No more science fiction for William Gibson

03 June 2008

John Howell

I've just finished reading William Gibson's latest novel Spook Country, a fragmented, leisurely paced, ultimately unsatisfying intelligence thriller about a group of disparate characters searching for a mysterious cargo container from Iraq. While it does feature present day virtual reality technology and GPS, there's not an ounce of real science fiction in it - no matter what William Gibson would have you believe.

"Personally I think that contemporary reality is sufficiently science fiction for me," Gibson told Reuters when asked why his last two books, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, had moved away from science fiction. "Some critics are already maintaining that science fiction is a sort of historical category and it is not possible any more," he said.

In an earlier interview with CNN in 1997 he was more direct in expressing his belief that science fiction is already with us:

"I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going… Earth is the alien planet now."

So the man who coined the phrase "Cyberspace" appears to believe that present day reality is so much like science fiction already that writing about the present is the same as writing science fiction?

"Today, the sort of thing we used to think in science fiction has colonised the rest of our reality," Gibson said in a recent interview with Phawker.

"We're living in a sort of overlapping system of purely science fictional scenarios, which affect everyone. So I can't see how anyone can sit down today and write what as an English major I used to call a naturalistic novel, a realistic novel that tries to explore how humans interact with one another and what's going on now, I don't see how anyone can do that without dealing with inherently science-fiction material."

William Gibson obviously hasn't read the science fiction I have: time travel, parallel universes, alien invasions, artificial intelligence, robotic revolts, dystopias, utopias, wormholes, interstellar travel, telepathy - and that's just the books I read last week. It's hard to see any of these elements in present day life. Last time I checked "contemporary reality" I hadn't encountered an alien, we hadn't started mining the asteroid fields, discovered time travel, forged a galactic empire, invented invisibility, perfected an anti-gravity device, or wiped ourselves out in a nuclear holocaust.

Sure, the iPhone is a revolutionary device, and global warming is happening, but no one can convince me that the artificial intelligence the late Arthur C. Clarke hypothesised with his super computer "Hal" in 2001 is anything like Microsoft's latest Vista operating system.

When asked by Phawker what he thought of science fiction writers who don't write in the present, but the future, he said:

"I don't see how they can do it right now if they're playing by the strict, old-school rules of science fiction, say the way H.G. Wells did it or even the way Robert Heinlein did it. Because Wells and Heinlein, I imagine, had a really good idea of where we are now, so they could afford to kick back and imagine where we're going. I don't know about other science fiction writers, but I don't feel like I'm all that clear on where we are now. I think I'm expending my creative energy trying to map or match the remarkable weirdness of the present moment."

To suggest that science fiction is already here, as Gibson appears to be doing, seems absurd. There is no end point, no arbitrary line drawn in the sand to delineate the past from the future. Science fiction writers hypothesise future scenarios, extrapolations from present or historical ideas and situations. Writers don't need to comprehend the present completely to attempt to make predictions about the future, especially the future impacts of technology. Science fiction may draw on history and twist the present, but it's still about the "future", and the future is as far away as it ever was. Contemporary reality to me is just not that strange or outlandish.

I'm a great fan of William Gibson's science fiction novels, from his earlier gritty cyberpunk works like his triple award winning first novel Neuromancer (The Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick awards) and especially his later character driven novels, the so called "Bridge trilogy", made up of Virtual Light (1993), Idoru, (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), but if Pattern Recognition and Spooks Country are the shape of things to come, I'm afraid I may have to look elsewhere. The Matrix, artificial intelligence, battling multinational corporations, gadget laden high tech industrial espionage, nodal points, technological and spiritual transcendence, cybernetics and cyberpunk - these are the elements that make his work unique, mind expanding, edgy and intriguing. Gibson appears to be deliberately bleaching his own work, draining out the colour and life with every novel. The elements that once leapt off the page struggle now to even crawl over the edge.

Perhaps he's slowly extracting himself from the science fiction scene to gain literary credibility? It's always been hard for science fiction writers to find a respectable place in the literary establishment. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, for instance, created works that many would consider to be science fiction classics, but I've never heard Orwell or Huxley referred to as science fiction writers. Isn't Orwell's 1984 a science fiction novel? And what about Huxley's Brave New World? You're either a respectable literary author who occasionally dabbles in science fiction, or a science fiction author with no literary credibility.

If Gibson is merely seeking literary kudos, he's been extremely successful: Pattern Recognition and Spooks Country have been his first works to make it into the top of the mainstream best seller lists and the critical reaction, especially to Pattern Recognition, has been overwhelmingly positive, in some cases hysterically good.

"Gibson's recent novels have displayed a certain weariness with the tropes of science fiction," claims the San Francisco Chronicle. "The completely contemporary Pattern Recognition finds the author rejuvenated, ready to acknowledge that the world has become a stranger place than could have been imagined even 15 years ago. It's his best book in a long time, and perhaps his most accessible one ever"

The Village Voice is particularly effusive:

"Pattern Recognition may be his quintessential work. The book peers so intently at the unthinkable here and now it induces something like infinite vertigo."

Even though he may now be more popular than ever, I long for the Gibson of old. The first line of Neuromancer expresses how I feel about his recent work: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". I hope he tunes in again soon.

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