William Gibson webchat – as it happened

http://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/nov/21/william-gibson-webchat-post-your-questions-now

Version 0 of 1.

12.39pm GMT12:39

That's all for today!

Thanks very much to everyone who asked questions and very special thanks to William for his fascinating answers. Cheers!

12.38pm GMT12:38

Paul Hill asks:

What would you say to someone starting to write a book/thinking about starting?

I would actually quote Robert Heinlein. His invariable advice to writers is that in order to become a writer you must write, you must complete that which you have written, you must submit it for publication and while waiting its acceptance or rejection, you must commence writing something else. It's rinse/repeat. And he said if you're unwilling to do that, it's very unlikely to happen. And I agree with him. You can work out whether you're cut out to be a writer simply by starting something, and attempting to finish it.

12.37pm GMT12:37

leicestersq asks:

I read Neuromancer quite a few years ago now. I like the idea that technology could become self aware, and bored like us with the ability to experience and deal with change.

Do you believe that the Singularity will come, and if so, will it bring a wonder of new challenges for us, or will it destroy us as humans? Will it be not so much a change for humans, but more of a change for the Universe itself?

Well, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of making fun of the Singularity. And I'm continuing to do that. One of the futures in the Peripheral I think is my best take so far on a half-assed Singularity, an imperfect Singularity. The very idea is that is will be perfect and absolute and unimaginable, and thus unlike anything humans have done before. I suppose that might be but my imagination naturally runs to what it would be like to be only partial, very imperfect, and unevenly distributed.

12.36pm GMT12:36

JonnyForeigner asks:

What else would you have done had you not become a science-fiction writer?

Probably I would have worked in a second hand bookshop.

12.35pm GMT12:35

benignhumour asks:

You’ve stated previously that you believe that scientific discovery is the main agent of change in society. But do you think that technology will be able to adapt to the kind of world that global warming creates?

I don't think that's knowable. And the unknowability is the nature of the problem.

12.33pm GMT12:33

Seamus O’Riordan asks:

I really loved that image you used to describe jet lag about your soul following a little later. Where did this come to you from ?

It's actually from Bruce Sterling from conversation during the tour for the Difference Engine. But I'm not entirely positive it originated with him...

12.31pm GMT12:31

Jamie Stilgoe asks:

One of my favourite quotes is the description of the barman in the first chapter of Neuromancer:

In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”

What significance does this line hold for you and what inspired it?

I was looking for the opposite tendency to what I assumed would be the result of cheaper and more ubiquitous cosmetic surgery. I suspected that there would be an opposite tendency, because with cheap plastic surgery I thought that people would look very pretty indeed but very much like one another - the punk counterextreme would be embracing radical ugliness. That would become a kind of powerful thing.

Updated at 12.32pm GMT

12.29pm GMT12:29

redhead200 asks:

Hi,

I’ve only just started The Peripheral but some of its characters seem to be stuck in a shrinking economy. Do you think digital technologies will continue to shrink the economy, as Jaron Lanier as suggested?

I don't know if I'd put digital technology at the very top of the list of the economy shrinkers... but I suppose it's up there to some extent. I think that the current redistribution of wealth upward is the biggest factor, if in fact 1967 was the heyday of the American middle class then we can't blame the digital on that. It's been going downhill for a while.

Updated at 12.30pm GMT

12.27pm GMT12:27

planetree asks:

In several of your books the characters are possessed by spirits (Baron Samidi, Legba etc). What makes you link African spirits with cyberspace? It probably has a deeper meaning than just being a plot device? PS I have to say thank you for the books!

It actually does, and it's quite a personal one. When I was a child, I bought a wonderful book called Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant, and in it there were line drawings of the Veves, the ritual drawings used in invocations. And I happened to notice that those ritual drawings were remarkably similar to circuit diagrams in solder-it-yourself electronic kits I was building at that time. So when I was writing my second novel, that image kept coming back to me, and on the basis of that I decided that some of the AIs in Count Zero would present themselves as voodoo deities, and might actually believe themselves to be voodoo deities. And the return to that years later in the sequels to Pattern Recognition was some sort of nod to my own earlier work.

I find those religions, those non monotheistic religions very interesting, because I think of monotheism as a sort of technology, something that came in a little after certain kinds of agriculture. It's an Iron Age technology, and has a lot to do with control, and hierarchy and bureaucracy, so I'm intrigued as to what consciousness would have been like for polytheistic or pantheistic people.

12.20pm GMT12:20

Archaen asks:

We seem to live in a time where the future has lost its appeal and the recent past is viewed as a resource to be endlessly reconfigured. What do you think is the significance of art that engages with the future and what do we lose when this happens less?

