William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211
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Vancouver, British Columbia, sits just on the far side of the American border, a green-glass model city set in the dish of the North Shore Mountains, which enclose the city and support, most days, a thick canopy of fog. There are periods in the year when it’ll rain for forty days, William Gibson tells me one mucky day there this winter, and when visibility drops so low you can’t see what’s coming at you from the nearest street corner. But large parts of Vancouver
Gibson came to Vancouver in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old orphan who’d spent the past half-decade trawling the counterculture in Toronto on his wandering way from small-town southern Virginia Far East , which would yield so much of the junk-heap casino texture of his early fiction. He hadn’t been to college and didn’t yet intend to go. He hadn’t yet heard of the Internet, or even its predecessors arpanet and Telenet. He thought he might become a film-cell animator. He hadn’t yet written any science fiction—he hadn’t read any science fiction since adolescence, having discarded the stuff more or less completely at fourteen, just, he says, as its publishers intended.
Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speak—more what you would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the genre-vanquishing hero he has become since the publication of his first novel, the hallucinatory hacker thriller Neuromancer, in 1984. Gibson resists being called a visionary, yet his nine novels constitute as subtle and clarifying a meditation on the transformation of culture by technology as has been written since the beginning of what we now know to call the information age. Neuromancer, famously, gave us the term cyberspace and the vision of the Internet as a lawless, spellbinding realm. And, with its two sequels, Count Zero (1986) andMona Lisa Overdrive (1988), it helped establish the cultural figure of the computer hacker as cowboy hero. In his Bridge series—Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), each of which unfolds in a Bay Bridge shantytown improvised after a devastating Pacific earthquake transforms much of San Francisco—he planted potted futures of celebrity journalism, reality television, and nanotechnology, each prescient and persuasive and altogether weird.
Neuromancer and its two sequels were set in distant decades and contrived to dazzle the reader with strangeness, but the Bridge novels are set in the near future—so near they read like alternate history, Gibson says, with evident pride. With his next books, he began to write about the present-day, or more precisely, the recent past: each of the three novels in the series is set in the year before it was written. He started with September 11, 2001.
Pattern Recognition was the first of that series. It has been called “an eerie vision of our time” by The New Yorker, “one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century,” by The Washington Post Book World, and, by The Economist, “probably the best exploration yet of the function and power of product branding and advertising in the age of globalization.” The Pattern Recognition books are also the first since Mona Lisa Overdrivein which Gibson’s characters speak of cyberspace, and they speak of it elegiacally. “I saw it go from the yellow legal pad to the Oxford English Dictionary,” he tells me. “But cyberspace is everywhere now, having everted and colonized the world. It starts to sound kind of ridiculous to speak of cyberspace as being somewhere else.”
You can tell the term still holds some magic for him, perhaps even more so now that it is passing into obsolescence. The opposite is true for cyberpunk, a neologism that haunts him to this day. On a short walk to lunch one afternoon, from the two-story mock-Tudor house where he lives with his wife, Deborah, he complained about a recent visit from a British journalist, who came to Vancouver searching for “Mr. Cyberpunk” and was disappointed to find him ensconced in a pleasantly quiet suburban patch of central Vancouver. Mr. Cyberpunk seemed wounded by having his work pigeonholed, but equally so by the insult to his home, which is quite comfortable, and his neighborhood, which is, too. “We like it quiet,” he explained.
—David Wallace-Wells
INTERVIEWER
What’s wrong with cyberpunk?
GIBSON
A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
INTERVIEWER
What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do?
GIBSON
I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.
I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a novel?
GIBSON
I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
INTERVIEWER
You won’t have planned beyond that one sentence?
GIBSON
No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.
E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.
INTERVIEWER
Do you take notes?
GIBSON
I take the position that if I can forget it, it couldn’t have been very good.
But in the course of a given book, I sometimes get to a point where the narrative flow overwhelms the speed at which I can compose. So I’ll sometimes stop and make cryptic notes that are useless by the time I get back to them. Underlined three times, with no context—“Have they been too big a deal?”
INTERVIEWER
What is your writing schedule like?
GIBSON
When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
INTERVIEWER
And your schedule is steady the whole way through?
