Novelist William Gibson may be the greatest fortune teller in the history of speculative fiction. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace,” and in his first novel, “Neuromancer” (1984), he more or less accurately described the World Wide Web well before it existed. In his next five novels, from “Count Zero” (1986) to “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (1999), he specialized in creating imaginary futures complete with vastly advanced technologies that delighted his sci-fi readers. Beginning with “Pattern Recognition” (2003) and continuing with “Spook Country” (2007) and “Zero History” (2010), he turned to setting his stories in the present, with none of the technological bells and whistles except for those we already have.
In his new novel, “The Peripheral,” Gibson has headed back to the future or, rather, futures. It’s the story of Flynne Fisher, a young American woman living in the near future, who makes a virtual journey to a corruption-filled London in the 22nd century in the form of an artificial but mostly organic android drone known as a peripheral. There she meets a celebrity publicist named Wilf Netherton to solve a murder mystery and, in a classic space-time-continuum paradox, prevent a past calamity that will doom his world. And what a world! Though it leaves much to be desired, this dystopian future is also blessed with some seriously cool bells and whistles, including stylized robots called Michikoids, nanotech bugs known as assemblers and outfits called squidsuits.
Printers Row Journal caught up with Gibson, 66, for a phone interview from his home in Vancouver, B.C. (A South Carolina native, Gibson moved to Canada to evade the Vietnam-era draft, although he was never drafted.) Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: About a decade ago, your novels shifted from depicting imaginary futures to a more realistic mode set in the present. Now, in “The Peripheral,” you’ve returned not just to one imagined future but two. What accounts for these shifts?
A: It feels to me more like walking to the other side of the room, rather than making a big change. It’s sort of looking out the other window. I had always assumed when I began writing fiction about imaginary futures that when you do that, you’re really writing about the moment in which you’re writing. You’re not really writing about the future. And when we reread older works about the future, that’s what we see. Those older works become for me the best way to understand what that time was, in which the author was writing.
Q: You’ve gotten it right more than most.
A: Well, maybe. (Laughs.) But all the time, I felt I was actually describing and analyzing the world in which I lived. In my first three books, that was very straightforward. In my second three, I set them in very near imaginary futures which are, for us now, the recent past. And when I got to the end of that sequence, the first six books, it had started to feel as though the world, then, was becoming as alien to me as anything I could imagine, and I didn’t really feel I understood it. Things were changing very quickly. So at that point I thought it would be a good idea to try writing fiction set in some version of the present, using the same tools I had had to develop for my imaginary futures.
With this new book, I wanted to see what happened if I took that understanding and, in a sense, (researched) an imaginary future, which then became two futures. But it doesn’t feel to me like I’m making big swerves back and forth along the genre line, in part because I think the genre line is fading. I think it’s almost impossible for someone today to write a seriously realistic novel that doesn’t have to take into consideration some things that would have been totally science fiction 30 or 40 years ago.
Q: I would think that writing a book like “The Peripheral” would require a different set of imaginative muscles than to write your “realistic” novels. I’m talking about the books’ speculative aspect.
A: Well, there’s definitely a sense in which it’s more work for the writer and, of course, for the reader. I think for the reader, it depends on how much the fiction of imaginary futures is a part of his or her culture. When I wrote “The Peripheral,” I was consciously trying to keep it somewhere between something that would delight a native reader of science fiction, which I am myself, and something that a non-native reader of science fiction could keep up with, and not be too frustrated by.
Ultimately it’s impossible to serve both sides of that particular aisle optimally. But for the further future parts of “The Peripheral,” I abandoned some really cool pieces of imaginary technology simply because to include them would be too distracting for anybody but the top 30 percent of full-on sci-fi fans. So the smartphone technology they have, as weird as it may seem to us, is considerably less weird than the one I originally conceived for it, which was more like telepathy or consensual dreaming. I test-wrote the first chapter using that and thought, nobody but 20-plus friends of mine will even be able to follow what’s going on in what were to me the most technologically interesting passages. So I cranked a lot of it back, to try and keep it somewhere in the middle of a fairly odd road.