I don't actually see that much of a contrast in the two. I'm not sure I agree with the dichotomy, because I assume that any work which engages with the future must necessarily consist of fragments of the past; any vision we have of the future is necessarily built of our experience to the moment in which we conceive of the vision. There's no way to have a vision of the future in a vacuum.

I think that a complete absence of imagining the future would be a dire thing indeed, but I don't really see that happening. There are at any given time I think relatively few really interesting imaginings of the future going on. There's always quite a bit of rote imagining of the future, put together from bits and pieces of other imaginings. Historically in any period, there isn't much original work. And I would assume that today somewhere the work is being done - we may not always be aware of it at the time of its writing.

In order to do my own work, I feel as though I'm listening to multitudes, mostly through the internet, rather than looking for visionary voices.

12.17pm GMT12:17

"Imaginary futures are about the moment of their creation"

Gangoffour asks:

Your early works postulate a future dominated by Japanese keiretsu. While Chiba City looks exactly as you describe, Japanese economic domination is almost as anachronistic as Cuban mercenaries as heavies. Would you change any of those themes if you could?

No, actually, I've always embraced the fact of any imaginary future becoming archaic. Imaginary futures are about the moment of their creation, they aren't about the real future. Ultimately every imaginary future will be read as an artefact of the moment of its creation.

Updated at 12.18pm GMT

12.15pm GMT12:15

"The thing I didn't predict? Cellphones"

Alex Wills asks:

When you look back at your older books, what stands out to you as the thing you didn’t predict? As an older writer (sorry) are you now more cautious about making predictions about technological advances?

Cellphones. If I were a smart 12-year-old reading Neuromancer for the first time, I would decide that the mystery must hinge on where all the cellphones have gone. Why are there payphones in the background? I began reading science fiction as a child in the 60s and a lot of the SF I read had been written in the 40s. It was necessary for me to reverse engineer modern history from this SF, because I knew nothing of modern history. But I noticed that there 40s people knew nothing of the 60s, they'd got it wrong. It was a good formative experience - it's inevitable that you'll get it wrong. We won't know about the next thing. It's an ongoing aspect of being human, that we just don't know. We think simultaneously of the inhabitants of the past as being hicks and naifs, and of the inhabitants of the future and being effete and rather helpless. Whereas we are obviously the crown of creation!

Updated at 12.43pm GMT

12.11pm GMT12:11

Benjamino asks:

Not long after your self-deleting Agrippa was released, full text transcripts circulated on the internet. Today, Snapchat users seem surprised when the supposedly ephemeral pictures they send are somehow recorded by others. Do you think that we should be concerned at the ever-increasing permanence of communication (with the pervasiveness of camera phones/Google glass, even the spoken word is set in concrete)? Or is this outweighed by the benefits of the opportunity to hold people to account for what they write and say?

It depends on whether being concerned is assumed to be equivalent to doing something about it, or not. Being concerned, certainly, is happening, we should be concerned. But I can't really imagine what we could do about it at this point.

It's interesting that there's simultaneously a fear of everything being recorded forever, and a fear of all this stuff being lost in platform migrations, solar flares, there's that underlying of that fear that digital records are just ephemeral compared to the Pyramids, say. All of the information that has come down through millennia, and we can still go in the British Museum and read.

12.08pm GMT12:08

"AI is one of those things that we imagine, sometimes for centuries, in order to arrive at something else"

clareyesno asks:

Does the advance of AI trouble you? Will it come to replace a lot of labour and ultimately disrupt labour far more than it aids it?

Also – what do you still have left to write about? What are the futures you want to imagine?

I'm inclined to think that AI is one of those things that we imagine, sometimes for centuries, in order to arrive at something else. I generally doubt that we will see the sort of AI we've been imagining. I think we might wind up with something completely different, some sort of distributed thing perhaps built of human consciousnesses. I think AI is something we're imagining because we now have the parts of what we think it'll have - it'll take the place, better or worse, of what we imagine AI to be.

With labour, it's a valid concern, but it's been one for a long time. AI in the sense of self driving cars that would completely impact cab drivers - we've had that, but our cultural anxiety of AI is I think is anxiety of the thing of the other end of the phone that is indistinguishable from a human being. I wonder if we'll get that.

If you think about Isaac Asimov's vision of robots, and his three laws of robotics, he was imagining mechanical bodies with computers in them. But they had no connectivity, the acted as individuals. That no longer makes any sense in an imaginary future because what we're seeing is... the equivalent would be a combination of humanoid drones, and AI on a mainframe elsewhere. One AI could be controlling thousands of humanoid drones. That's what I see growing out of what we have. Asimov's version is a like an evolutionary tree that doesn't go anywhere. But there was a huge amount of imagery that went into imagining that kind of robotics, and it won't happen; AI might be one of those branches, there may be emergent technologies that take us in a completely different direction.

