21165
>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. I'm Kim Ricketts and I am here to introduce
William Gibson who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. William
Gibson is here today to discuss his book Zero History. Gibson takes us to a recent past that feels as if it's
just about to happen. Our present is a time defined by frenzied change, a world in which everything is
growing faster and more connected at an exponential rate, and we're at a nodal point, a key point in history
after which everything will be different. In Zero History we're taken into the world of both military
contracting and the fashion industry, institutions surprisingly related. William Gibson is the author of nine
books including Spook Country, Pattern Recognition and his 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer, which was
the first novel to win the three top science fiction prizes: The Hugo Award, the Nebula and the Philip K.
Dick Memorial Award. A founder of the cyberpunk genera, Gibson is credited with coining the term
"cyberspace" in his short story Burning Crow. Please join me in welcoming back William Gibson to
Microsoft.
>> William Gibson: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. Every time I come here I feel
like I've moved a little further away from the sort of overt material that caused me to be invited here in the
first place. Then again, perhaps not. And I think I'll do the only thing I've ever been able to think of doing
when I come to Microsoft which is I'll read you a chapter from Zero History and then I will invite your
questions which I will probably fail to be able to answer but I'll do my best. That's always the fun part for
me.
This is -- yeah, I'll do the whole thing. This is one of my favorite chapters of this book because it was
written with the most interesting -- the most interesting informant that I've ever had really, and I'm under a
sort of personal nondisclosure agreement about that so I won't be able to say much about it, except that I
will say that the CV of the criminal that gets run down here is built from real parts. In fact, it's very
carefully the CV of absolutely no one in particular but every single little piece of it is a genuine part from the
parts drawer of such people according to them as "no."
This is called "Elvis Graceland."
Winnie Tung Whitaker was wearing a pale blue iteration of the sweatshirt with the South Carolina state flag
monogram. Milgrim imagined her buying the full color-range at some outlet mall, off the highway to Edge
City Family Restaurant. The blue made her look more like a young mother, which she evidently was, than
a bad-ass, which she'd just told him she was. He really didn't doubt that she was either. The bad-ass part
was currently expressed by a pair of really impressive ugly wraparound sunglasses with matte alloy frames,
worn pushed up over her smooth black hair, though more so by something about the look in her eyes.
"How did you know about this place?" asked Milgrim. Their starters had just arrived, in a small Vietnamese
café.
"Google," she said. "You don't believe I'm a bad-ass?"
"I do," said Milgrim, rattled. He hurriedly tried his chili squid.
"How is it?"
"Good," said Milgrim.
"You want a dumpling?"
"No thanks."
"They're great," she said. "Had them when I was here before."
"You were here before?"
"I'm staying near here. Called Kentish Town."
"The hotel."
"The neighborhood. I'm staying with a retired detective. Scotland Yard. Seriously." She grinned.
"There's a club, the International Police Association. Hooks us up with lodging in members' homes. Saves
money."
"Nice," said Milgrim.
"He has doilies." She smiled. "Lace. They kind of scare me. And I'm a clean-freak myself. But otherwise,
I couldn't afford to be here."
Milgrim blinked. "You couldn't?"
"We're not a big agency," she said. "I'm covered for $136 per day, meals and incidentals. More for a hotel,
but here, not really enough. This is the most expensive place I've ever seen."
"But you're a special agent. It says so on your card."
"Not that kind of special. And I've already got pressure going on, from my boss."
"You do?"
"He doesn't see the operation via the legate and the Brits going anywhere and he's right, it isn't. He isn't
crazy about me running around London on per diem, conducting investigations outside U.S. territory,
without the proper coordination. He wants me back."
"You're leaving?"
"That's bad for you?" She looked as though she were about to laugh.
"I don't know," he said. "Is it?"
"Relax, she said, you aren't rid of me that easily. I'm supposed to go home and work through the FBI to get
the Brits on board, which would be slow as molasses even if it worked. The guy I've got the really serious
hard-on for, though, he'd be gone anyway."
