[tt] Through the Looking Glass

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/05/AR2007090502582_pf.html

Through the Looking Glass The Post-9/11 Era Has Caught Up With William
Gibson's Vision

By Joel Garreau 
Washington Post Staff Writer 
Thursday, September 6, 2007; C01

Southwest Washington is an antique vision of the future. It's mid-century's
idea of "progress," a never-to-be-repeated experiment in bulldozing shabby if
genuine neighborhoods and replacing them with chilly high-rise modernity. To
this day it struggles to present much sense of life or soul.

It is weird finding William Gibson here, even given his acute sense of irony.

He gazes at his Mandarin Oriental hotel surroundings off Maryland Avenue. "It
looks like one of those low-resolution, decaying-fractal hotels you'd find in
Second Life," Gibson muses as he walks around the broad, empty meeting-room
corridors, thinking of that Internet virtual world where residents interact
through animated selves. "You keep waiting for somebody to scoot out of one
of those doors and shoot you like in a video game."

Back when it was a more meaningful phrase, Gibson achieved renown for writing
"science fiction." He famously invented the word "cyberspace" in his 1984
novel "Neuromancer," which has sold more than 6 1/2 million copies. This was
before virtually anyone -- including him -- knew that something called the
Internet was being born. He is also credited with inventing the idea of the
"matrix," as well as foreseeing some of the twistiest aspects of
globalization.

He was in Washington recently, however, because he has morphed. Gibson is
still producing literate and thought-provoking novels featuring the kind of
gritty, anonymous warehouses where the future is sometimes fledged. But
recently his novels have transcended categories. His new book is even set in
the recent past. He now appeals to sufficiently diverse readers -- including
women not generally attracted to his original genre -- that right out of the
shipping cartons, "Spook Country" leapt to No. 6 on Publishers Weekly's
national hardcover fiction bestseller list.

"Ah, well, honor your mistakes," he says of the hotel. The nearby
attractions, he has been told, amount to one Starbucks. Unless you count the
blasts of diesel horn from the adjacent trench of weed-lined railroad tracks
that trundle black tank cars full of chemicals into a tunnel near the
Capitol, giving chills to terrorism aficionados.

This post-9/11 frisson fits, as it happens. "Despite a full complement of
thieves, pushers and pirates," the Washington Post book review says, " 'Spook
Country' is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise
reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best
work of Don DeLillo. . . . With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial
comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its
governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as
one character puts it, 'grown-ups ran things.' "

"Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness," Gibson
acknowledges. "I can work with this," he says, thinking of recent turns of
events. "I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That's
what makes it work. It's interesting. I'd like to see it get less
interesting. But I don't know that it necessarily will." Stranger Than
Fiction

As uncannily as Gibson has sometimes foreseen the future, there are other
times when the events of the real world outstrip anything he could conjure
up. In 1998, for example, when Viagra was brand-new and he was presented with
a sample, he examined it carefully and responded incisively, "It does what ?"

Behind the hotel courtyard lunch table, a Marine helicopter roars low over
the Potomac. Thoughts turn to the future of Washington. Could Gibson have
predicted that in 2007, two leading candidates for the presidency would be a
white woman and a black man?

That's the problem with his game, he says. "If I had gone to Ace Books in
1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease
that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the
world -- particularly badly in Africa -- they might have said, 'Not bad. A
little toasty. That's kind of interesting.'

"But I'd say -- ' But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and
everything else we've been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has
thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic
results.' And they'd say, 'You've already got this thing you call AIDS. Let's
not --'

"And I'd say, ' But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have
hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.' Not only
would they not go for it, they probably would have called security." Richness
in the Details

Ask his peers for help getting at the ways Gibson has grown, and they e-mail
questions to put to him. Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine,
suggests, "Does the future matter anymore?"

Gibson is the man who, after all, in the late '80s observed, "The future is
already here; it's just not evenly distributed."

He arranges glasses and cutlery on the restaurant table to describe how our
lives have changed.

"When I wrote 'Neuromancer' " almost 25 years ago, he says, "cyberspace was
there, and we were here. In 2007, what we no longer bother to call cyberspace
is here, and those increasingly rare moments of nonconnectivity are there.
And that's the difference. There's no scarlet-tinged dawn on which we rise
and look out the window and go, 'Oh my God, it's all cyberspace now.' "

That, nonetheless, is the sort of recent past examined in "Spook Country."

It's plenty strange. His spring of 2006 involves a female main character who
was once the lead singer of a rock band and is now reporting for a start-up
magazine called Node, which may or may not ever publish a first issue. There
are also a Cuban-Chinese New Yorker whose family business is crime-enabling,
a mysterious old man who may or may not have once been important in American
intelligence, and a recluse who has turned an advanced form of global
positioning into a radical new art form with sinister applications. Many
other characters run the gut-tightening gamut of the clever and the damned.

