William Gibson

Gary Westfahl

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095085
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The leading figure in the development of cyberpunk, William Gibson (born in 1948) crafted works in which isolated humans explored near-future worlds of ubiquitous and intrusive computer technology and cybernetics. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of the award-winning author of the seminal novel Neuromancer (and the other books in the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive ), as well as other acclaimed novels including recent bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. Renowned scholar Gary Westfahl draws upon extensive research to provide a compelling account of Gibson's writing career and his lasting influence in the science fiction world. Delving into numerous science fiction fanzines that the young Gibson contributed to and edited, Westfahl delivers new information about his childhood and adolescence. He describes for the first time more than eighty virtually unknown Gibson publications from his early years, including articles, reviews, poems, cartoons, letters, and a collaborative story. The book also documents the poems, articles, and introductions that Gibson has written for various books, and its discussions are enriched by illuminating comments from various print and online interviews. The works that made Gibson famous are also featured, as Westfahl performs extended analyses of Gibson's ten novels and nineteen short stories. Lastly, the book presents a new interview with Gibson in which the author discusses his correspondence with author Fritz Leiber, his relationship with the late scholar Susan Wood, his attitudes toward critics, his overall impact on the field of science fiction, and his recently completed screenplay and forthcoming novel.

CHAPTER 1

JOURNEY TO THE FUTURE

A Biographical Sketch

William Gibson has never expressed an interest in writing an autobiography; as he reported while introducing Distrust That Particular Flavor, “The idea of direct, unfiltered autobiography made me even more uncomfortable” than a journal (5). But in another sense, Gibson has spent much of his life sporadically writing an autobiography that dribbles out in bits and pieces within articles, reviews, introductions, interviews, and even works of fiction. An energetic editor, then, might compile a Gibson autobiography from those fragments, just as a Beatles autobiography, The Beatles Anthology (2000), was compiled from old and recent interviews.

The editor crafting such a project would start with Gibson’s autobiographical sketch, “Since 1948,” first posted to his blog on November 6, 2002. There, he relates the generally familiar story of how he was born in South Carolina and, as a child, frequently moved with his parents because of his father’s various jobs. In 1987, he told A. P. McQuiddy that his father “made a fair bit of money supplying flush toilets to the Oak Ridge Project” while his family “lived briefly in Chattanooga, and Charlotte, and other places” (3). But his life was disrupted at a young age by his father’s accidental death by choking; though Gibson said he was six years old at the time in “Since 1948,” he told McQuiddy that he was eight (3), and in the documentary No Maps for These Territories, he said that his father died in “1956,” seemingly confirming that he had been eight years old. After his father’s death, his mother settled with her son in Wytheville, a small Virginia town.

In these early years, the major influence on his life was television, which he repeatedly mentions when discussing his childhood: in “Since 1948,” he describes these times as “a world of early television” (21–22); in 2007, he told Mary Ann Gwinn about “the day my father brought our first television set home”; in 1985, he reported watching “Tom Corbett and Captain Video on black-and-white tv” (Nicholas and Hanna 18), and he noted in a 2003 interview that he “watched Tom Corbett, Space Cadet every night” (“Crossing Boundaries” 7); in a 2005 article, he discussed watching the 1940 serial The Mysterious Dr. Satan on television (“Googling the Cyborg” 245); he remembered in a 1975 review watching outdated documentaries on television (“In the Airflow Futuropolis” 1); he told Noel Murray in 2007 about watching “Sputnik and Twilight Zone on television”; and he explained in a 2004 introduction to Neuromancer that he based its memorable opening on specific memories of a 1950s black-and-white television (vii). But as he observed in a 2012 article, the young Gibson also felt the impact of science fiction—but “[n]ot of prose fiction, or of film, but of the cultural and industrial semiotics of the American nineteen-fifties” as observed in his father’s car, toys, and Chesley Bonestell’s illustrations (“Olds Rocket 88, 1950” 104). Talking to Matthew Mallon in 2003, he termed such items “science fiction iconography, or folk futurism” (27).