Thinking about this person, Milgrim noticed made her eyes look beady. And that brought back his initial
reaction to her in Covent Garden.
"Recruiting a U.S. citizen in the U.K. is okay," she said, "but interacting with non-U.S. citizens in furtherance
of criminal investigation for a national security matter? Not so much."
"No?" Milgrim had the feeling, somehow, that he'd just penetrated some worryingly familiar modality, one
that felt remarkably like a drug deal. Things were going seriously transactional. He looked around at the
other diners. One of them, seated alone, was reading a book. It was that kind of place.
"If I did that," she said, "the Brits would get very upset. Fast."
"I guess you wouldn't want that."
"Neither would you."
"No," Milgrim agreed.
"Your tasking is about to get a lot more specific," she said.
"Tasking?"
"How's your memory?" she asked.
"The past ten years or so, nonlinear. I'm still putting it together."
"But if I tell you a story," she said, "a fairly complicated one, now, you'd retain the general outline, and some
of the detail."
"Hubertus says I'm good with detail," he said.
"And you won't inflate it," she said, "distort it, make up crazy shit when you tell it to someone else later on?"
"Why would I do that?" he asked.
"Because that's what the people we tend to work with do," she said.
"Why?"
"Because they're pathological liars, narcissists, serial imposters, alcoholics, drug addicts, chronic losers,
and shitbirds. But you're not going to be like that, are you?"
"No," said Milgrim.
The waitress arrived with the their bowls of pho.
"Curriculum vitae," she said, and blew on her pho, the shaved beef still bright pink. "45 years old."
"Who is?" Milgrim asked.
"Just listen. 2004, he resigns his commission, 15 years an officer in the U.S. Army. Rank of major. Last
ten years of that, he was with First Special Forces Group in Okinawa. Fort Lewis in Tacoma. Spent most
of his career deploying in Asia. Lots of experience in the Philippines. After 9/11, he does deployment in
Iraq and Afghanistan, but before the army figures out how to do counterinsurgency, resigns because he's a
classic self-promoter. Believes he has a good chance at striking it rich as a consultant."
Milgrim listened intently, methodically sipping broth from the white china spoon. It gave him something to
do, and that was very welcome.
"2005," she said, "through 2006 he tries to get work as a civilian contractor with CIA, interrogations and
whatnot."
"Whatnot?"
She nodded, gravely. "They see, to their credit, that his talents and expertise don't really go that way. He
knocks around the Gulf region for two years, pitching security consulting services for oil companies, other
big corporations in Saudi, UAE, Kuwait. Tries to get his foot in the door as a consultant with the rich Arab
governments, but by this time the big dogs in that industry are up and running. There's no takers for what
he's offering."
"This is Foley?" Milgrim asked.
"Who's Foley?" she said frowning.
"The man who followed us in Paris."
"Did he look 45 to you? You might not make such a good informant after all."
"Sorry."
"2006 to present," she began again. "This is where it gets good. Going back to what he knew best before
9/11, he exploits old contacts in the Philippines and Indonesia. Moves his business to Southeast Asia,
which is a gold mine for him. The big companies are more focused on the Middle East at this point, and
smaller operators can pick up more cash in Southeast Asia. He starts by doing the same security
consulting work for corporate clients in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, hotel chains,
banks. He games the political connections of those corporate clients into consulting work for those
governments. Now he's teaching tactics, counterinsurgency strategies, which he's maybe only barely
qualified to do. Interrogation, which he's not qualified to do at all. And more. Whatnot. Instructing police
units, probably the military too. And here's where he starts to seriously get into arms procurement."
"Is that illegal?" Milgrim asked.
"Depends how you do it." She shrugged. "Of course he also has some former service buddies working for
him by this point. While he's teaching tactics, he's also specifying the equipment these outfits will need.
