“William Gibson”1 Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (U L B) 1997 Biography William Ford Gibson was born on March 17, 1948 in Conway, South Carolina; he was raised in a southwest Virginia small town. His father, a contractor, had worked on the Manhattan project—the development of the American atom bomb during WWII—and died when William was six. In the sixties, Gibson dropped out of high school and moved to Canada, where he joined the local hippie scene; he became a devoted rock fan—a cultural interest that would later influence his fiction. An opponent to the Viêt Nam War, he stayed in Canada in order to avoid being drafted. In 1972, he married Deborah Thomson, a teacher, with whom he had two children. The couple settled in Vancouver. Gibson took his B.A. at the University of British Columbia in 1977. He discov- ered his potential as a writer when taking a science fiction class in college. His first stories, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," "The Gernsback Continuum" and "Johnny Mnemonic" were published in science-fiction magazines in the late seventies and early eighties. Gibson was at the time a member of the "cyberpunk" group—a set of authors gathering around writer and critic Bruce Sterling, the editor of the SF fanzine Cheap Truths. In the mid-eighties, two events contribut- ed to making cyberpunk the new vital edge of science-fiction: on the one hand, Gibson published his first novel Neuromancer (1984), which was granted the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards the same year; on the other hand, Bruce Sterling published Mirrorshades (1986), an anthology of cyberpunk short stories, several of which by Gibson; Sterling's preface to the collection defined the characteristics of cyber- punk as a genre. Gibson's Neuromancer, still to this day regarded as the paradigmatic work of the movement, turned out to be the first volume in a "cyberspace" trilogy that also includes Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). These three novels, together with short 1 This paper was initially published in Post-War Literatures in English (Leiden, NL: Martinus Nijhoff, Sept. 1997). 2 Den Tandt “William Gibson” stories like "Johnny Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel" and "Burning Chrome," make up Gibson's "Sprawl" cycle—named after the Eastern seaboard megalopolis in which these narratives partly take place. Gibson's short fiction of the early eighties was collected in Burning Chrome (1986). In 1990, Gibson and Bruce Sterling coauthored The Difference Engine, a cyberpunk novel set in the Victorian age. Gibson's latest novel to this day is Virtual Light (1993). His works outside the traditional fiction format include Aggrippa (1992), a non-SF text recorded on a self-erasing computer file, illustrated with engravings by New York artist Dennis Ashbaugh, as well as the screenplay for the film version of "Johnny Mnemonic" (1994). Gibson is also the author of several nonfiction articles and reviews. Critical Essay The science fiction movement to which Gibson belongs, writer Samuel Delany explains, owes its name to Bruce Bethke's story "Cyberpunk," written in 1980 and published in 1983 (see Dery, 199). The term was picked up by critics to designate a literary group that, ironically, did not include Bethke himself: the set of writers revolving around Bruce Sterling—William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Marc Laidlaw, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan and John Shirley. After Gibson's highly successful Neu- romancer, cyberpunk became a household term and was grudgingly accepted by the writers themselves; "cyberpunk," Bruce Sterling re- veals in his preface to Mirrorshades, supplanted previous labels like "Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, or the Mirrorshades Group" (Mirrorshades ix). Like punk rock musicians, Sterling argues, the early-1980s writers are characterized simultaneously by their raw spontaneity and by their acute self-consciousness as to their place within well-developed tradi- tions. Among canonical writers, the cyberpunks draw inspiration from the technological allegories of Thomas Pynchon and William Bur- roughs. In science-fiction, the influences acknowledged by Gibson, Sterling and his friends cover the whole spectrum of the genre: early masters like Jules Vernes and H.G. Wells; Pulp fiction stories and SF comics, technologically-oriented hard SF; as well as 1960s New Wave SF authors like Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, and J.G. Ballard. With regard to these antecedents, the cyber- punks advocate a "return to the roots" (Sterling xi), that is a revival of what Sterling, in the preface to Gibson's Burning Chrome, calls a "self- consistent evocation of a credible future" (Burning 10). This commit- 3 ment to a postmodern variety