56 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
in the two-thousands. The Big One has
rendered San Francisco’s Bay Bridge un-
usable, and the government of Northern
California—the state has split in two—
can’t afford to fix it. Squatters, home-
less after a pre-earthquake housing cri-
sis, have used high- and low-tech
materials—tarps, plywood, aircraft
cable—to turn its decks and towers
into a cool suspended shantytown.
Media saturation has cloaked even
the recent past in a haze; TV news
programs practice “counter-inves-
tigative journalism,” reporting on
the newsrooms to which they are
ideologically opposed. Culture is global-
ized and high-def. Virtual celebrities are
replacing real ones, and patrons in a bar
called Cognitive Dissidents dance to the
evangelical Islamic band Chrome Koran.
Fashion is retrofitted: Chevette, a bike
messenger, wears a vintage horsehide mo-
torcycle jacket with bar codes affixed to
its lapels. A woman’s scalp tattoo com-
bines Celtic crosses with cartoon light-
ning bolts. A teen-ager puts his feet up,
revealing “little red lights around the edges
of his sneakers ... spelling out the lyrics
to some song.”
Futurists he knew had begun talking
about “the Singularity”—the moment
when humanity is transformed com-
pletely by technology. Gibson didn’t buy
it; he aimed to represent a “half-assed
Singularity”—a world transforming dra-
matically but haphazardly. “It doesn’t
feel to me that it’s in our nature to do
anything perfectly,” he said. He wrote
improvisationally, without knowing how
his novels would end. (In “All Tomor-
row’s Parties,” an assassin who bears a
striking physical resemblance to Gibson
is guided in his actions by the Tao.) His
fiction was an “artifact,” he told an in-
terviewer, akin to tombstone rubbings—
the tombstone, in this case, being our
present. The trilogy culminates, obscurely,
with the introduction of consumer nano-
technology through a chain of conve-
nience stores. No one knows what to
make of it; an atmosphere of WTF pre-
vails. At one of these stores, a kid buys
“this Jap candy that’s like a little drug
lab”: “You mix these different parts, it
fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do this extru-
sion-molding thing and watch it harden.”
It tastes just O.K., but it’s fun. Mean-
while, in a room on the Bay Bridge—at
the top of the east tower, above the fog—
Chevette reads old issues of National
Geographic and marvels at the size of the
old countries, long since broken up.
When Gibson published his first
short story in Omni, in 1981, the writer
Robert Sheckley took him to lunch and
gave him two pieces of advice:
never sign a multi-book contract
and don’t buy an old house. Gib-
son ignored the latter suggestion;
on my second morning in Van-
couver, a rainstorm descended,
and he texted to say that he
needed to check his attic for leaks,
inviting my assistance. (“I have a
fear of doing it alone,” he texted, lest
“the ladder fall over.”)
“It’s coming down hard,” Gibson said,
when I arrived. “Luckily, I’ve got the
perfect jacket for you.” In writing “Vir-
tual Light” and its sequels, he’d learned
to harness his obsessions, among them
garments and their semiotic histories.
In the hall, he relieved me of my mis-
judged chore coat, and handed me a
recent reproduction of Eddie Bauer’s
1936 Skyliner down jacket: a forerunner
of the down-filled B-9 flight suit, worn
by aviators during the Second World
War. Boxy and beige, its diamond-
quilted nylon was rigid enough to stand
up on its own. When I put it on, it made
me about four inches wider. Gibson
shrugged into a darkly futuristic tech-
ninja shell by Acronym, the Berlin-based
atelier, constructed from some liquidly
matte material.
“You have to dress for the job,” he said.
We ventured into the verdant back
yard, retrieving an eight-foot ladder from
the garage. Carefully, we carried the lad-
der through the house and up a wind-
ing, skylit central staircase. Gibson’s
height allowed him to casually open the
attic door. I watched his rose-colored
Chucks disappear into the hole. When
I ascended, I found him lit by a small
window, balancing gracefully on the
joists, carrying a bucket heavy with water.
“Thank you very much,” he said,
handing it to me.
As it happened, a closet in a room off
the hallway contained Gibson’s Acro-
nym collection. (He is friends with the
co-founder and designer of Acronym,
Errolson Hugh, and was briefly involved,
as a consultant, in the creation of Arc’teryx
Veilance, a futuristic, or perhaps merely
presentist, outerwear line that Hughhelped design.) As a longtime Acronym
lurker—I don’t own any, but would like
to—I was curious to see the jackets, which
enable excessive, even fantastic levels of
functionality. “This is something Errol-
son calls the ‘escape zip,’” Gibson said,
indicating an unusual zipper along the
jacket’s shoulder, and demonstrating how
it could be used to enact an instanta-
neous, overhanded dejacketing. Another
coat, long and indefinably gray-green,
was seductively sinister—the most cy-
berpunk object I’d seen in Gibson’s home.
“This is this weird membrane that Gore-
Tex makes,” he said, rubbing the fab-
ric—leather-like on one side, synthetic
on the other—between his fingers. “Er-
rolson gave it to me when they hadn’t
named it yet. I was trying to come up
with a name....”
“This is what I imagine the scary hit
man wearing, in ‘All Tomorrow’s Par-
ties,’” I said.
“Oh, the scary hit man, yeah!” Gib-
son said. “I’m delighted to have this
jacket, but it’s hard to wear it. It’s al-
most too effective. It absorbs too much
light.” He enjoys wearing the future, but
fears full cosplay.
Satisfied, Gibson returned the jacket
to the closet. Biggles watched from the
landing as we carried the ladder and the
bucket down the stairs. Techno-fabric
and a leaky roof: the real future.W
as Gibson afraid of what the fu-
ture held? Like anyone, he lived
in the present, awaiting tomorrow. By
the end of the nineties, he’d taken up
Pilates and given up smoking. Claire
lived nearby; so did Graeme, who has
autism, and a savant-like ability to play
hundreds of musical instruments. Gib-
son and Deborah had helped him build
a secure life. (Gibson drops by every day,
and often shares Graeme’s birding pho-
tographs on Twitter.)
He had reason to be concerned about
a rising F.Q. But he managed to keep
that concern contained within his writ-
ing life. “Bill’s always been able to shut
the door in his head,” Jack Womack,
one of Gibson’s oldest friends, said.
Womack is also a Southerner—he’s from
Lexington, Kentucky—and a science-
fiction writer. For decades, Gibson has
sent his drafts to Womack, who’s based
in New York, every few days—at first
by fax, and in later years by e-mail. “I’ve