No Maps for These Territories Page #3

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went a longwent a long way.

When Louis Shiner and I, who were part

of the Turkey City group here in Austin

were first reading Gibsons work in manuscript,

we looked at it and said,

Look, you know, this is breakthrough material here.

This guys really doing something different.

Like, we gotta put down our preconceptions and pick up on

this guy from Vancouver. Its the way forward!

A hole had opened up in consensus reality,

and we just, like, saw daylight

When I was writing Burning Chrome, the short story that intro

you know, where the word cyberspace firstfirst appeared,

I knew as soon as I had the opening scene

that I actually had a completely original piece.

In the early days when he used to send me short stories,

I would send them around to people, and I would sort of give them copies of

OMNI that had his stories in them, and send them to people and sort of seek out their response.

And people were just genuinely baffled

You know I sat there thinking, Nobodys ever done this.

I mean, they literally could not parse the guys paragraphs.

They could not make sense ofthey didnt understand

concepts like cyberspace, for instance,

that there was a simulated space, which was inside the computer.

I mean, they literally could not get their heads around that concept.

I mean, What was the problemare they hallucinating?

Is it a real space? I mean, these

just these sort ofimaginative tropes,

which he was inventing and deploying,

were just beyond peoples grasp.

I met Bruce Sterling at a science fiction

convention in Denver in the fall of 1981,

and read, uh,

Burning Chrome, the first cyberspace short story,

to an audience of four people:

Sterling, his wife, a friend of mine, and some baffled stranger.

And it was, like, the most fun I think I ever had reading

reading anything, because Bruce completely got it.

We were aware that computers were a bigger

social revolution in the making than space flight

was ever going to be, or that robots ever had been.

No one seemed to have noticed

that there was a territory there.

Yeah, when we were first hanging out with computer geeks,

it was not something you spoke about in public.

I mean, reallyif you went to a party and started

talking about your Apple II, people would walk off diagonally

We turned out to be great glamorizers.

We were able to make computers glamorous.

Andand of course, we werent the only ones.

I mean, once people caught on that that was possible, you had

Madison Avenue move into the job.

AT&T hires people to tell people that, now.

Its, you know, its become a very mainstream message.

I had a hunch that it was going to change things in a way that

the advent of the ubiquity of the automobile changed things.

It changed how we dressed, how we eat

it affects these things affect everything.

I mean, this was a supermodel among technologies.

It was just a matter of spraying on the hairspray,

and slapping on some lip-gloss, and this thing was gonna walk, you know?

They were gonna be cute. They were gonna be miniature.

They would be designed.

They would be adorable, you know.

The boundaries of the human body would be crossed.

What made you choose science fiction rather

than some other form of fiction?

Well, I wasit was my native literary culture,

and it was what I had grown up on.

I saw it as a viable, but essentially derelict

form of popular art.

And I thought that that wasthat was a remarkable thing.

I probably started looking at what was being done

then in science fiction, around 1976 or 77.

I saw an opening, you know?

I thought, Hmm, you know, I can fill the gap here.

Maybe I can do something

maybe I can do something with this.

That was the conscious part of it.

The unconscious part of it, I dont know.

I know that it seemed it seemed a weird and pathetic thing

to try to do

Were you still a student when you first got published?

Yeah. I figured out that I could make a living,

or augment my living by being a student,

which was possible in Canada at that time.

If you could maintain a high enough grade point average,

they were very generous.

You know, theyd give you loans and then forgive them.

You know.In fact, I wasnt even really studying; I was just making

maintaining a grade point average and reading, reading books.

You came to Canada to dodge the draft, didnt you?

Well, I had a peculiar experience with that.

I had gone in and basically

told them the truth.

I told them that that my one ambition in life was to take

every mind-altering substance that existed on the face of the planet,

and I just went in and babbled about

babbled about wanting to be like William Burroughs.

That seemed to do the trick.That, and the fact that

I promptly, you know, within a week or two,

exited the country for several years.

You know, I was very, very lucky in the timing of that,

because if I had turned up at an induction center two years later with

with the same line, they would have said,

Dont worry, sonwell make a man of you.

And they wouldvethey wouldnt have

even let me back out the building.

And I went home and bought a bus ticket to Toronto.

But I dont like to take too much

too much credit for that having been a political act,

in the sense that political acts are

are sometimes understood.

It had much more to do with my wanting

wanting to be with hippie girls and have lots of hashish,

than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the

the North Vietnamese people under U.S. imperialism.

Much more, much more to do with hippie girls and hashish.

Consequently, when I got to Toronto,

I actually to my, I think,

chagrin, somewhat I found that it was

I really, really couldnt handle hanging out

with the American draft-dodgers.

There was too much clinical depression.

There was too much suicide.

There was too much hardcore substance abuse.

They were a traumatized lot, those boys.

And I just felt like ayou know,

I felt frivolous.

Torontos Summer of Love was

it was up there with San Franciscos,

I would imagine.

It was really quite ait was quite a party.

From an alternative mode of perception, most of the people

I suppose, really, everyone that I counted as a close friend

seemed to harbor the unspoken assumption that everything

that had gone before us was ending.

It was really a very millennial time, far more millennial

than this last year of the century.

What did you think was ending?

The Straight World.

I think thats what I would have told you at the time.

But the straight world didnt end.

The straight world and the other world

bled into one another and produced

the world that we live in today.

Drugs were absolutely central to

to that, to that experience.

But they werent essential.

They werent actually essential to it. I only know that in retrospect.

At the time Im sure I would have said that they were

you know, ingesting the right chemical was absolutely,

absolutely essential to the experience.

But, in retrospect, no.

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