50 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
PROFILES
MIRROR WORLD
How William Gibson makes his science fiction real.
BYJOSHUAROTHMAN
S
uppose you’ve been asked to write
a science-fiction story. You might
start by contemplating the future.
You could research anticipated devel-
opments in science, technology, and so-
ciety and ask how they will play out.
Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging
population: an elderly couple live far
from their daughter and grandchildren;
one day, the pair knock on her door as
robots. They’ve uploaded their minds
to a cloud-based data bank and can now
visit telepresently, forever. A philosoph-
ical question arises: What is a family
when it never ends? A story flowers
where prospective trends meet.
This method is quite common in sci-
ence fiction. It’s not the one employed
by William Gibson, the writer who, for
four decades, has imagined the near fu-
ture more convincingly than anyone
else. Gibson doesn’t have a name for his
method; he knows only that it isn’t about
prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a
deep engagement with the present. When
Gibson was starting to write, in the late
nineteen-seventies, he watched kids play-
ing games in video arcades and noticed
how they ducked and twisted, as though
they were on the other side of the screen.
The Sony Walkman had just been in-
troduced, so he bought one; he lived in
Vancouver, and when he explored the
city at night, listening to Joy Division,
he felt as though the music were being
transmitted directly into his brain, where
it could merge with his perceptions of
skyscrapers and slums. His wife, Debo-
rah, was a graduate student in linguis-
tics who taught E.S.L. He listened to
her young Japanese students talk about
Vancouver as though it were a backwa-
ter; Tokyo must really be something, he
thought. He remembered a weeping am-
bulance driver in a bar, saying, “She flat-
lined.” On a legal pad, Gibson tried in-
venting words to describe the space
behind the screen; he crossed out “info-
space” and “dataspace” before coming up
with “cyberspace.” He didn’t know what
it might be, but it sounded cool, like
something a person might explore even
though it was dangerous.
Gibson first used the word “cyber-
space” in 1981, in a short story called
“Burning Chrome.” He worked out the
idea more fully in his first novel, “Neu-
romancer,” published in 1984, when he
was thirty-six. Set in the mid-twenty-
first century, “Neuromancer” follows a
heist that unfolds partly in physical space
and partly in “the matrix”—an online
realm. “The matrix has its roots in prim-
itive arcade games,” the novel explains,
“in early graphics programs and mili-
tary experimentation with cranial jacks.”
By “jacking in” to the matrix, a “console
cowboy” can use his “deck” to enter a
new world:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination ex-
perienced daily by billions of legitimate oper-
ators, in every nation.... A graphic represen-
tation of data abstracted from the banks of
every computer in the human system. Unthink-
able complexity. Lines of light ranged in the
nonspace of the mind, clusters and constella-
tions of data. Like city lights, receding.
Gibson was far from the first sci-fi
writer to explore computers and their
consequences; a movement, soon to be
known as cyberpunk, was already under
way. But “Neuromancer” changed sci-
ence fiction by imagining a computer-
saturated world that felt materially and
aesthetically real. Gibson’s hardboiled
prose was fanatically attentive to design
and texture. A hacker’s loft contains a
Braun coffeemaker, an Ono-Sendai cy-
berspace deck, and “the abstract white
forms of the foam packing units, with
crumpled plastic film and hundreds of
tiny foam beads.” A spaceship is “walled
in imitation ebony veneer and floored
with gray tiles”—a Mercedes crossed
with a “rich man’s private spa.” Gibson’s
future seemed already to have aged: the
counterfeit young are “marked by a cer-
tain telltale corrugation at the knuck-
les, something the surgeons were un-
able to erase.” The science-fiction writer
Samuel R. Delany marvelled at the nov-
el’s “wonderful, almost hypnotic, surface
hardness.” Describing a hacker about to
deploy a virus, Gibson invented his own
language, toughened with use: “He slot-
ted some ice, connected the construct,
and jacked in.”
Most science fiction takes place in a
world in which “the future” has defini-
tively arrived; the locomotive filmed by
the Lumière brothers has finally burst
through the screen. But in “Neuroman-
cer” there was only a continuous ar-
rival—an ongoing, alarming present.
“Things aren’t different. Things are
things,” an A.I. reports, after achieving
a new level of consciousness. “You can’t
let the little pricks generation-gap you,”
one protagonist tells another, after an
unnerving encounter with a teen-ager.
In its uncertain sense of temporality—
are we living in the future, or not?—“Neu-
romancer” was science fiction for the
modern age. The novel’s influence has
increased with time, establishing Gib-
son as an authority on the world to come.
The ten novels that Gibson has writ-
ten since have slid steadily closer to the
present. In the nineties, he wrote a tril-
ogy set in the two-thousands. The nov-
els he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010
were set in the year before their publi-
cation. (Only the inevitable delays of
the publishing process prevented them
from taking place in the years when they
were written.) Many works of literary
fiction claim to be set in the present day.
In fact, they take place in the recent past,
conjuring a world that feels real because
it’s familiar, and therefore out of date.
Gibson’s strategy of extreme present-
ness reflects his belief that the current
moment is itself science-fictional. “The
future is already here,” he has said. “It’s
just not very evenly distributed.”
The further Gibson developed his
present-tense sci-fi, the more mysterious
