Author William Gibson in Toronto on Jan. 12, 2012.
"Scollard Street!" William Gibson huffs the syllables indignantly.
The celebrated author is scheduled to appear at the Toronto Central Reference Library before a sold-out audience later in the evening and visions of the neighbourhood where he spent the Summer of Love assail his memory.
It was here, in the vanished Village of Yorkville, where the future author lived for a time "in various wonderful sorts of sin," after leaving small-town Virginia where he had been raised. He has revealed mixed feelings about those heady days, but at the time he was enamoured of the scene enough to give the CBC a tour for the 1967 doc Toronto's Yorkville: hippie haven. All that is gone now.
"It's as though they tore down St. Mark's Place and built the Trump Tower," he grumbles. "My Bohemia is gone. I can't even go there and watch kids inhabiting the set."
He didn't stay too long in Toronto, fleeing for the easier of climate of Vancouver decades ago. Gibson became an international sensation with his first novel Neuromancer, in which he outlined a strange future world existing in a state he called "cyberspace" – uncannily like the world we inhabit almost 30 years later – and went on to win every major science-fiction award while contributing to making the genre respectable in literary circles.
The audience assembling where the hippie-filled rooming houses once stood has come to hear Gibson discuss his first-ever collection of non-fiction, Distrust that Particular Flavor, which brings together 25 articles, talks and essays written between the age of Neuromancer and now.
As a "practising ectomorph" and a writer who was not only inspired by William Burroughs, but once seemed to be collapsing into a postmodern version of the old wreck himself, Gibson, now in his sixties, is walking a little taller, for which he credits Pilates.
The collection was a long time coming, and Gibson begins the volume by prominently declaring what he calls "my lack of non-fiction credentials."
"I think my real lack of credentials has to do with my inherent inability not to hallucinate fantastically on the material I'm presented with," he explains. "That's really the basis of what I do."
Each piece is accompanied by its date of publication so readers have the sensation of watching the future unfold before it happens, from a pioneering visit to the end of the Internet – "a site that contains ... everything we have lost" – to a totalitarian vision glimpsed 20 years ago in Singapore, "a coherent city of information" where "information does not necessarily want to be free." Along the way, in pieces like Dead Man Sings and Googling the Cyborg, he expresses a fantastically expansive world view so concisely as to risk making all 10 of his novels redundant.
By way of personal information, Gibson writes of how he became addicted to buying and selling old watches on eBay, a form of "voluntary autism" from which he claims to suffer no longer. Even as he sports a rather impressive hunk of metal on his wrist – built, he says, from a collection of unused vintage Rolex parts put together in ways Rolex never intended. The object is painted matte black and joined to what Gibson calls his "pipe-stem" wrist with a nylon band.
"If I showed it to someone from Rolex they'd probably have me arrested," he says.
Claiming to be neither a technophobe nor a technophile, Gibson says he aims for "anthropological neutrality" in observing society coming to terms with emergent technology. Of course he is also a participant in this culture. "The big lesson of Anthropology 101 is that you can never know your own culture because you are it," he adds, mooting the basic paradox that animates his thinking.
In the 21st century, he says, "technology has come to life, booted itself up and it's doing its own thing." Nobody really knows where it is taking us, the famous futurist insists, pointing out that 19th-century inventor Karl Benz never stepped back from his primitive internal combustion engine to wonder what it might one day do to the global climate.
"So what you have in effect is this incredibly powerful driver of history that's absolutely random," Gibson says.
The "unutterable weirdness" of the present, he suggests, lies in its capacity for total recall –- beginning with the astounding fact of recorded music and extending to the outermost ends of the Internet, which never forgets. "That's the much bigger deal for us as a species than the fact that some of us may or may not wind up with chips in our heads," Gibson says.
"Time moves in one direction, memory in another," he writes in Dead Man Sings, first published in 1998. "We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting."
He predicts that history itself will become a new form of "speculative fiction" as the past both overwhelms us and in doing so disappears.
"The end point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration," he writes, "an infinite digital Now."
In that world, the Village of Yorkville lives forever.