"I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes. I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic.”
"After
reading Neuromancer for the first time," literary scholar
Larry McCaffery wrote, "I knew I had seen the future of [science fiction]
(and maybe of literature in general), and its name was William Gibson."
McCaffery was right. Gibson's 1984 debut is one of the most celebrated SF
novels of the last half century, and in a career spanning more than three
decades, the American Canadian science fiction writer and reluctant futurist
responsible for introducing "cyberspace" into the lexicon has
published nine other novels.
In Conversations with William Gibson editor Patrick A. Smith has assembled 23 interviews drawn from a variety of media and sources—print and online journals
and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs and podcasts. Myriad topics
include Gibson's childhood in the American South and his early adulthood in
Canada, with travel in Europe; his chafing against the traditional SF mold, the
origins of "cyberspace," and the unintended consequences (for both
the author and society) of changing the way we think about technology; the
writing process and the reader's role in a new kind of fiction.
Gibson also takes on branding and fashion, celebrity culture, social networking, the
post-9/11 world, future uses of technology, and the isolation and alienation
engendered by new ways of solving old problems. The conversations also provide
overviews of his novels, short fiction, and nonfiction.
Readers
come to Gibson’s work with an expectant, almost religious fervor. His fiction
mirrors the cacophony of light, energy, and uncertainty inherent in technological
progress. Perhaps the most influential chronicler in fiction of technology and
its possibilities (as well as its discontents) working today, he draws on
influences as wide-ranging as Beat literature and the Counterculture, Golden
Age and New Wave science fiction, punk rock, and film to examine a future that,
Gibson reminds us, is already now.
Conversations with William Gibson is now available from UPM.
. . .
Patrick A. Smith is
professor of English at Bainbridge State College in Bainbridge, Georgia. His
previous books and edited collections include "The true bones of my
life": Essays on the Fiction of Jim Harrison; Tim O'Brien: A Critical
Companion; and Conversations with Tim O'Brien (published by University Press of
Mississippi), among others.
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