model house of a Levittown-style sub-
urban development in North Carolina.
“And then we moved to a place near
Virginia Beach, and while we lived there
my father died,” Gibson said. “On a
business trip, from a choking incident,
pre-Heimlich maneuver. Like, if some-
one had known to squeeze him the right
way, he might have survived.” He paused.
“I think I was seven.”
Gibson and his mother, Otey, retreated
to Wytheville, Virginia, the small Appa-
lachian town where his parents had grown
up, settling in a house that had been in
his mother’s family for generations. “Be-
fore, I was watching TV in a suburb,”
Gibson said. “I could see out the window
that it was the modern world. And then
I went to this place which, from many
angles, looked like the early nineteen-
hundreds.” In Wytheville, people remi-
nisced about the days before recorded
music; men plowed fields with mules.
The mid-twentieth century leaked in,
like light through the blinds. “I’m con-
vinced that it was this experience of feel-
ing abruptly exiled, to what seemed like
the past, that began my relationship with
science fiction,” Gibson has written.
Fatherless and quiet, Gibson was often
alone. One day, he crawled through the
window of an abandoned house and
found a calendar from the Second World
War. Each month had a picture of a
different fighter plane—a sleek machine,
yellowed by time. Meanwhile, from the
wire rack at the Greyhound bus station,
he bought science-fiction novels by H.
G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Ray Brad-
bury, and others. He noticed that their
stories also supposed the existence of
histories—real ones that were being re-
considered (the myths of empire and the
American West), or prospective ones that
seemed unlikely to come true (world
government, the brotherhood of man).
In Wytheville, people owned books like
“The Lost Cause,” an encyclopedic ac-
count of the Civil War, published in 1866,
which depicted slavery as benign. “I be-
came someone who disassembles the
past in which I find myself, in order to
orient myself, or perhaps in order to re-
lieve anxiety,” Gibson told me.
His mother was literary and progres-
sive; she helped establish a library in
Wytheville. But she grew worried as
Gibson developed what he’s called a
“Lovecraftian persona”—“introverted,
hyper-bookish.” With his consent, she
enrolled him in an all-boys boarding
school in Arizona. Gibson, “extracted
grub-like and blinking” from his bed-
room, arrived when he was fifteen, got
a girlfriend, and read the Beats. In the
fall of his sophomore year, when he was
seventeen, his mother died.
“Probably a stroke,” he said. “I’m not
sure. She fell down dead walking some-
where—in those days, if an older person
died, no one did an autopsy.” On the
flight home, Gibson struggled to think
about what had happened. As a child,
after his father’s death, he had feared—
irrationally, he thought—that his mother
might die, too. Now she had. Years later,
he would come to see himself as “dou-
bly traumatized.” In the moment, he took
refuge in an odd thought: at least she’d
be spared the discomfort of watching
him try to become an artist.
His mother’s estate provided him
with a vanishingly small stipend. Instead
of finishing high school, he took a bus
to Toronto; he slept outdoors for a night
and then found a job at a head shop,
where he could sleep on the floor. Gib-
son is reluctant to talk much about those
years—“I wasn’t a tightly wrapped pack-age at that time,” he has said—but a 1967
CBC documentary features him, intro-
duced as “Bill, a real hippie,” strolling
through the city’s version of Haight-
Ashbury. (He was paid five hundred dol-
lars to serve as a quasi-anthropological
tour guide: “The hippie society centers
largely around this curious word ‘love,’”
he explains in the program.) In his early
twenties, in Washington, D.C., he earned
his high-school diploma. He kept the
Vietnam draft board apprised of his
whereabouts but was never called up.
Instead, he perused the ruins of the six-
ties, reading Pynchon and Borges, going
to punk shows. Back in Toronto, he en-
rolled in art school and met Deborah, a
former fashion model; they moved to
Vancouver, her home town. For a while,
he made ends meet as a vintage picker,
buying undervalued objects—antique
toys, Art Deco lamps, chrome ashtrays—
from thrift shops and reselling them to
dealers. Writing of the future in his third
novel, “Mona Lisa Overdrive” (1988), he
might have been describing this period:
“The world hadn’t ever had so many
moving parts or so few labels.”
Some speculative writers are archi-
tects: they build orderly worlds. But