He starts small, outfitting counterterrorist police squads with special weapons and body armor, stuff
sourced from American companies where he has ties of friendship. But if general officers of these
countries' militaries get visibility on what he's doing, and get a chubby from it, which some of them are
highly disposed to do, and they're are also impressed by his Rambo routine, your classic multitalented
American commando but with more business acumen, they can start talking to him about equipment
needed by their militaries' conventional forces." She put her spoon down. "So here's where we start
talking real money."
"He's selling arms?"
"Not quite," she said. "He becomes a hookup artist. He's hooking up deals with contacts in the United
States, people who work for companies that build tactical vehicles, UAVs, EOD robots, mine-detection and
removal equipment." She sat back, picking up her spoon again. "And uniforms."
"Uniforms?" Milgrim asked.
"What did your Blue Ant guys think," she asked him, "they'd picked up on in South Carolina?"
"An army contract?"
"Right, but the wrong army. At this point, anyway. And at this point, the man I've just described to you
regards your employers as direct and aggressive competitors. Those pants you were looking at were his
first shot at contracting equipment himself. He won't just be the hookup."
"I don't like the way this sounds," Milgrim said.
"Good," she said. "What you need to remember with these guys is that they don't know they're con men.
They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience, that's part of the mythology that surrounds the
Special Forces. I had those guys hitting on me every last day in Baghdad." She held up her fist showing
Milgrim her plain gold wedding band. "Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he
personally doesn't know how to do and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a
special kind of gullibility, a kind of psychic tactical equipment that he had installed during training. The
army put him through schools for that that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that
matters. And he believed them. And that's who your Mr. Bigend has interested in his ass today, if not
seriously after it."
Milgrim swallowed. "So who's Foley?"
"The designer," she said. "You can't make uniforms without a designer. He was at Parsons, the New
School For Design."
"In New York?" Milgrim asked.
"Kind of doubt he fit in. But never mind him, Michael Preston Gracie's who I'm after."
"The major. I don't understand what it is he's done."
"Crimes that involve lots of official acronyms," she said. "Crimes that would take me all night to explain
accurately. I hunt in an underbrush of regulations. But the good thing about these guys, for me, is that the
smaller the transgression, the sloppier they'll handle it. I watch the underbrush for twigs they've broken.
That was Dermo, in this case."
"Dermo?"
"D-R-M-O. Defense Reutilization and Marketing Offices. They sell off old equipment. He manipulates old
Army buddies illegally. Equipment's sold on to foreign entities, be they companies or governments. ICE
notices a shipment, all curiously shiny-new. No ITAR violations but they note the shiny, the new. I look
into it, turns out those radios were never meant to be sent to DRMO at all. Look a little closer and the
DRMO buy wasn't right either. See he's involved in lots of these purchases, lots of contracts. Nothing
huge, but the money seriously adds up. Those pants of yours look to me like the start of a legitimization
phase, like he's started listening to lawyers. Might even be a money-laundering angle there. What did I tell
you his name was?"
"Gracie." Milgrim said.
"First name?"
"Peter." Milgrim said.
"I'll give you a mnemonic," she said, "Elvis, Graceland."
"Elvis, Graceland?"
"Preston, Gracie. Presley, Graceland. What's his name?"
"Preston Gracie," Milgrim said. "Mike."
She smiled.
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
"Tell Bigend," she said.
"But then he'll know about you."
"Only as much as you tell him. If we were back in the States, I'd play this another way, but you're my only
resource here and I'm out of time. Tell Bigend there's this hard-ass federal agent who wants him made
aware of Gracie. Bigend has money, connections, lawyers. If Gracie fucks with him, let's make sure he
knows who to fuck back at."
"You're doing what Bigend does," Milgrim said, more accusingly than he intended. "You're just doing this to
see what happens."
"I'm doing it," she said, "because I find myself in a position to. Maybe, somehow, it'll cause Michael
Preston Gracie to fuck up or get fucked up. Sadly, it's just a gesture, a gesture in the face of the shitbird
universe on behalf of my ongoing frustration with its inhabitants. But you need to tell Bigend, fast."
