I think we may be headed for something, in the early 21st Century. People will probably look back from the mid-21st century at what we call cyberpunk, and see it like the precursor phenomenon to what ever it is they’re going through. – William Gibson (bOING bOING #12 1994) CYBER NOODLE SOUP no. 12 Cyber Noodle Soup is published from time to time, usually whenever we have a couple of pages of material Another obscure interview… THE PROTOTYPE INTERVIEW William Gibson is probably the first name the average person would associate with cyberpunk. His early short stories and his first novel, Neuromancer, set the scene of the second new wave of SF, brilliantly documented in the Mirrorshades anthology that I encourage all those interested in cyberpunk to buy. Recently he has moved on to other subjects and has written the world’s first "steampunk" novel, The Difference Engine , with Bruce Sterling. His latest novel is Virtual Light, which I plan to read as soon as I get the time. This interview was done on the 1st of October after a reading from Virtual Light held in Waterstones bookstore. Unfortunately, due to background noise, slight bits of the conversation didn’t record well on the dictaphone and therefore have had to be excluded. Ed PROTOTYPE – Could you tell me about VIRTUAL LIGHT? William Gibson – When I put the proposal to the publishers one of the things I said to try to get them to buy it was it would be like an Elmore Leonard thriller set in the near future. To some extent it attempts that but it wound up having a lot of other peculiar agendas running in the background, some of them poking fun at… well, not so much my earlier works as some responses to my earlier works that I found so funny. William XXXIII – Do you believe the future will turn out like you say it will? W.G. – No, no. I don’t think that stuff is being predictive at all. What I’m really trying to do is to throw the present into a different perspective. This book really isn’t extrapolative in any classic SF sense. It’s something else. I’m not at all sure what it’s doing as it’s not the result of an entirely rational process. Ed – What do you think of, for example, being called "the father of cyberpunk"? W.G. – It’s been going on for a while. Someone in London the other day called me "the Milton of the information age". I like that one. It was getting pretty silly. Somebody else called me "the James Brown of cyberpunk". W. XXIII – Do you think that cyberpunk fits into Dada, Lettrist International, Situationalism, punk rock, that sort of thing.. W.G. – Yeah, actually I do to some extent. Particularly the original literary movement of cyberpunk to the extent that there was one. W. XXIII – But do you think that if someone carried out your teachings they’d be as successful as Situationism as carried out in Cambodia by Pol Pot (Editors note – William XXIII has some funny ideas about Pol Pot. Don’t ask me why…)? W.G. Whoa, man. That’s an amazing question. No ‘cos there’s no theory behind this stuff. These books aren't’ didactic. In a funny sort of way they pretend to be but that's’ sort of a fictive conceit. I don't’ think you can use these as blueprints for anything really. Ed. – No, they’re not blueprints for living… W.G. – I don’t think so. No, but all the original cyberpunk phenomenon did indeed have something historically in common all of those various other flirting moments. Have you read Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus? Ed. – Yeah… W.XXIII - ….and the Spectacle by Guy Debord. W.G. – Yeah… Ed. – What do you think about all the hype over virtual reality at the moment? W.G. – Well, I think its ready for the museum of obsolete futures. It has almost become are sort of Science Fiction kitsch. It joined the flying cars of the 1930s. Which pretty much means.. I think that whatever is going to be is not going to be anything like the model girl with goggles and gloves… which is actually a very good objective paradigm for what television has already done to us. W.XXIII – What does cyberpunk actually have to do with punk rock which is primitive and about going back and attacking the leaders? W.G. – Well… It’s funny. It was the tile of a peculiar short story which was not in itself in any way cyberpunk. Person watching – By Bruce… W.G. – Yeah. W.XXIII – Was it stupid? W.G. – Well, I’ve never read it but I understand it wasn’t that memorable. But Gardiner (? – Ed) (…) appropriated just because he saw its usefulness in what I suspect was a conscious act of propagation. He was trying to be an agent provocateur by saying this movement exists he actually cause it to crystalize. W.XXIII – But Malcolm McLaren did the same thing with punk. You need agent provocateurs to put a name on things. W.G. – Yeah, indeed. Ed – So what do you think of Timothy Leary’s adoption of cyberculture? W.XXIII – Do you think he’s just a pathetic old man? W.G. – No I wouldn’t go that far… I think he’s just…. He obviously has burnt out. Ed – He’s trying to make himself credible again (come to think of it, was he ever very credible?)… W.G. – Yeah. Ed – It never really works… trying to make yourself credible. W.G. No probably not… I doubt it….. After this, the interview lapsed into a conversation so pointless I wont even both printing it. We are thrown out of Waterstones and make our way back to my house for some caffeine… From Prototype #8 (1994?) out of Dublin, Ireland. No attempt has been made to correct spelling or syntax. Reviews All Tomorrow’s Parties (2) - JPC Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties is an enjoyable book so far as it goes. Filled to the brim with that trademark grit and detail of the near future which Gibson is so rightfully credited, the novel engages you at once. It's something of a reunion tour bringing together characters from the previous Virtual Light and Idoru. Colin Laney, a man able to see the emerging future, so to speak, out of patterns of information is hiding amongst the homeless in a cardboard box at the Tokyo subway. Sensing that the world is fast approaching some epochal shift he is both an observer of events and an agent of change. Lany hires Berry Rydel, the cashiered cop from Virtual Light, to investigate matters for him in California. Rydel is working as a security guard at the Lucky Dragon in LA, a chain of worldwide 21st century convenience stores. He is instructed to go to San Francisco and retrieve a mysterious package near The Bridge, Gibson’s great artifact from Virtual Light. He is then to hang out on The Bridge making himself visible. Whatever forces are at work will find him. Meanwhile, Chevette, fleeing an abusive boyfriend, arrives at the The Bridge with her graduate student housemate who is doing a documentary on "interstitial" communities -- of which The Bridge is a prime example. Also in play are a Taoist assassin lurking in the area, the shopkeeper Fontaine and an autistic young boy named Silencio who possesses a strange talent involving antique wrist watches, and Harwood, a media powerbroker who, like Laney, senses some seismic paradigm shift approaching. Harwood hopes to control the emerging future so that his privileged status in the old order will continue in the new. This involves a technological "whatzit" called the "nanofax" and the Lucky Dragon convenience store chain. The tale emerges in a series of mostly short chapters jumping from person to person. This gives us an opportunity to tour the future. And the future is just okay. The world of ATP is not startlingly different from today, or I should say the 1980s. Gibson liked to say that The Sprawl books were actually fables of Reaganomics. Gibson still writes within that environment of drab marginal cultures, impoverished people, feral violence, overweening corporations and impotent governments. When Neuromancer came out, that was a not unreasonable scenario. By 1999 that seemed a most unlikely outcome. If the 90s have been about anything it's been about color and flash and speed. Unless Vancouver is a particularly awful place, Gibson's claim that he is writing about today is wrong; he's writing about yesterday. The two major sf devices, Laney's talent for "sensing" the future and the nanofax, are outright red herrings. Laney's ability to see emerging patterns and nodal points is a mystery. He essentially watches television (it's more complicated than that, but not much more complicated). How does that work? Gibson is vague. The nanofax is more or less the replicator device from the -- God help us! -- Star Trek universe. It exists within ATP in splendid isolation from any other technological innovation and is completely improbable. The two features exist solely to get the plot moving and bring it to an end; in between they hardly exist at all. Character development is pretty minimal. What motivates these people? The Tao assassin is a total cipher. He works for Harwood but acts against Harwood's mercenaries The Bright Young Things. He becomes allied with Rydell but we're never sure why.