Soon, the young Gibson discovered science fiction literature, which then became his passion: in “Since 1948,” he attributes his “relationship with science fiction” to “this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past” in Wytheville (22), a place where, as he told David Wallace-Wells in 2011, “I wasn’t a very happy kid,” and his perpetually depressed mother undoubtedly did little to lighten his mood. (He was also left-handed, which may have contributed to his sense of alienation, though he reports in the interview below that his mother ensured that he was not forced to write with his right hand, then a common practice.) In those confining circumstances, science fiction was “like discovering an abundant, perpetually replenished, and freely available source of mental oxygen. [. . .] [Y]ou saw things differently, in extraordinary company” (“Olds Rocket 88, 1950” 104). It all began around 1960, when, as noted in a January 19, 2009, blog entry, he “found a moldering stack of 1950s Galaxy” magazines. These obviously made a powerful impression, since over thirty years later, in a 1987 article, he vividly recalled the cover of the June 1951 issue: Ed Emshwiller’s “wonderful painting of spacesuited, dinosaurian aliens excavating Earth, exposing cliffside strata that clearly illustrated mankind’s progress from club-swinging savage to radioactive slime” (“Alfred Bester, SF and Me” 28). In the same 2009 blog entry, Gibson posted a photograph of the “Greyhound Restaurant and Bus Station” in Wytheville where he happily “discovered that science fiction magazines were still being published” in 1961.

At this time, in the words of “Since 1948,” Gibson “became exactly the sort of introverted, hyper-bookish boy you’ll find in the biographies of most American science fiction writers, obsessively filling shelves with paperbacks and digest-sized magazines, dreaming of one day becoming a writer myself” (22). Among other signs of his devotion to the genre, he reported in a January 13, 2003, blog entry that “when I was twelve or so,” he became “a proud new member of the Science Fiction Book Club,” which provided him with Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). We know that his voracious reading included other major science fiction writers of the 1950s like Alfred Bester, Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon, all mentioned in “Alfred Bester, SF and Me” (28). Young Gibson may have even delved into science fiction criticism, since a 1998 introduction references Kingsley Amis’s 1960 survey of the genre, New Maps of Hell (“The Absolute at Large” 9–10), and he notes in the interview below that he “read a lot about sf.” A 2010 introduction further indicates that Gibson’s reading habits included more juvenile genre-related material, like Mad magazine and Forrest J. Ackerman’s “gloriously cheesy” Famous Monsters of Filmland (“Sui Generis: A Testimony” 7). Still, Gibson did not exclusively read science fiction, since his 1989 introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and The Poison Belt reports that he was “given a two-volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes” when he “was twelve,” becoming “immersed in the cozy, miraculously seamless universe of Holmes and Dr. Watson” ([vii]).

However, his perception of science fiction began changing in 1962, which Gibson usually attributes to his chance discovery of William S. Burroughs and, through him, other Beat Generation writers, who opened his eyes to new possibilities in science fiction. As he told Tom Nissley in 2007, “I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets a year later.” This second group of writers loomed larger in his imagination after 1962, for when he assembled an “Imaginary Anthology of Imaginative Fiction” in a 1975 article (discussed below), he exclusively included works by Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Terry Southern, and similar writers, ignoring the genre writers he previously read and collected.

Accompanying this new enthusiasm for Burroughs and other writers was a sense of disillusionment with traditional science fiction; as he said in a 1991 interview for Creem magazine, “Even as a teenager reading science fiction, I think I was distinctly distrustful of that techno-euphoric mythology of the engineer in a lot of mainstream American science fiction. I can remember having these inchoate, almost political doubts about Robert Heinlein when I was maybe 15 or 16 years old.” But he offered a different perspective in “Time Machine Cuba,” where he describes the fears of a nuclear holocaust he and other children experienced during the 1950s (he was particularly affected by a 1960 Playhouse 90 adaptation of Pat Frank’s post-holocaust novel Alas, Babylon [1959]). Yet when the world did not end after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Gibson began to “distrust that particular flavor of italics” in the doomsday warnings of the “terminally exasperated futurist” H. G. Wells and others and “may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently, as my initial passion for it began to decline, around that time” (“Time Machine Cuba” 207, 208). Thus, even without discovering Burroughs, Gibson might have drifted away from science fiction, searching for different sorts of stories.

While Gibson suggests that he essentially abandoned science fiction at this time to focus on Burroughs and similar writers, he actually remained committed to the genre, for in 1963, while a sophomore in high school, he plunged enthusiastically into the world of science fiction fandom, as documented in several ways. One fan history reports that “Bill Gibson” attended two small science fiction conventions in Alabama in 1963 and 1964 (Lynch, “Preliminary Outline for a Proposed Fan History Book of the 1960s”); another notes that he joined a fanzine organization, the Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA) (Montgomery, “1997 Southern Fandom Confederation Handbook & History, Part II”); and Gibson published two cartoons in the October/November 1963 issue of a fanzine, Fanac. Most interestingly, in 1963 and 1964 he published five fanzines of his own—one issue of Votishal, three issues of Wormfarm, and one issue of Srith—a significantly overlooked source of information about this period of his life.