"Why?" Milgrim asked.
"Because I've got Gracie's flight schedule on APIS, via CBP. He's on his way here. Atlanta by way of
Geneva. Looks like he's laying over for a meeting there, four hours on the ground. Then he's into
Heathrow."
"And you're leaving?" Milgrim asked.
"It's a piss-off," she said, "but, yeah. My kids and husband miss me. I'm homesick. I guess it's time. She
put down her spoon, switching to chopsticks. Tell Bigend. Tonight."
Well, I've never read that before. Actually I quite liked it. I say that because there's this thing that happens
during say the 14 months that it took me to write this rather slender novel, and that's kind of pretty much 14
months of seven-day weeks and by the time I get to the end of that I've been over every part of it literally
hundreds of times and cannot register at all as a coherent experience until the very first time I hear myself
read it to an audience as I just read that, and the weird thing is, it's pretty much the last time I'll ever be able
to hear it that way. So actually that's why I really treasured doing this because it's the only time I really get
it the way a reader might get it. So thank you.
So if you have any questions, raise your hand and I will attempt to answer it.
Yes.
>>: How many times do you rewrite the first few pages of your book before you figure it's written out?
>> William Gibson: Like many, many, many, many times. Actually what I do is for maybe the first third of
the process, every time I start to write, I go back to word one and very quickly go through the whole thing
but I'm making changes without even consciously thinking about it much. I keep doing that and it gets built
up sort of like a palobsession. And it occurred to when me when I finished this book that this book and the
two books before it, with which it's connected by characters and history, are a sort of palobsessed of the
same book. There's a way in which it's sort of three versions of the same story but superimposed and in
the end, sort of squashed together, and I hadn't thought of that before but I actually kind of like it. And, you
know, eventually I may figure out some semi-reasonable savvy excuse for having done that.
>>: So when you first walked in you sort of said that you're getting farther away from the things that
brought you here, which I assume you mean technology, and I was thinking between things like the virtual
world as a second life and the connect that's coming out that lets you use your body essentially as a
controller, what do you think about sort of the technology today or where you see it going and how it's
anecdotal of the vision you had?
>> William Gibson: Well, I don't think my take on technology, actually, I don't think it's changed since when
I started because when I started I assumed that it was part of my gig to be agnostic about technology and
that I couldn't -- I feel like I can't say whether anything is good or bad until I see what uses people put it to.
Some of the uses will be bad and some of the uses will be good. I don't feel particularly surprised about
the way it's gone on the way to the real future of 1984 as opposed to the one I imagined in 1984, except
that it's impossible, of course, to imagine the real future because the real future invariably involves degrees
of ubiquity and banality that one, you know, can't very wisely employ in fiction. Like you want the story to
be exciting. And some kinds of technology, I think, simply can be incredibly radical in terms of their effect
on society but never have had any potential for the writer of science fiction.
Cellular telephony, for instance. If in 1981 I had written a novel in which all of the characters carried tiny
radio telephones in their pockets and talked to one another and sent one another brief text messages and,
you know, accessed enormous amounts of information and all the things we do with cellular telephones, I
don't think I could have hung a plaque on it. If it had simply been the background of the story, I think
readers in 1984 would have found it incredibly weird and intrusive and tedious. "Why are these people
always talking on the phone? My god, they're never alone."
>>: How did you become interested in the voodoo?
>> William Gibson: Well, I grew in up in southwestern Virginia where we didn't have any voodoo that I
knew of, but quite possibly we could have had some that I didn't know of. When I was about 13 or 14 years
old when my mother took me to visit the only book store I'd ever seen in my life which was a couple of
hundred miles away in the nearest thing that passed for a city, I found a copy of a book by Robert Tallant
called Voodoo in New Orleans which I bought and took home and read pop-eyed with wonder, and it's a
really -- it's a good book still, so I read that, you know, several times just out of fascination, but it had line
drawings of vivaz [ph], the ritual diagrams that are laid out in flour usually, powder, white powder, each one
representing a different member of the pantheon of that particular religion, and what struck me about them
when I was 14 years old was they looked incredibly like the circuit diagrams that came with my heath kits.
