slightly fragile material and that was why he had given it to her, to capture her imagination, because it was plastic.

No one imagined at that point that tiny fragments of the Fuller Brush Man literally would be killing shoals of coral. Even today, like all of that stuff wound up in the ocean.

It took about five years for everything I was playing with to be made out of injection moulded plastic, for the most part, and another five years for them to invent plastic bags. And no one looked at plastic bags and expected the deaths of uncounted species.”

When asked about the problems caused him by the election of Donald Trump, he speaks ruefully regarding the demise of the book that he was originally working on when Trump won the presidency, a book set in California in the near future, where Hillary Clinton is president of the United States.

"It was going slow in part because I was watching the buildup to the US presidential election out of the corner of my eye.

And when Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy my simulation node or whatever it is sort of went "ENNNHHH!"**** But the editor that’s attached to it said, “Forget it, that’s ridiculous. That’s not going to happen.” So I thought, okay, and I went back to work.

But then the UK voted YES on Brexit, and when I saw that I thought ‘Whoa, if the United Kingdom can vote for something that STUPID and that self-destructive, the United States might be able to elect Trump.’ But then I thought, ‘No…’

So when I woke up after November 16th and looked at the laptop where my manuscript was, I thought, ‘Well that's dead.’

So on top of everything else I had to be unhappy with, I was unhappy that my book seemed to have been ruined.”

Trump's election left Gibson with a feeling of "complete unreality."  But this feeling allowed him to immediately take the world he’d been creating and use it as one of the stubs from The Peripheral, and after writing some short pieces to test the idea, found that it worked as a concept and took that as a starting point for Agency.

Lederman comments on how unrealistic the present situation would seem to someone from 2013, and Gibson relates having a luncheon in London during the Agency book tour at which he and a group of fellow writers had “a mutual grumble and sigh of exasperation: what do they expect us to do with this material??”

“It made me realize that part of whatever it is that I do** is I sort of measure what Wilf in the book calls ‘the Fuckedness Quotient’ of the world.

I measure that, then I work out ways to increase it slightly to induce the level of cognitive dissonance that I think would be part of my pleasure in the text that I was writing.

Doing that in this world is incredibly difficult because - okay, I've got it set here, and you wake up the next day, and the FQ is up HERE."

After discussing the influence of current events and internet sources such as Google and Twitter on his work, Lederman  points out that Gibson has "been pretty famously influenced by music, and music has been pretty famously influenced by you."

Apparently Gibson doesn’t feel that Billy Idol’s 1993 Cyberpunk album is the best example of this type of cross-polination, but he acknowledges that Flynne’s half of The Peripheral owes a large debt to a band called Drive By Truckers, which put Gibson back in touch with his small town South Carolina and Virginia origins.

When asked if it’s "kind of a thrill" to have music like Zooropa by U2 or Idoru by Grimes that is in part was inspired by his writing, his response is “It...varies.”

He mentions having a huge cardboard box of cassettes in his basement that he’s been sent over the decades by people who aren't famous: " 'Here, I based this on your work.' That’s kind of more fun in a way than the big guys."

(In an attempt to keep this readable, I've split this posting into two - the second half can be read here.)

- Sid

* I attended a reading by a trio of authors at Toronto's Harbourfront back in the 90s where Nancy Baker, who was reading first, started with with "I realize you're all really here for William Gibson."

** Gibson is oddly reluctant to describe himself as a science fiction writer. His responses are peppered with this sort of euphemism.

*** The Fuller Brush Company used to do door-to-door sales in the United States. This is before my time as well, just for the record.

**** Full disclosure, I struggled with this sound. I illicitly recorded the talk – don’t worry, Vancouver Writer’s Fest, I have no plans to release a William Gibson bootleg album – so I was able to play the sound for my wife Karli. We agreed that it wasn’t indifference, it wasn’t panic, it was more sort of a slightly surprised sound with just a soupçon of distaste. I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not more E’s, N’s or H’s would have better conveyed that intonation.