of socio-technological realism differenti- ates the cyberpunks from 1960s and 1970s writers—Ursula LeGuin, Roger Zelazny—whose works verged on "sword and sorcery fanta- sies," and who addressed a broader audience than the stereotypical techno-nerds of SF subculture (Burning 10). The core thematics of cyberpunk is the interaction of characters with technologically-managed information. On the basis of Gibson's Neuromancer, we can further define the genre as a form of postmodern science fiction that depicts information communities of the near future where social relations are constructed by means of computer systems. In 1984, at a time when cyberpunk barely had any public existence, Fredric Jameson all but prophesied the movement when he highlighted the importance for postmodern culture of a form of literature he called "'high-tech paranoia'"—narratives in which "interlocking and compet- ing information agencies" struggle for the control of "the circuits and network of some putatively global computer hookup" (38). Jameson's description does not fully do justice to the fact that in spite of their world-wide electronic interconnections, the cyber societies of the new SF are decentred; within their networks, power circulates in unstable fashion among giant corporations, techno-literate subcultures and criminal rings. Accordingly, cyberpunk narratives are set in heteroge- neous locales, whether in real or virtual space; characters include motley collections of biological persons, artificial intelligences, and the paradoxical beings obtained from the interfacing of human bodies and electronic circuitry. Power in the cyberpunk world revolves around the control (production, appropriation, phagocytization, destruction) of information and access codes. Gibson's gradual elaboration of his own cyberworld is traceable in his early short fiction, collected in Burning Chrome. Some of the stories in this volume settle accounts with what Gibson calls the "to- morrow that never was" (38)—science fiction ideologies the author no longer has any use for such as scientific utopianism ("The Gernsback Continuum") and space travel ("Red Star, Winter Orbit," "Hinter- lands"). The protagonist of "Gernsback" suffers from hallucinations in which his 1980s present is invaded by beings and machines—"shark- fin roadsters, flying-wing liner[s]" (Burning 37)—straight from Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories pulps of the 1930s; Gibson delivers thereby a scathing caricature of 1930s future worlds crammed with fascistic Art Déco architecture and square-jawed supermen on a food- pill diet. "Red Star," coauthored with Bruce Sterling, chronicles the 4 Den Tandt “William Gibson” insurrection of a Soviet orbital station phased out because space explo- ration is no longer economically viable. Ultimately, the station is taken over by a commune of environmentally-conscious space squatters. Characteristically, in "Red Star," the United States are no longer a dominant world power; likewise, "Hinterlands"—an allegory close in format to New-Wave SF—presents a disenfranchised humankind that acts as an archaic tribe facing the mysteries of an incomprehensible technology: its explorers sent into hyperspace return dead or psychotic, holding on to cryptic extraterrestrial trinkets human researchers must investigate for years. The other stories of Burning Chrome piece together the universe of common references—technology, characters, institutions, slang—of the author's Sprawl cycle—the narratives set in the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Authority. These texts explore various techniques by which consciousness and corporate technology interface: they depict, for instance, game consoles plugged in to a character's brainwaves ("Dogfight"); devices called simstim rigs that allow people to jack in to another body's sensation ("Fragments of a Hologram Rose," "Winter Market"); and encoding procedures by which characters merge "with the net" (140), thus ending up as a personality "construct" recorded on computer disk ("Winter Market). "New Rose Hotel" reveals that the economic basis of this technology is a system of big corporations—the "zaibatsus," in their Japanese form—whose employees can be inden- tured until criminal conspiracies help them defect. "Burning Chrome" and "Johnny Mnemonic," both of them trial runs for Neuromancer, orchestrate these elements with great concision and flair. Characters in "Johnny" have all been reshaped through cosmetic surgery, electronic implants or grafts. The protagonist rents a psychotic layer of his perso- na—his "idiot/savant" mode (15)—for the storage of confidential corporate information that he cannot access himself. With the help of Molly Millions—the stereotypical amazon warrior of the Sprawl, who sports surgically-implanted mirrorshades and retractile fingerblades—