54 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
Gibson has a collagist’s mind. He has
depicted himself as “burrowing from
surface to previously unconnected sur-
face.” His language connects contem-
porary jargon, with its tactical-techno-
logical inflections, to modern states of
anxiety and desire. (His chapter titles
include “Death Cookie,” “Ordinary Sad-
Ass Humanness,” “Tango Hotel Sol-
dier Shit.”) The novels register the vir-
tual world’s micro-expressions—the way,
when we’re still half asleep, the first Web
site of the day opens as “familiar as a
friend’s living room”—and attend to the
built environments we take for granted,
made from Styrofoam, cardboard, glass,
silicon, wood, paper, leather, stone, rub-
ber, and plastic, each subtype of mate-
rial possessing its own distinctive look,
feel, smell, weight, and history. In “Pat-
tern Recognition,” an American mar-
vels at the collage that is England:
Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are
huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current
that only powers electric chairs, in America.
Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; tele-
phone handsets have a different weight, a differ-
ent balance.
The difference, she thinks, has to do
with Britain’s past as an industrial na-
tion: “They made all their own stuff....
All their bits and pieces were different.”
Only an outsider would notice the mean-
ing in the bits.
In his late twenties, Gibson earned
an English degree at the University of
British Columbia. He took a class taught
by the feminist sci-fi pioneer Susan
Wood; she suggested that, instead of
writing an analytical paper, he might
turn in a story of his own. (At her urg-
ing, he sold the story, “Fragments of a
Hologram Rose,” to a small magazine.)
He began writing science fiction in ear-
nest only when Graeme was on the way,
and it seemed to him that his career
had to start, or else. Deborah was in
grad school, so he took care of the baby,
writing “Neuromancer” while Graeme
napped. He learned to work iteratively.
He still rereads his manuscripts from
the beginning each day—an increasing
burden, as each book goes on—strip-
ping away what’s superfluous and squir-
relling new ideas into the gaps. (Hav-
ing shown a technology used properly
in one scene, he might show someone
misusing it in another.) His plots are
Tetris-like, their components snapping
together at the last possible momentuntil the space of the novel is filled.
Often, at the center of the story, there’s
a Gibson-like figure—an orphaned col-
lagist of actual or digital bits. In “Count
Zero,” the sequel to “Neuromancer,” an
out-of-work curator is hired to track
down an anonymous artist who is cre-
ating a series of boxes in the style of Jo-
seph Cornell. She discovers that the art-
ist is an artificially intelligent computer
built by an unimaginably rich family.
The family’s multinational mega-cor-
poration has collapsed, and its space-
based villa has fallen into disrepair. The
A.I. has chopped the house into parts,
and constructs the boxes by pulling frag-
ments—“a yellowing kid glove”; “rect-
angular segments of perf board”; “an or-
nate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half,
from end to end”—out of the floating
cloud that the family’s life has become.
The romance of the abandoned child,
of the orphan on the edge of everything,
can give Gibson’s novels a sad sweet-
ness. But his collages contain ugly ma-
terials, too. In his library, Gibson un-
folded himself from his chair, retrieving
a copy of “The Lost Cause,” which he
had salvaged from Wytheville.
“In our house, there were these ob-
jects that no one ever said anything to
me about,” he said. “I just found them
myself, and reverse-engineered what
they meant. These were being sold from
the very beginning of Reconstruction,
and within them—actually, there’s an-
other one....” He bent low, and picked
up a smaller volume, blowing dust from
its binding.
“This is the most evil object in the
house,” he said. “It’s just, like, unspeak-
able!” He handed it to me. The book
was “The Old Plantation: How We
Lived in Great House and Cabin Be-
fore the War,” by James Battle Avirett.
“Check out the inscription,” he said.
It was dedicated to “the old planter and
his wife—the only real slaves on the old
plantation.”
Gibson settled on a hard-backed chair,
adjusting the cuffs of his perfectly repro-
duced mid-century chambray workshirt.
“It’s just the foulest revisionist text,” he
said. “It was given to my grandmother
when, I think, she was sixteen years old,
signed by the author. She took me aside,
on one or two ritual occasions, to try to
indoctrinate me into the crucial, central
significance of the ‘War of the North-“Sometimes all you want is a mediocre place to eat something you could
have made better yourself if you weren’t so lazy.”