Updated at 12.12pm GMT

12.06pm GMT12:06

"Americans have gotten the message. Blade Runner was very important in that"

ID5545799 asks:

When does the future begin?

The future never quite does begin. We remain in the present and we arrive in the future moment by moment. I think it's actually significant that in this question, future isn't capitalised - if it were, it would be a different question. In the 20th century we have the Future in a very big way, and I don't think we have that in the 21st century, we just have the lower case indeterminate ever going forward future. In the 20th century, the '21st century' was a very dynamic term and was used a great deal - in the 21st century we never mention the 22nd century, and culturally that's very significant. Something has changed hugely in the past 30 years. When I wrote Neuromancer, '21st century' was vibrant and retained an energy - now that's gone, and I'm interested in that.

It might represent a kind of very wide cultural maturation. Americans for instance no longer believe in the future as some completely other place. Europeans never believed in that, because in Europe the evidence is all around us that the future is built in the past. We're surrounded by the past in Europe. The American vision of the future was over the hill, down the highway, we'll build a new world. Americans have gotten the message. I think that Blade Runner was very important in that, in its wonderfully European depiction of a future Los Angeles that grew perpetually out of its own ruins. A very un-American vision, radically un-American. Something came from that.

Updated at 12.43pm GMT

11.59am GMT11:59

"The horrible thing about writing contract screenplays in Hollywood is that you have to tell them how it ends, and stick to it"

HunterKiller asks:

When it comes to writing your novels, are you more of an outline everything in advance kind of guy, knowing what’s going to happen in every scene before you write it, or are you seat of your pants, have an idea, work it out as you go along?

For another question: how well do you think the whole cyberpunk thing has aged now we’re something like thirty years on since Neuromancer came out?

Thanks

I'm very much not an outline everything writer. The horrible thing about writing contract screenplays in Hollywood is that you have to tell them how it ends, and stick to it - I found that literally unbearable. I can't do it if I know how it's going to work out. It's as much a mystery to me as I'm writing it as it is to the readers as they're reading it. That's the only way I know how to do it.

I think that today, cyberpunk's primary usage as a word is as a signifier, a stylistic signifier. You can say a cyberpunk haircut, or trousers, and it makes a certain sense. But if you say cyberpunk attitude, I don't think people quite know what that is. But I would qualify that as saying that cyberspace is a piece of heritage terminology in 2014. I think of the 'real world' as being a piece of heritage terminology in 2014. So given that it's difficult to know what cyberpunk could mean in 2014 other that as a descriptive, stylistic form of shorthand.

Updated at 12.00pm GMT

11.54am GMT11:54

sonoran asks:

Your books have become progressively less cynical and dare I say it, “happier”. Is there a reason for this retreat from darkness?

I'm happy that if there's been a decrease in cynicism, because I've never thought that cynicism was desirable. But I think what you may be noting is simply some degree of maturation in the author. In Neuromancer for instance, none of the characters seem to have parents or children - the only children are childlike monstrous beings. In my most recent novel, the female protagonist is caring for her mother who has some sort of chronic disease - the characters in Neuromancer weren't capable of that. It's some very basic maturation on my part.

11.51am GMT11:51

Anikii asks:

Your work always seems to be viewed via the lens of technological prescience or reconfigured ‘cool’ and the consistent, literary quality of the writing seldom gets mentioned.

Do you find this frustrating or accept that it’s a fair trade off for the rewards of being a popular author of speculative fiction?

To what extent do you feel that your unique narrative voice, which reaches new heights in The Peripheral, is a byproduct of avoiding exposition ?

I don't avoid exposition entirely, it's a matter of layering the right amount of exposition into the narrative. It makes me think of pastry chefs. It's a nervewracking part of writing: judging the amount of exposition.

Too much will lower the tone, I personally think, and reduce the pleasure of the reader, whereas the amount of exposition I prefer myself as a reader is too little from Reader B - when I hear from Reader B in the comments section of Amazon, she's sighing and says she doesn't understand the first 150 pages.

It's a tough call: accessibility on one hand, and something else on the other. There's a pleasure I personally take as a reader in doing that work myself, with any imaginary landscape. I love the thrill in figuring it out, and I try to provide that.

Updated at 11.52am GMT

11.49am GMT11:49

"I do consciously cultivate a relatively agnostic attitude to emergent technologies"

Emigillis asks:

Hi William,

I recently heard you speak in Toronto and was struck by your “professionally objective” (and not un-optimistic) stance on the potential implications of emergent technologies (mostly because its a very different stance than most of your generation’s). I am wondering whether this is an attitude you consciously cultivate by trying to read less news, etc? I’m also wondering whether you would agree with David Foster Wallace’s one-time statement that “in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism ... The only choice we get is what to worship.”

Thanks very much!