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Q: Your hard-core sci-fi fans are going say, “He should have left it in.”
A: Yeah, probably, but I very seldom think of writing for an audience. With “The Peripheral,” I guess I had a sense that I’ve probably acquired another audience with those last three books, and they aren’t the audience I initially had. I like both audiences, although I guess it’s better to think of them as one audience.
It was more like deciding not to be completely self-indulgent about something I had developed that I totally loved, but which wouldn’t really serve the narrative at all. It made me imagine somebody back in 1963 somehow having a completely perfect vision of our smartphone technology today and what we do with it, and writing a novel depicting that. And all I could think was that he wouldn’t have been able to get it published. It would have been too weird and too distracting from the narrative, because people back in the ’60s would have been reading a novel in which all the characters were carrying these little radio-television things in their pockets and communicating with each other on them in a dozen different ways, constantly, all day long. (Laughs.) To realistically, naturalistically depict that in a science-fiction novel, it would just blow your narrative out of the water.
Q: I do wonder, though, how you come up with this stuff. Are you extrapolating from current-day technology and thinking of the logical extension of, say, the smartphone? The haptic technology in “The Peripheral” is maybe that kind of extrapolation.
A: It is, although at the same time, the U.S. military is heavily invested in haptics (the science of sensory feedback). We just don’t know exactly what they’re doing with it. Given the way things go, in the next 30 years, a lot of street technology is going to emerge from the military-industrial complex.
There’s an element of classical science-fiction extrapolation in how I work. How I actually do it, though, is something I don’t fully understand. It happens in some part of myself that I don’t really have that much conscious access to. I watch it happen sometimes, and it’s as though I’m watching constantly for little bits of a presence that might possibly have legs to get into the future. Once I’ve noticed that presence, I continue to wonder, mostly idly, what those legs could be and where the thing might go in the future. I think I always have a lot of that stuff cooking on the back burner, but I don’t actually sit around thinking about it. When I’m writing, the good bits tend to force themselves to the fore.
Q: You used a word a few minutes ago — “cool” — that’s important in this context. That’s one of the reasons we like science fiction: It’s just so darn cool. And maybe that’s another reason for you to have returned to science fiction. Mainstream fiction, while satisfying on many levels, is just not as cool.
A: You know, one of the things that made me write science fiction was my sense that it had actually been cool in the 1960s, but by the late ’70s, it wasn’t nearly cool enough. “Cool” is a bouncy word. (Laughs.) Not only is it in the eye of the beholder, but it can mean a variety of different things.
There’s a great deal of terminally uncool science fiction out there at any given time, and relatively little really cool science fiction, in my opinion. Science fiction is an aspect of what I think of as a modality of art. Genre is about expectations; it’s really a marketing box in our culture. I’m an absolute cultural native of science fiction. I love science fiction deeply, but I’m totally uncomfortable with ideas of genre.
I started writing science fiction because I was uncomfortable with people within the culture of science fiction telling me that the science fiction I liked wasn’t part of the genre. They would give me fits, trying to define the genre. Then when they talked about the “mainstream,” they were talking about everything else. It seemed to me an absolutely crazy way of talking about the possibilities of literature.
One of the things that have delighted me in the course of my own career has been seeing this border dissolve, watching genres intermingle, watching people being able to do what they want. That makes it possible to be a writer like David Mitchell (author of “The Bone Clocks”), who’s as competent and wonderful a science-fiction writer as you can find in the world today. But nobody ever suggests that David Mitchell is a science-fiction writer. He’s writing alternate history and time travel and every conceivable kind of fantasy, and he’s getting nominated for the Man Booker Prize. He’s taken absolutely seriously as a literary writer, and that’s possible because the line down the middle of the highway has somewhat disappeared in my lifetime. I like to think of myself as being part of the project that made that possible.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter: @KevinNance1
“The Peripheral”
By William Gibson, Putnam, 486 pages, $28.95