I was forced to look at a lot of old and very good movies. I never wanted to write for films, but I think it affected the way I saw things. I did teaching assistant work for film history courses for three years, which is something that really affected me. Tatsumi: So you didn’t attend any creative writing programs? I had the leisure to take it seriously, but it left me with a terrible theoretical burden. I went to the university in my mid-twenties, in ’74 or ’75, as a way to avoid having a job. But I hadn’t really had a formal education until I was way past the age where most people in North America would be going to college. Bruce Sterling made the distinction between himself and you by referring to the difference between his major in journalism and your major in English. Tatsumi: Tell me a little bit about your education at the University of British Columbia. To me it’s just a place I dream about, not the place I choose to live. But in my imagination, the West Coast isn’t very big. Except in Count Zero, the girl in the first chapter lives somewhere in California, so it’s the first time that you realize that there actually is a California. There doesn’t seem to be any California in the books I’ve written. I think that the place you remember from the early teens is the place that you come to believe in, in some odd sense. This is the place that I remember from my early teens. Living where I do, I might as well be living in England or France. Gibson: North America has a lot of regional consciousness that I think people don’t recognize. Tatsumi: Why don’t you tell me about your feelings toward the place where you grew up? Gibson: Yeah, but I haven’t been here for a long time, so it’s a sort of mythical country for me, rather than a real place. Tatsumi: So you are actually very familiar with some of the District. In a way, that’s a vision of a 1969 Washington. I lived near Dupont Circle, where they go to get the subway.
I lived in the Washington area ten years ago. Partly because I have just finished reading your second novel, Count Zero, in Chapter 27 of which you describe Turner and Angela taking the subway from Washington to New York City. Takayuki Tatsumi: I am impressed by seeing you here, in Washington, DC, even though you live in Vancouver. Reprinted with permission of Takayuki Tatsumi. A version of the interview also appeared in Hayakawa’s SFM October 1986. Read moreĮye to Eye: An Interview with William Gibson Takayuki Tatsumi / 1986įrom Science Fiction Eye 1.1 (Winter 1987): 6–17, 23. The conversations also provide overviews of his novels, short fiction, and nonfiction. 1948) takes on branding and fashion, celebrity culture, social networking, the post-9/11 world, future uses of technology, and the isolation and alienation engendered by new ways of solving old problems. Myriad topics include Gibson's childhood in the American South and his early adulthood in Canada, with travel in Europe his chafing against the traditional SF mold, the origins of "cyberspace," and the unintended consequences (for both the author and society) of changing the way we think about technology the writing process and the reader's role in a new kind of fiction. Smith draws the twenty-three interviews in this collection from a variety of media and sources-print and online journals and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs, and podcasts. Gibson's 1984 debut is one of the most celebrated SF novels of the last half century, and in a career spanning more than three decades, the American Canadian science fiction writer and reluctant futurist responsible for introducing "cyberspace" into the lexicon has published nine other novels.Įditor Patrick A. "After reading Neuromancer for the first time," literary scholar Larry McCaffery wrote, "I knew I had seen the future of (and maybe of literature in general), and its name was William Gibson." McCaffery was right.