Gibson puts a premium on making his details rich. He's always wanted his
world to be "naturalistic -- where people used toilets. And dry cleaners. And
things got rusty and things broke." He recently caught up with the HBO series
"Deadwood," which, among its many achievements, once portrayed possibly the
most convincing case of kidney stone suffering ever captured on film. Gibson
thinks it's the greatest television America has ever produced. "This is like
what I wanted to do" in his work, he says, "but they were doing it with
westerns."

He used to hang out in West Coast junk shops, cool-hunting. Not so much now.
"Is eBay a much scarier thing than a pawnshop?" asks Bruce Sterling in an
e-mail. Sterling is credited with co-founding with Gibson the "cyberpunk"
movement, which turned away from white men in shiny rocket ships toward much
more recognizable, if dystopian, worlds full of high-tech and lowlife. He
adds, "I want you to ask him about the fact that he's got Google open" all
the time now as he types.

"Bruce was the only guy I ever knew who was watching MTV with the sound off
while listening to his own soundtrack while he was typing," Gibson says. "So
I don't know why having a little Google open is that big a deal."

EBay as Curator

Having said that, Gibson says: "One of the biggest technologically driven
changes in my writing is the awareness that every text today has a kind of
spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it." It is "all of the Googled
information that found its way into the book but which isn't available to the
reader as a literal hypertext unless you're willing to be the animator of the
hypertext process" and Google each term that's distinctive and new.

"It's curious. When I published 'Pattern Recognition' " -- his previous book,
which was also set in the recent past and achieved mainstream success --
"within a few months there was someone who started a Web site. People were
compiling Googled references to every term and every place eing numbered --
eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful
function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is
sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever
existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

"Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I've been able to see on eBay.
The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made 'eek eek' noise until
that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out
that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I
saw his box, which I'd long forgotten. I didn't have to buy Froggy, but I
saved the jpegs. So I've got Froggy in my computer.

"This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class
connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn't used to be
possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little
kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world's premier
info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a
city. It no longer does." The Book as Magic

Gibson is less than seven months away from turning 60. At one level, he's
become a paragon of bourgeois respectability, having lived in Vancouver for
35 years, which is also as long as he's been married. His two kids are 30 and
24. He is lean and still shows up in denim shirts and khaki jeans and black
sneakers. Is our new world one in which you can be a cool-hunter and an edgy
world-inventor and a best-selling hipster forever?

"I saw an older gentleman walking down the street in San Francisco last
week," Gibson says, "and he was like majorly Bluetoothed and rigged for very
high connectivity and I thought, that's what we're all going to look like.
The geezer of the future will have more plugs and jacks -- will be more into
that, probably, than younger people -- because he'll need it."

In addition to the books for which he is best known, Gibson has worked on
films and television and theater and dance and art and poetry and music. "Ask
him abouday I go out to the biggest bookstores that have ever existed and are
doing the most business daily of any bookstores in history.

"It's the oldest and the first mass medium. And it's the one that requires
the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural
training. But it's still the same thing -- I make black marks on a white
surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets
them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It's magic. It's a magical thing. It's
very old magic, but it's very thorough. The book is very well worked out,
somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out."

Near the end of his 1986 novel "Count Zero," Gibson presents a vision of a
creature orbited by an endless swirl of novel stuff -- "A yellowing kid
glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an
armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black
fountain pen, rectangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green
snake of a silk cravat . . . Endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things."
This creature reaches out with dozens of arms and manipulators selecting
items, shaping them and snipping them, transforming them into intricate and
beautiful little works of art.

It is in part a homage to the collagist Joseph Cornell, an early artistic
hero of Gibson's. But this is also his vision of himself. This is who he is,
what he does, when he now describes our futures past.

In the same scene, a character "looked up in time to see a glittering arm
snag the floating sleeve of her Brussels jacket. Her purse, half a meter
behind it and tumbling gracefully, went next, hooked by a manipulator tipped
with an optic sensor and a simple claw.

"The new box came tumbling out of the shifting flitter of arms. She caught it
easily. The interior, behind the rectangle of glass, was smoothly lined with
the sections of leather cut from her jacket. . . . The crumpled wrapper from
a packet of Gauloise was mounted against black leather at the back, and
beside it a black-striped gray matchbook from a brasserie in Napoleon Court."

"I am honored," she says.

"I sing with these things that float around me," says the creature.

Gibson, of course, would call his little box of magic -- the function of
which is to raise eyebrows, and questions -- a book.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.