One revelation from this material is that Gibson remained enthusiastic about Fritz Leiber, and while one might imagine that he preferred Leiber’s anarchic, proto-cyberpunk stories like “Coming Attraction” (1950) and “The Beat Cluster” (1961), he actually loved his sword-and-sorcery fantasies featuring Faf hrd and the Gray Mouser: one Fanac cartoon featured a hotel clerk telling someone, “We Don’t Have a Mr. Faf hrd Registered Here”; the titles of Votishal and Srith are taken from the series (where characters refer to priests of Votishal and the Scrolls of Srith); he called Votishal a “genzine [general-interest fanzine] for fen [plural of fan] who like a little s.f. and fanac with their sword and sorcery” (1); in Srith, he described himself as a “Mouser fan” (1); and as reported in the interview below, he corresponded with Leiber, receiving postcard replies, one of which he published in Votishal as “Mouser Mythos.” In Srith, Gibson also brags about owning an “a*u*t*o*g*r*a*p*h*e*d (A fanfare and a round of applause, please) copy of the original Arkham House edition of [Leiber’s] ‘Night’s Black Agents’” (1), which included two Faf hrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Gibson scholars must ponder the possibility that the dark alleyways and furious action filling his fiction could reflect the lingering influence of Leiber’s colorful adventures. Young Gibson also says that he owns “a collection of original drawings,” “a letter from R[obert] E. Howard to Farnsworth Wright,” and “an autographed copy of ‘The Hobbit’” (2), indicating that he was a dedicated collector of science fiction memorabilia, though he reports in the interview below that this material “was all lost, one way or another, after my mother’s death.”

Gibson was also writing science fiction poetry: he published three poems in Wormfarm’s first issue and told readers that the fanzine “may well turn out to be the SFPA poetryzine” (“The Screaming Crud” 3). Interestingly, the longest poem, “A Tale of the Badger Folk,” obviously imitates an author and book never before mentioned in connection with Gibson—Clifford D. Simak’s City (1952)—since it involves intelligent badgers of the far future telling stories about a possibly mythical “race of strange creatures” called the “Children of Men,” or “Robots,” who in turn spoke of vanished creators who had “bent time into strange loops, and flown to the stars” (4). (While Gibson says in the interview below that he does not recall reading Simak, he surely encountered the author in the pages of the Galaxy magazines he read, which published twenty-four Simak stories and three serialized novels between 1950 and 1964—though the stories in City appeared in other magazines.) The other two poems, “Observations on a Nightfear” and “The Last God,” seem like homages to H. P. Lovecraft and confirm that, as noted in his article “Lovecraft & Me” (1981), he was then a devoted Lovecraft reader.

The fanzines provide other valuable data for biographers. In the untitled editorial comments beginning Wormfarm No. 1, Gibson offers this charming self-portrait:

I should introduce myself, I suppose. You see, I’ve been in fandom for about a year now, but I have a talent for keeping my name out of fanzines, mailing lists, and con reports. “Yes, I have the power to cloud men’s minds.”

It is safe to say that Bill Gibson is years old, has worked as a, and his interests in fandom are.

If you wish to be a little more specific, you can add that he is a sophomore in high school, 6'3" tall, and this is his third fan publication. Outside of fandom, my interests include such diverse things as paleontology, girls, folksongs, girls, poetry, and girls. (1)

In the third issue, Gibson shifted from poetry to nonfiction to publish two articles offering snapshots of his teenage life: “A Short History of Coke Bottom Fandom” describes a conversation with friends involving the fact that Coca-Cola bottles of the era identified the city where they were manufactured, creating the possibility of enthusiasts transforming rare bottles from certain cities into valuable collector’s items; and “Ohm Brew” provides a presumably exaggerated account of how Gibson was forced by friends to sample some homemade beer, an incident that probably occurred at the first DeepSouthCon, since the article mentions three fans—Dave Hulan, Rick Norwood, and Dick Ambrose—who attended that event with Gibson (Montgomery, “1997 Southern Fandom Collection Handbook”). As something for a scholar near Wytheville to pursue, Gibson also claims in the issue’s editorial, “Grunt and Groan: Happy Gibson Comments,” to have a “newly acquired job as cartoonist for one of the local papers,” and he communicates why he left Wytheville in 1964 by announcing, “One of the most remarkable things about George Wythe High School, a veritable antheap of intellectuality sans any trace of creativity or creative insight, is the fact that I am no longer a student there. Further plans are pending, but I do plan to continue my education next year. Elsewhere, if at all possible” (1). Clearly, Gibson was not happy at his high school, so he urged his mother, as he told Edward Zuckerman in 1991, to find him a school “as far away as possible from Virginia.”

