William Gibson is sitting, cross-legged, in the middle of the road, just off Vancouver's busy South Granville Street. An elderly lady shuffles slowly by and gives him a look as if – at his age – he should know better. To be fair to the 59-year-old author, he probably does: He's just doing what The Globe and Mail's enthusiastic photographer tells him, while stealing surreptitious glances over his shoulder to check for advancing vehicles. He may be compliant, but comfortable he certainly is not.
Being forced to deal with his physical image is an increasingly common phenomenon – and not something he has completely come to terms with. “Because of things like YouTube and Second Life, there is all this video of me circling around – that I never look at,” he explains with a slight shudder.
It's funny to hear the man credited with inventing the term “cyberspace” so rattled by its current craze. But then, of course, he is a writer, more used to being the observer than the observed. Tall, thin and slightly stooped, it's not until he starts to speak that Gibson becomes animated, his apparently endless arms stretching out to make a point. Despite having lived most of his life in British Columbia, there's no missing his Appalachian childhood in the soft twang of his speech.
Over coffee in a tiny Vietnamese café, Gibson is discussing Spook Country, his latest novel. In it, he weaves a tale of virtual “locative” art, international spy rings and an former indie rock star into a compelling screen-grab of the constantly shifting socio-political realities of the world.
Though he is best known for his futuristic works, Spook Country, like his last book, Pattern Recognition, is set in the recent past – in this case, 2006.
His reasons for leaving science fiction behind are many. For a start, there's his much-quoted bon mot: “The future is already here – it's just unevenly distributed.” I ask him if perhaps it's because there isn't a future to see and he shrugs: “I don't find it at all imaginable.”
Still, he says, it's fun to be able to write about the 21st century without having to make it up. “Here we are,” he smiles. “And how much stranger it is than anyone imagined it to be.”
Though he does have his own blog (williamgibsonbooks.com) and a noted propensity to Google, somewhat surprisingly he regards the Net as “simply a welcome distraction from creating elaborate narratives that might convince a reader to turn the page.”
Some argue that his first novel, Neuromancer, imagined the World Wide Web itself, but he insists that no one “envisioned the Internet until it happened.” On the other hand, the new economy of the high-net-worth individual (a crucial facet of Spook Country) is something he believes he did predict in the earlier work.
Back then, he used Mexico City as a template – a city where there were only the very rich and the very poor, a place where the middle class had been excised.
“Now, Manhattan is in the preserve of the very wealthy and the looming version of London with no one inside the M25 except the super-rich may not be too far-fetched.” He pauses, then adds: “Vancouver is the same: Strathcona was a bargain for what? Two weeks?”
Vancouver makes its William Gibson debut in Spook Country, something that gave the author a few sleepless nights. “I had real anxiety about it,” he admits. “But when I got the characters all here, I realized I had three quite different and foreign viewpoints that each opened up a side of the city I hadn't really seen before. It turned out to be a lot of fun.”
As we part, he's back on the road again, finishing up the final leg of a three-part book tour. He has already covered Britain and the United States and now he's deep into his Canadian tour (the book spent much of August and September on The Globe bestseller list). The act of discussing his work so intimately is spurring him forward: “Having to talk about my latest book so frequently and at length drives me to begin thinking about other stories.
“I'm at that stage now,” he says. “What can I write about next?”
Special to The Globe and Mail
