52 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
and resonant his novels became. They
seemed to reveal a world within the
world: the real present. The approach
was risky; it put him at the mercy of
events. In 2001, Gibson rushed to incor-
porate the September 11th attacks into
his half-completed eighth novel, “Pat-
tern Recognition,” a story about global-
ization, filmmaking, Internet forums,
brand strategy, and informational del-
uge. Terrorism turned out to fit
neatly within this framework;
“Pattern Recognition” is often
described as the first post-9/11
novel. The risks could pay off.
Two years ago, in December
of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask
if he’d consent to being profiled,
since his new novel was to be
published that spring. He replied, ex-
plaining that the election of Donald
Trump had forced him to delay the book.
“I’ve had to get an extension,” he wrote.
Extrapolating from current events, he
had already written into his novel “a nu-
clear crisis involving Syria, Russia, NATO,
and Turkey”:
But then Trump started fucking with N
Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be?
He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle
it in rewrite. And if there’s a nuclear war, at
least I won’t have to turn in the manuscript! ...
Crazy times,
Bill
In March, 2018, I e-mailed Gibson again,
but he had delayed the book a second
time. “Cambridge Analytica now re-
quires a huge rethink, major revisions,”
he wrote. “This is very comical in a way,
but still a huge problem.”
Earlier this year, we finally met,
in Vancouver, to talk about the novel,
“Agency,” which comes out next month.
Gibson is now seventy-one. Bald and
skinny, six feet five but for a slight stoop,
he dresses almost exclusively in a mix-
ture of futuristic techwear and mid-twen-
tieth-century American clothing pains-
takingly reproduced by companies in
Japan. It was late on a gray afternoon;
we sat at the bar of a cozy bistro—warm
wood, zinc bar, brass fixtures—while
Gibson, in his slow, quiet, wowed-out,
distantly Southern drawl, described the
work of keeping up with the present.
“With each set of three books, I’ve
commenced with a sort of deep read-
ing of the fuckedness quotient of the
day,” he explained. “I then have to ad-
just my fiction in relation to how fucked
and how far out the present actually is.”
He squinted through his glasses at the
ceiling. “It isn’t an intellectual process,
and it’s not prescient—it’s about what
I can bring myself to believe.”
“Agency” is a sequel to Gibson’s
previous novel, “The Peripheral,” from
2014, which is currently being adapted
into a television show for Amazon,
executive-produced by the cre-
ators of “Westworld.” In writ-
ing “The Peripheral,” he’d been
able to bring himself to believe
in the reality of an ongoing
slow-motion apocalypse called
“the jackpot.” A character de-
scribes the jackpot as “multi-
causal”—“more a climate than
an event.” The world eases into it grad-
ually, as all the bad things we worry
about—rising oceans, crop failures,
drug-resistant diseases, resource wars,
and so on—happen, here and there, to
varying degrees, over the better part of
the twenty-first century, adding up to
“androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seri-
ously bad shit” that eventually kills eighty
per cent of the human race. It’s a Gib-
sonian apocalypse: the end of the world
is already here; it’s just not very evenly
distributed. One character reacts to the
jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing
and scared the fuck out of me or sort
of how I’d always figured things are?”
“I had real trouble coming to that,”
Gibson said. “I couldn’t really think
about it. I just had to get to the point
where I could write it really quickly.
Afterward, I looked at it and was just
... It was the first time I’d admitted it
to myself.”
After “The Peripheral,” he wasn’t
expecting to have to revise the world’s
F.Q. “Then I saw Trump coming down
that escalator to announce his candi-
dacy,” he said. “All of my scenario mod-
ules went ‘beep-beep-beep—super-
fucked, super-fucked,’ like that. I told
myself, Nah, it can’t happen. But then,
when Britain voted yes on the Brexit
referendum, I thought, Holy shit—
if that could happen in the U.K., the
U.S. could elect Trump. Then it hap-
pened, and I was basically paralyzed in
the composition of the book. I wouldn’t
call it writer’s block—that’s, like, a nat-
urally occurring thing. This was some-
thing else.”Gibson has a bemused, gentle, curi-
ous vibe. He is not a dystopian writer;
he aims to see change in a flat, even
light. “Every so often—and I bet a lot
of people do this but don’t mention it—I
have an experience unique in my life, of
going, ‘This is so bad—could this pos-
sibly be real?’” he said, laughing. “Be-
cause it really looks very dire. If we were
merely looking at the possible collapse
of democracy in the United States of
America—that’s pretty fucked. But if
we’re looking at the collapse of democ-
racy in the United States of America
within the context of our failure to do
anything that means shit about global
warming over the next decade ... I don’t
know.” Perched, eagle-like, on his bar-
stool, he swept his hand across the bar.
“I’m, like, off the edge of the table.”P
hotographs of Gibson have tended
to find him in dark rooms, sur-
rounded by wires and gizmos—a seer
in his cyber cave. In fact, he has spent
his writing life in a series of increasingly
pretty houses on the arboreal streets of
suburban Vancouver. The rambling, sun-
lit home where he and Deborah live
now, in the city’s Shaughnessy neigh-
borhood, dates from the early twentieth
century; its many windows open onto
radiant greenery. His quarter million
Twitter followers are accustomed to
photographs of Biggles, the couple’s ex-
traordinarily large cat, lounging in the
library, where Gibson does most of his
writing. A photograph on the living-
room mantelpiece shows the Gibsons’
son, Graeme, in aviators and a military
jacket; nearby, a drawing of their daugh-
ter, Claire, hangs on the wall. Wander-
ing around the first floor, I could find
only one futuristic object: a small glass-
and-aluminum cylinder, lit from within
by warm L.E.D.s. This abstract oil lamp
turned out to be a wireless speaker, given
to Gibson by Jun Rekimoto, Sony’s ver-
sion of Jony Ive.
Gibson had a distinctly American
upbringing. Born in 1948, he told me
that his earliest memories are of a farm-
house in Tennessee. The family lived
there while his construction-manager
father, William Ford Gibson, Jr.—Gib-
son is William Ford Gibson III—helped
to oversee the building of workers’ hous-
ing at the Oak Ridge National Labo-
ratory. Later, they occupied the red-brick