Due to his subsequent transfer to the Southern Arizona School for Boys, Gibson lost touch with science fiction fandom and stopped publishing fanzines, but this might have happened anyway, as he pursued typical adolescent interests: he had already announced his burgeoning interest in “girls,” and in “Lovecraft & Me,” he described his transition away from science fiction: “[M]y Lovecraft period extended from about age fourteen until sixteen, when I started to satisfy my curiosity about hillocks and mounts” (real women, in lieu of Lovecraft’s sexually charged imagery); so “Lovecraft wandered up into the lumber-room of early adolescence and stayed there” (22). With science fiction now “put aside with other childish things” (“Since 1948” 23), Gibson also discovered the pleasures of smoking marijuana, and when caught, he was unceremoniously kicked out of his school—something he casually mentioned to McQuiddy in 1987 but discreetly omitted from “Since 1948.” (Also not willing to reveal this incident to People magazine in 1991, Gibson told Zuckerman that the expulsion was due, in Zuckerman’s words, to his habit of “sneaking off to coffeehouses and folk-music clubs” [106].) This occurred after another significant event in his life, his mother’s sudden death in 1966—which may be why he was smoking marijuana.

Returning to Wytheville, Gibson first lived with his mother’s relatives. As he explained to David Wallace-Wells in 2011, he “didn’t get along” with them, so his “mother’s best friend and her husband finally took me in.” From one bit of information, we deduce that he then returned to reading science fiction, because he reported in his 2007 introduction to Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths that he “initially discovered Borges in one of the more liberal anthologies of science fiction, which included his story ‘The Circular Ruins’” (“An Invitation” 107). The first science fiction anthology featuring the story was Judith Merril’s 11th Annual Collection of the Year’s Best S-F, published in 1966 when Gibson was eighteen, so Gibson undoubtedly read this book in 1966 or 1967. Further, he recalls reading the story while sitting in “a room dominated by large pieces of dark furniture belonging to my mother’s family,” suggesting that he was living with relatives at the time (107).

A turning point came in 1967, when he appeared before the local draft board; after hearing Gibson announce that his “one ambition in life was to take every mind-altering substance” (No Maps for These Territories), the officials, either appalled or bemused by this bold young man, took no immediate action, and Gibson quickly moved to Toronto to avoid being drafted. There, as he said in “Since 1948,” he “joined up with rest of the Children’s Crusade of the day” (23), briefly working in a head shop and appearing in a 1967 documentary, Yorkville: Hippie Haven, as a purported representative of local “hippies.” While Gibson told John Barber in 2012 that he engaged “in various wonderful sorts of sin” in Toronto, suggesting a pleasurable sojourn, he disliked the company of draft dodgers—“Too much clinical depression, too much suicide, too much hard-core substance abuse” (No Maps for These Territories)—and soon moved away. He briefly lived in Washington, D.C., where he found himself in the middle of riots—he specified in 1982 that it was the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations on November 15, 1969 (“On the Surface,” Wing Window No. 4, p. 8)—an event that Gibson compared to Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren in a 1975 review and his 1996 introduction to the book. He also attended Woodstock, though he described the experience to Curt Holman in 2010 as “extraordinarily uncomfortable. I left early and thought, ‘That was like going to a Civil War battle.’” Around this time, Gibson encountered R. Crumb’s Zap Comix, and he confirmed to Adam Greenfield in 1988 that he was a “fan” of “underground comics in the ’60s” (119).

How much the turbulent events of Gibson’s first two decades affected his life remains debatable. Certainly, his protagonists are consistently drifters and loners without strong family ties who recall Gibson’s early life more than the placid domesticity of his adulthood; he said in a 2010 interview, “I seem to write about nomadic characters who travel light” (“Prophet of the Real”). But Gibson does not necessarily hearken back to these times because he is h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Journey to the Future: A Biographical Sketch
• Chapter 2: A Dangerous Amateur: Contributions to Science Fiction Fanzines
• Chapter 3: Finding His Own Uses for Things: The Short Fiction
• Chapter 4: Legends of the Sprawl: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive
• Chapter 5: Different Engines: The Difference Engine, Screenplays, Poetry, Song Lyrics, and Nonfiction
• Chapter 6: A Bridge to the Present: Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties
• Chapter 7: All Today’s Parties: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History
• Conclusion
• An Interview with William Gibson
• A William Gibson Bibliography
• Bibliography of Secondary Sources
• Index