THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 55
ern Invasion.’” He grimaced. “This is
why the South is still so fucked up—be-
cause this stuff never quit. It never quit!
It’s the formation ...” He trailed off.
“Of our past?” I asked.
“Of our present,” he corrected me.
Gibson was in the process of sorting
through his basement archive, which he
planned to donate to U.B.C. Biggles ac-
companied us down the stairs; beneath
a set of head-height windows, an old
desk and table were covered with neatly
piled manuscripts, some typewritten,
others dot-matrix. Gibson wanted to
show me the manual typewriter on which
he’d composed “Neuromancer”: a 1927
Hermes 2000 that had belonged to Deb-
orah’s stepgrandfather. While he rum-
maged, I inspected the screenplay for
“Alien 3,” which he had written in the
late eighties, during a contract-screen-
writing phase. (In the end, an entirely
different story was used.) A paperweight
on top of it turned out to be a claw—a
memento from the film. Biggles me-
owed, twining around my legs.
“Can’t find it!” Gibson said from be-
hind a pinball machine based on the 1995
film “Johnny Mnemonic,” starring Keanu
Reeves. (The movie had been adapted
from his 1981 short story of the same
name, about a courier who carries sto-
len corporate data on a chip in his head.)
“I’ll have to text Claire.”
Near a rack of compact disks—
Drive-By Truckers; Lucinda Williams;
Dock Boggs; multiple bootlegs of live
performances by the goth band Sisters
of Mercy—a legal pad was covered in
interlinked bubbles charting the plot of
Gibson’s 1996 novel, “Idoru.” (A song
called “Idoru” is featured on the forth-
coming album by the future-pop musi-
cian Grimes.) One bubble read, “Mc-
Guffin in bag.” An orange notebook,
filled with intricate time lines for “The
Peripheral,” was decorated with a sticker
bearing the logo of the niche techwear
brand Outlier—a black swan.
“Ah,” Gibson said tenderly. He leaned
over to open a green wooden cabinet,
containing dozens of mementos: a mar-
moset skull, a smooth rock, a teacup
from Japan. Gingerly, from behind the
skull, he removed a small metal ray gun.
“This gun,” he said. “I had one of these—
the Hubley Atomic Disintegrator—as
a kid. It’s a cap gun absolutely redolent
of sci-fi romanticism!” He’d lost his own,
and, in middle age, obtained this one
on eBay.
“And these guys were very common,”
he went on, taking down a small plas-
tic spaceman: red, wearing an elaborately
earmuffed helmet with an antenna on
top. “These spacemen were dime-store
toys at a time—which I can actually re-
member!—when cheap plastics were still
weirdly novel. Like Gore-Tex or some-
thing. You’d ask, ‘What is it made of ?’”
He looked wistful, then thoughtful. “I’ve
decided that one of the most significant
things I ever saw in my life was the ar-
rival of completely ubiquitous injec-
tion-molded plastics. I was certainly
aware of them as the onset of something
new. They cost practically nothing. But
no one had any idea what a disaster we
were all witnessing. Now the oceans are
full of it.” He handed the spaceman to
me. I hefted it, weightless, in my palm—
an antique bit of misread future.G
ibson finished “Count Zero” and
“Mona Lisa Overdrive,” the se-
quels to “Neuromancer,” in the late eight-
ies. In the nineties, he achieved maxi-
mum fame for a sci-fi writer. It was a
time when virtual reality promised to
make cyberspace, as he’d described it in
“Neuromancer,” real, and he and Deb-
orah were invited to lavish V.R. confer-
ences around the world. He collabo-
rated with sculptors, dance troupes, and
performance artists, and co-wrote, with
Bruce Sterling, “The Difference Engine,”
a novel that popularized the “steam-
punk” aesthetic. Movies borrowed liber-
ally from his fiction. In 1999, four years
after “Johnny Mnemonic,” “The Matrix,”
also starring Reeves, remixed “Neuro-
mancer” to superior effect.
Droll, chilled out, and scarily artic-
ulate, Gibson talked about the future
on television. (“It doesn’t matter how
fast your modem is if you’re being shelled
by ethnic separatists,” he told the BBC.)
He appeared on the cover of Wired, did
some corporate consulting, and met
David Bowie and Debbie Harry. For a
time, U2, which had based its album
“Zooropa” in part on Gibson’s work,
planned to scroll the entirety of “Neu-
romancer” on a screen above the stage
during its Zoo TV tour. The plan never
came to fruition, but Gibson got to know
the band; the Edge showed him how
to telnet. During this period, Gibsonwas often credited with having “pre-
dicted” the Internet. He pointed out
that his noir vision of online life had
little in common with the early Web.
Still, he had captured a feeling—a sense
of post-everything information-driven
transformation—that, by the nineties,
seemed to be everywhere.
As the Internet became more acces-
sible, Gibson discovered that he wasn’t
terribly interested in spending time on-
line himself. He was fascinated, though,
by the people who did. They seemed to
grow hungrier for the Web the more of
it they consumed. It wasn’t just the In-
ternet; his friends seemed to be paying
more attention to media in general.
When new television shows premièred,
they actually cared. One of them showed
him an episode of “Cops,” the pioneer-
ing reality series in which camera crews
sprinted alongside police officers as they
apprehended suspects. Policing, as per-
formance, could be monetized. He could
feel the world’s F.Q. drifting upward.
Instead of fantasizing about virtual
worlds, Gibson inspected the real one.
Storefronts in some Vancouver neigh-
borhoods were strangely empty—the
drawback before the tsunami of global
capital, as though the city itself antici-
pated the future. “Have you been to Van-
couver’s downtown east side?” he asked
me. “It’s one of the poorest per-capita
postal codes in the entire
country, and it is abso-
lutely brutal—well, bru-
tal, Canadian style. Ad-
diction, prostitution, street
crime ...” There were, he
thought, more “interstitial spaces”—
places that had fallen through widening
civic and economic cracks. In Los An-
geles, a friend drove him down a desolate
street to an abandoned-looking build-
ing—Dennis Hopper’s house, she said,
with art worth millions hidden behind
its walls. Gibson thought he detected
an uptick in the number of private se-
curity guards. He registered the increased
presence of bike messengers—a new
punk-athlete precariat—and began read-
ing their zines.
If Gibson’s eighties novels imagined
a fluid, hallucinatory datasphere, his nine-
ties novels—“Virtual Light,” “Idoru,” and
“All Tomorrow’s Parties”—take place in
a world that is itself fluid and hallucina-
tory. They are set in California and Tokyo