And there didn't seem to be anywhere to go with that, it was just a curious resemblance. But many years
later when I was writing, when I was writing Count Zero, my second novel, that came back to me and the
cyberspace thereby became populated with the "Loa," to my great delight.
But that's basically all I know about it. I don't really know -- I've had no personal contact really. Just a
white guy biting other people's culture.
>>: How do you decide what to pay attention to on Twitter?
>> William Gibson: Well, I have a module that I've developed throughout my life for the detection of novelty
and I used to, before I had access to the web, I was a sort of power consumer of magazines, mostly foreign
magazines, probably my biggest operating expense as a writer is I'd go to the best magazine store in town
and buy 2- or $300 worth of glossy foreign magazines which could be like scarcely thicker than this in a
shopping bag. Take them home and put them beside my computer and just kind flip through them
randomly. And how I chose -- I'd say simply allowed myself to be attracted to things I found interesting. So
my strategy with Twitter for following people is that if someone presents themself to the ever-hungry
module as an incredibly efficient and productive aggregator of novelty I push the "follow" button. So if you
can get like 20 super novelty aggregators on Twitter you've got a flow of groovy random shit that that's
never been equalled in human history that I know of.
>>: Have you read any good books lately.
>> William Gibson: Oh, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which isn't spelled the way its pronounced, but if you
Google "Zoo City Lauren," you'll find it, and there's gonna be an American edition, I think, in about six
months. Someone said it's a cross between Raymond Chandler and Jeff Noon which sort of gets it except
that she's South African which makes it really, really different, and that's like definitely my current favorite in
the generas if you could call it a genera piece which it actually doesn't deserve it but it will probably end up
marketed that way.
>>: So a few years ago when Spook Country came out, I was reading it and my girlfriend, who hates
science fiction as a genera, saw me reading your book and said, "William Gibson, I like him," and she told
me that, you know, she sort gave me [indiscernible] and told me that you're well-respected in the literary
circles, which I didn't sort of know of that. But it caused me to sort of do some research of my own and I
read Dhalgren, the edition with your introduction for it, and I was wondering, did that book -- is that one of
your inspirations or is that just a book you like?
>> William Gibson: Well, I don't know. You know, I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of
inspiration and influence as it applies to writers of fiction. And I think it's one of those ideas that's sort of an
unexamined premise of our culture, but when we examine it, it doesn't quite turn out to be what we think it
is. For one thing, there would be, I think, it's -- you have to assume that the writer is a sort of fixed system
moving along the timeline in order to assume that when the writer encounters and reads possibly for the
only time or maybe twice, a work of fiction at age 23, that when that same author has moved along down
the timeline you talk about the influence of that work he read at age 23, it seems it involves the assumption
that your dealing with the same system far down the timeline. I don't think you are. People change. I
know that Dhalgren excited me and baffled the shit out of me and annoyed me and overwhelmed me and
all of those things when I was younger, but I don't think I necessarily carried that -- I didn't carry that
experience in the same alignment into later adulthood. So, I don't know. China Miéville likes a theory that
says there are rare books and collecting rare books is the true task of anyone who loves literature. But one
person's rare books aren't another persons's rare books and Dhalgren would be on my rare-books shelf.
There's absolutely nothing like that. There's nothing really to compare it to as is the case with all of those
truly rare books.
>>: I've always found an image from your earlier work extremely personally powerful. You portray your
[indiscernible] AI sitting up in orbital station cranking out this three-dimensional artwork.
>> William Gibson: Yeah.