I do consciously cultivate what I like to think of as a relatively agnostic attitude to emergent technologies. I don't want to be a Luddite, or a technophile. Although being human I'm both or either depending on the day.

As to Wallace's statement, I would have to say that I'm not atheistic about emergent technologies. I'm attempting a kind of agnosticism, I try not to feel as though I know what something is about prior to evidence emerging. With technologies, I generally don't think we know how they're going to change human society until human beings get their hands on them and use them for something.

Whenever I'm shown something, like Google Glass - I put it on, and somewhat got an idea of what it did. The first thing I did was imagining what it would look like in the display cabinet beside the cash register in a thrift shop - I try to imagine how they'll look in ten years time. It's a very good exercise for putting it in perspective. In a charity shop you'll find all the once-new technology, gathering dust as all things do. And it's not as though the stuff in the charity shop didn't radically change the world, at some point.

Updated at 11.58am GMT

11.44am GMT11:44

Ririd69 asks:

Are you familiar with the recent Oculus Rift virtual reality developments? The temptation to say “told you so!” must be a daily challenge? Ps. New book soon please.

I've tried Oculus Rift, the latest developers' version, and I found it very impressive. But I was baffled by why that hadn't been possible in the 1990s, and the systems I tried in the 90s had individual pixels the size of a human head and everything was incredibly slow. The person from Oculus explained the whole thing was made possible by smartphone technology: you're using a repurposed smartphone to have these experiences, and that tech didn't exist in the 90s.

Oculus was extremely smooth - it did what the 90s Sunday supplements advertised VR as doing. But I'm still in doubt as to whether very many people will want to do it. We already attain full immersion with flat screens, simply by being very interested in the content.

11.43am GMT11:43

Craig Stewart asks:

Hi William,

We’re now almost as far removed from the codification of “cyberpunk” as a genre as the publication of “cyberpunk” texts like The Gernsback Continuum was from the pre-war World of Tomorrow aesthetic of pulp magazine sci-fi. In that time, the surface signifiers of cyberpunk have never really gone away, with video games in particular finding it a rich source of inspiration and musicians like Perturbator drawing upon its imagery despite real-world advances in technology.

Do you feel any affinity with these artifacts that draw so much upon your own work? Would you agree that it’s fair to say that a degree of kitsch has accumulated around 1980s visions of the future, regardless of its often (especially in your case) extremely high quality?

Yeah, I think it's perfectly fair to say that, and indeed I assume that would always happen. Any vision of the future necessarily consists on the envisioners past and whatever she knows of the present, so its obsolescence, its increasing archaism, began with the moment of creation.

Updated at 11.43am GMT

11.41am GMT11:41

RogueStatement9000 asks:

Hi William. I have been around for quite a while, and can therefore recall pre-internet, pre-Google times. Another era, it goes without saying. Do you ever think back to your past, pre-wired self and subconciously try to communicate with it? It sounds silly, I know, but sometimes I can’t help but do that! :)

On a more serious note, do you have any thoughts on companies such as Google and Apple, and the power they have? I am a user of products from both of these - and they do make some good stuff - but I do worry that they have become too embedded in the human experience, generally.

Cheers

I do actually try and think back. I think it's become more difficult to imagine, say, the past prior to the advent of recorded music, than to imagine some sort of future. I think that we've become that which uses a given technology, and we cease to be that which didn't use a given technology.

11.40am GMT11:40

William Gibson is now with us!

Here he is in the Guardian offices:

And he’s already answering your questions. SackTheJuggler asks:

Please could you explain The Difference Engine to me? I enjoyed it, but I can’t claim to have understood it.

It was an attempt to draw parallels between future shock and emergent technology in the Victorian era, and in our period.

Updated at 11.50am GMT

9.30am GMT09:30

Post your questions for William Gibson

With his 1984 novel Neuromancer, William Gibson anticipated the networked society in all its efficiency and brutality, long before filesharing, targeted advertising and cybercrime. His tale of a computer hacker who frees an artificial intelligence remains relevant in our age of data leaks, while his cast of ninjas and Rasta spaceship pilots invented the grungy aesthetic of cyberpunk.

He’s since defined steampunk with his Victorian-era work The Difference Engine and, with his Bridge trilogy, transposed Chandlerian noir into an age of networked celebrity. His new novel The Peripheral was published last month, exploring the apocalypse across two possible futures – though knowing Gibson, perhaps that should be ‘probable’.

The digital soothsayer is joining us to answer your questions about it and anything else in his career, in a live webchat on Monday November 24 from 11.30am GMT onwards – post them in the comments below, and he’ll try to answer as many as possible.

•Gibson will also join us for a Guardian Live event to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Neuromancer on Monday 24 November at the Tabernacle, London. To book, click here.

Updated at 10.54am GMT