108 Time February 3, 20207 Questions‘
IF ONE WANTS
TO ESCAPE
THE PRESENT,
ONE GOES FOR
THE GALACTIC
EMPIRE
600 YEARS
FROM NOW
’
seeing the Internet and VR. Is there
anything you’ve gotten wrong? I can
imagine a bright 12-year-old picking up
[1984’s] Neuromancer and thinking it’s
a book about something happening to
all the cell phones because I didn’t pre-
dict them. Sometimes I’ve been right
and wrong at the same time. I could
not imagine the complete collapse of
the Soviet Union, so I wrote it as sort
of non–fully capitalist economic back-
water. If I had simply called it Russia,
I’d have been right on the dot.If you had to leave science fiction
and try another genre entirely, what
would it be? I would try something that
isn’t identifiable as genre fiction, but
you get into practical considerations
like packaging. I get a guilty feeling be-
cause I think if I were someone running
into an airport bookstore and buying
[2010’s] Zero History, thinking it’s going
to be a thriller. Then suddenly I’m read-
ing this extended meditation on the in-
fluence of military- garment design on
street wear. I’d be pretty disappointed.Is there a book of yours you would
rewrite? When I was finishing [1999’s]
All Tomorrow’s Parties, I had a lot going
on in my life, and I could have done
more with the final moment and the
emergence of the singularity. In effect,
I said “and it happens.” I would have
taken a two-month break and done a
final pass on the last 30 pages.Agency includes an intelligent digital
assistant named Eunice. Do you en-
vision a world partly populated by
Eunices? I’m not positive; even peo-
ple who know a lot about AI are di-
vided. It’s been posited that what we
think of as sentient AI is more likely
to be a heavily modified human con-
sciousness in a living human body
who has all of the capacities of the
system and is no longer human.
All of my Eunice-like characters
are really a longing for a better
Siri or Alexa. —Jeffrey KlugerI
n the same way Hunter
S. Thompson and Pablo Picasso
gave us gonzo journalism and
Cubism, you’ve been credited with
creating cyber punk and inventing the
term cyber space. How do you plead?
I remember early in my career looking
at a yellow legal on which I wrote down
info space and dataspace, and they just
looked woefully unsexy. Then I wrote
cyber space and it just rolled off the
tongue. Since then I’ve discovered that
a Scandinavian artist previously used it
in an abstract painting. Cyber punk is not
my coinage. I was with a group of sci-fi
writers and someone called us that, and
I said, “Don’t buy this.” We were already
marginalized as sci-fi writers. Cyber-
punk would marginalize us further.Much of your work takes place in
the near future, though in your new
book, Agency, you look a full century
ahead. Is there a certain plausibil-
ity and accountability in not moving
too far ahead in time? If one wants to
escape the present, one goes for the ga-
lactic empire 600 years from now, but
I’m not interested in that. And even if
one writes about 600 years from now,
in 100 years, people will still see it as
something written in 2020 because it
will bear all those attitudes.Nine of your books are trilogies. Have
you gone into them with that in
mind, or did you begin the first
of each as a stand-alone book?
I absolutely intended the first
ones to be stand-alone, and I
have never been able to stick
to that. Agency is more con-
ventionally a sequel [to 2014’s
The Peripheral] because I’ve
gone back to the same charac-
ters. In past sequels, I’ve dealt
with other characters having
different experiences in the
same world.You’re credited with a sort
of clairvoyance for fore-William Gibson The sci-fi novelist on inventing
the term cyberspace, the surprising way AI could
be truly intelligent and the ending he regrets