>>: What was inspiring to you, what were you thinking about when you wrote that?
>> William Gibson: Well, Joseph Cornell, an American -- you have to say -- "outsider" artist. An untrained
American artist who admired the European surrealists and received some public respect from them in his
lifetime, and he mostly made small set-like boxes containing found objects. And if you reacted in the way
I've always reacted, also containing infinity and infinite sorrow and strange lusts, just amazing things. And
actually when I wrote them into my fiction, which I did quite a lot in those early books, I had never seen one
and it was a decade before a tour escort on a book tour when I was in Chicago took me into the Chicago
Museum of Art without telling me what we were gonna see, and took me into a room where there were like
eight or ten of them illuminated by Halogen lights, and it was like getting hit in the head with the best
sledgehammer. And I've never seen a real one since, but that was it. The idea was that the AI which had
gone quite potty at that point, spent all it's time assembling the bits and pieces of this dead uber-rich family
into Cornell boxes doing it all at zero gravity, which is really the good part.
Yes.
>>: I read Pattern Recognition a few years ago and a good part of the book happens in Russia and I was
really surprised how accurate it was [indiscernible] real lifelike, so my question is how much do you explore
things before you write, like do you actually go to all the places and spend time there or ->> William Gibson: Well, thank you. I'm glad it worked. You're like proof of process right there.
I've never been to Russia but I've had a keen secondhand interest. And at one point I was involved with a
brilliantly wacky but ultimately abortive film production process, as so many of them turn out to be, that
would have been set in Russia, and they needed me to go and, you know, check it out on the ground but I
had a contracted to write a novel and a deadline and I just couldn't see dropping that and going to Russia
and maybe blowing the contract, so I managed to arrange to send my good friend and fellow novelist Jack
Womack, and Jack went and came back and told me like a lifetime of incredible stories, many of which
wound up in Pattern Recognition, so that was sort of the basis of my Russian world-building. But I was
super fortunate that another good friend of mine, Eileen Gunn, happened to be in Russia when I was doing
that, so I would e-mail her the Russia I was making up and she would e-mail me back snapshots of the
Russia she was inhabiting, the real Russia she was experiencing, and the subjects of the snapshots were
chosen for their similarity to the imaginary Russia, so I would then sort of reverse-engineer it and get
another iteration and send it back. And she was there for a few weeks, so we did it over and over and
over. And she's an extremely talented writer herself and a wonderful observer of things, and in the end
what you see is what I got. And the thing that makes me sad about that is that, you know, that's so very
pre-Google Street View. We don't need to do that anymore.
Yes.
>>: Obviously we appreciate your view of culture and history. We read a talk recently that you gave
around, it was at a luncheon that was at [indiscernible] Future. Do you remember that?
>> William Gibson: Yeah, at the Book Expo, I think.
>>: And if you could talk a little bit about that and what you imagine might be replacing our fascination for
what used to be the capital-F Future today?
>> William Gibson: Sure. Well, the capital-F Future idea is the idea of the sort of future that I was told that
I had when I was about five years old in the 1950s, and it's really, I think, an American vision of the future.
My feeling is that Europeans envied it but couldn't quite imagine having it. And now, in retrospect, and
having had a chance to spend some time in Europe, I think the Europeans envied it because they
realistically knew that they would forever inhabit the retrofitted ruins of the worlds of their ancestors which is
what you do if you're, for the most part, if you're European. I think the American capital-F Future is the
result of that impulse, that early and maybe largely mythological impulse. I don't think it's important
whether or not what I'm about to say is historically true, but I think it's true in our culture, and that's when
things get like all messed up and tedious where you're living and you think there might be a better way, you
light out for the territories, and when you get to the territories, supposedly you start building the new city.
