Present tense

Author William Gibson. (Michael O'Shea/G.P. Putnam/Canadian Press)

When the 21st century finally caught up to him, William Gibson had already lived there for more than two decades. Beginning with his early short stories like Johnny Mnemonic and his first novel Neuromancer in 1984, Gibson has been a literary oracle anticipating the internet, inventing the term “cyberspace” and foreseeing the role that technology would play in widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. (In the late 1980s, he famously said “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.”) His complicated, dystopian and cult-followed fantasy worlds are populated by drug addicts, computer hackers and corporate baddies. Consider them cautionary tales — or maybe instruction manuals — for life in the future.

But Gibson is modest about his own prescience. He’s quick to point out that while he predicted the World Wide Web, he missed cellphones. He’s also a little bored — but very polite about it — of being asked why, after more than 20 years of writing cyberpunk and steampunk science fiction, he decided to make a genre jump to modern, realist literary thrillers.

“All fiction is speculative,” he says over a hasty lunch at a Toronto hotel during a long-haul publicity tour for his latest novel Spook Country. “I had been saying for 15 or 20 years, ‘You know, I could write a novel set right now and you probably wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t set in the future.’ I guess I just heard myself say that one time too many.”

It was also the case that the weirdness of contemporary life became too tempting a subject for Gibson to ignore. A single event didn’t pique his interest, like the hysteria of Y2K, or even the attacks of Sept. 11, though that was a big part of it. Rather it was an accretion of things: globalization, the AIDS crisis, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, the war on terror, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Viagra and YouTube. “The real 2007 is infinitely stranger than anything I could have imagined,” Gibson says. “Given that, it seems tragic to me not to honour it.”

Like his 2003 bestseller Pattern Recognition, Spook Country takes place in the present day, albeit largely in a shadowy world of high-tech gadgets, gloomy warehouses and rogue government agents. But while Pattern Recognition was set in the immediate aftershock of Sept. 11, 2001 — one of the first novels to address the attacks — Spook Country is a much more skeptical and angry examination of life after the aftershock.

(G.P. Putnam)

The novel alternates between the perspectives of three characters. Hollis Henry, a onetime rock star, is ambivalent about her enduring cult celebrity. An iconic photograph of her by Anton Corbijn is still in circulation and her defunct band lives on in filesharing/fansite heaven. Now a freelance writer, she’s been sent on assignment to Los Angeles by a magazine that doesn’t seem to exist to cover the phenomenon of “locative art,” a kind of virtual reality installation project. In New York, Tito, a Chinese-Cuban, is part of the world’s smallest crime family, a boutique operation that forges documents, shuttles contraband and stores encrypted secret messages on iPods. He’s being trailed by Milgrim, a drug addict and former cryptographer who is being held semi-hostage by a volatile government agent named Brown, who keeps Milgrim compliant with a designer Japanese narcotic.

Superficially, what links these three is their connection to a mysterious shipping container. But their similarities run much deeper. They’re isolated people, shut off from others, despite their proximity to the most cutting edge forms of connectivity, and they inhabit the anonymous transitory world of hotel rooms, airplanes, glossy lofts and forgotten warehouses — what Gibson calls “liminal spaces.”

“They’re not even places, they’re thresholds that lead you into someplace else. I always find those interesting. Often there’s literally nothing going on in thresholds, it’s not the room, it’s not the house, but you can’t get into the house or room without going through the threshold. I think that we are collectively in a liminal place now in a very big way. We don’t know what’s on the other side of the threshold, maybe less now than ever before.”

At 59 and matchstick skinny, dressed in jeans and black Converse sneakers, Gibson still resembles the draft-dodging hippie who came to Canada 40 years ago from his home in southwestern Virginia. (“It’s such an odd part of America,” he says of the place. “It’s like coming from a cranky little corner of Wales.”) He’s lived the past 35 years in Vancouver with his wife and two children. Despite his long residency, Gibson remains an outsider to the Canadian literary scene. For someone with ardent fans of the science fiction kind — annotated versions of his books appear online within moments of publication — this offers him an anonymity that he enjoys. “When I think about my fans, I think about Oscar Wilde’s warnings to avoid cats and mirrors, because they’re fundamentally disturbing and spooky, and not good to look into too deeply.”

Gibson has long maintained that he is “technology agnostic.” In his fiction, he doesn’t take a position on whether computers and other gadgets are good or bad; he’s more interested in how people react and relate to the technology than the technology itself. When it comes to politics, he’s less circumspect. In Spook Country, he tackles everything from war profiteering to illegal government surveillance. The prose is too elliptical to be a soapbox, but it’s clear where Gibson’s sympathies lie.

“I’ve never felt the same need to be politically neutral in my writing. And I’m just discovering now the incredible capacity on the part of my more conservative readers to ignore things that I thought were fairly obvious in my work. In Neuromancer, I arrived at the particular tone of the place by extrapolating what I thought would be the outcome of Reaganomics: a culture that lost its middle-class. But I’m not overtly constructing literary realities to express [a liberal] philosophy. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as fairly conservative. Most of my life I thought it was a good idea to have Republicans in office. I thought they were honest and they understood money and economics.”

Long pause. “Things change,” he adds with a smirk.

And as a writer Gibson felt he had to change, too. For a man with a gift for speculation and extrapolation, the complicated present has made the future difficult to predict. “I’ve always had a sense of tininess of the present moment. And our present has gotten really, really small. When [science fiction author] H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, it was very close to the turn of the 20th century. I think his idea of the present would have probably been five or six years. By the 1930s, the sense of the present might have been a year. Today, the present is literally a news cycle. I can’t stand upon a news cycle and create a Wellsian arc to project where we’re going from here.”

Which isn’t to say that he’s not without optimism for what’s to come. “When science fiction writers get to be a certain age, no matter how radical they might have been they suddenly take this ‘after us, the deluge’ position, you know, that ‘young people today’ tone. Becoming that kind of writer scares me to death. I’m not there yet.”

Spook Country is published by Penguin Canada.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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