You start building the capital-F Future, and everything in it will be equally new and everything in it will be
equally free of the taint of the past. And I think we got a long, long way on that, but I think somewhere 20,
30 years ago the wheels drove into that California surf and some part of the deep national mythology
stopped and said, wait a minute, that's it. We've got to the edge of the continent. There's no more over
there. We're gonna be living in -- we're always gonna living in somebody else's future and somebody else's
past. And for our cultural imagination that was quite a shock. To me that's absolutely the significant
triumph of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, that he managed to say that cinematically and poetically and
absolutely convincingly and killed a lot of the capital-F future. I suspect that it survives in certain popular
millenarian forms, the singularity perhaps. That rapture.
Yes.
>>: I have a question, as you look to the future and you investigate what could be or think about it, think
about an author, John Twelve Hawks, who makes surveillance into something very creepy, do you run into
things that either inspire you or kind of creep you out as you go and I'm curious how you deal with them
because, I think, looking ahead, you do a good job of turning things that could be creepy into something
that's fascinating or quirky and I'm curious about what things you run into that either give you hope or kind
of creep you out and that surveillance would be one example.
>> William Gibson: Well, when I'm honest with myself, you know, when I'm honest with myself I often find
that the stuff I think is coolest kind of keeps me out and visa versa. And that's sort of back to what I was
getting at when I said that technology's neutral until we do something with it. One of the fundamental
assumptions underlying all of my work is that the people who generate emergent technologies often do not
wind up having -- quite evidently had zero clue about, ultimately, what their invention or development would
ultimately be used for. Like we can't tell where anything is going until we see people using it.
And another equal important part of what I do for myself is that I've always known that I didn't actually know
very much about real technology at all. And what I have, I think, is an interest in observing people using
technology and particularly observing people using emergent technology. So, I would never claim that I'm
any sort of an anthropologist but what I do resemble is a kind of hobbyist anthropology, kind of like a hedge
anthropologist, a drive-by anthropologist.
>>: So, I've always wondered in your works why does it always turn into like a darker world where you
have all of this amazing technology, [indiscernible] why does it get to like a darker environment?
>> William Gibson: Well, possibly because I'm not sure that I have ever actually experienced the other
outcome in the complete absence of darkness. I know I was -- I was kind of taken aback when I started to
publish because the reviews, even the positive ones would say this glittering, this topian vision, this hell on
Earth, and I actually thought from the point of view of 1981, when I was really getting going writing fiction, I
thought from the point of view of 1981, I was sort of ludicrously optimistic because in 1981 there were
relatively few intelligent and informed people around who didn't admit to the very real constant daily
possibility that we'd all be deep fried by joint Soviet/American mutual nuclear destruction. That was the
dominant deal of the whole human soul in 1981. We couldn't be conscious of it every last minute or we
would have killed ourselves. But it was an incredibly different world and I'm starting to realize it was a
world which those who aren't old enough to have experienced it have a really, really hard time of grasping
what that felt like. So when I wrote Neuromancer and turned the entire eastern seaboard of the United
States into a giant teeming slum, it looked to me like I was testifying for life and fecundity because in plenty
of the sort of smarter science fiction of that day that particular real estate was some kind of mutant
zombie-haunted wasteland.
Yes.
>>: With all the hard-copy books around here for book signing, I was actually curious what you think of the
Kindle?
>> William Gibson: I'm mostly worried about how one signs them.
>>: On the back of it but you'd have so many authors.
>> William Gibson: It's occurred to me that I probably should be carrying a mechanic's carbide-tipped
marker volunteering to give your screen a permanent kiss perhaps just in the coroner.
>>: [indiscernible].
>> William Gibson: Okay, yeah. Well, pictures are always good, but, you know, I imagine I'll wind up
signing quite a few of those with those big sloppy silver paint pens because I've signed innumerable
laptops and cell phones and even the odd motherboard where some totally obsessive and overly handy
young person has extracted the motherboard, brought it for signing and it will then go back into the
machine and become a covert William Gibson autograph.
And on that note, I think I'm gonna thank you for coming and sign any books or Kindles or whatever you've
got.
Thank you very much.