GIBSON
As I move through the book it becomes more demanding. At the beginning, I have a five-day workweek, and each day is roughly ten to five, with a break for lunch and a nap. At the very end, it’s a seven-day week, and it could be a twelve-hour day.
Toward the end of a book, the state of composition feels like a complex, chemically altered state that will go away if I don’t continue to give it what it needs. What it needs is simply to write all the time. Downtime other than simply sleeping becomes problematic. I’m always glad to see the back of that.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise?
GIBSON
Every day, when I sit down with the manuscript, I start at page one and go through the whole thing, revising freely.
INTERVIEWER
You revise the whole manuscript every day?
GIBSON
I do, though that might consist of only a few small changes. I’ve done that since my earliest attempts at short stories. It would be really frustrating for me not to be able to do that. I would feel as though I were flying blind.
The beginnings of my books are rewritten many times. The endings are only a draft or three, and then they’re done. But I can scan the manuscript very quickly, much more quickly than I could ever read anyone else’s prose.
INTERVIEWER
Does your assessment of the work change, day by day?
GIBSON
If it were absolutely steady I don’t think it could be really good judgment. I think revision is hugely underrated. It is very seldom recognized as a place where the higher creativity can live, or where it can manifest. I think it was Yeats who said that literary revision was the only place in life where a man could truly improve himself.
INTERVIEWER
How much do you write in a typical day?
GIBSON
I don’t know. I used to make printouts at every stage, just to be comforted by the physical fact of the pile of manuscript. It was seldom more than five manuscript pages. I was still doing that with Pattern Recognition, out of nervousness that all the computers would die and take my book with them. I was printing it out and sending it to first readers by fax, usually beginning with the first page. I’m still sending my output to readers every day. But I’ve learned to just let it live in the hard drive, and once I’d quit printing out the daily output, I lost track.
INTERVIEWER
For a while it was often reported, erroneously, that you typed all your books on a typewriter.
GIBSON
I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, “This changes everything!” I said, “What?” He said, “My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!” I said, “Why?” He said, “Automation—it automates the process of writing!” I’ve never gone back.
But I had only been using a typewriter because I’d gotten one for free and I was poor. In 1981, most people were still writing on typewriters. There were five large businesses in Vancouver
INTERVIEWER
For someone who so often writes about the future of technology, you seem to have a real romance for artifacts of earlier eras.
GIBSON
It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City New York
My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.
INTERVIEWER
Was television a big deal in your childhood?
GIBSON
I can remember my father bringing home our first set—this ornate wooden cabinet that was the size of a small refrigerator, with a round cathode-ray picture tube and wooden speaker grilles over elaborate fabric. Like a piece of archaic furniture, even then. Everybody would gather around at a particular time for a broadcast—a baseball game or a variety show or something. And then it would go back to a mandala that was called a test pattern, or nothing—static.
We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did something—did everything—to us, and that now we aren’t the same, though broadcast television, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence of broadcast television, but I can’t tell what it did to us because I became that which watched broadcast television.
The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like growing up in Wytheville , Virginia
GIBSON
Wytheville was a small town. I wasn’t a very happy kid, but there were aspects of the town that delighted me. It was rather short on books, though. There was a rotating wire rack of paperbacks at the Greyhound station on Main Street
My parents were both from Wytheville. They eventually got together, though rather late for each of them. My father had been married previously, and my mother was probably regarded as a spinster. My mother’s family had been in Wytheville forever and was quite well-off and established, in a very small-town sort of way. My father’s father had moved down from Pennsylvania
My mother had had some college, which was unusual for a young woman in that part of the world, but she hadn’t married, which was basically all a woman of her class was supposed to do. When she did eventually marry my father, he was the breadwinner. He had had some college, too, had studied engineering, which enabled him to wind up working postwar for a big construction company. My earliest memories are of moving from project to project, every year or so, as this company built Levittown-like suburbs in Tennessee and North Carolina
INTERVIEWER
And as these projects were being built you would live in one of the houses?
GIBSON
We did, in these rather sadly aspirational ranch-style houses within brand-new, often unoccupied suburbs. It was right at the beginning of broadcast television, and the world on television was very much the world of that sort of house, and of the suburb. It was a vision of modernity, and I felt part of that.
But my father was often away—he traveled constantly on business trips. When I was about six, he left on one business trip and died. Within a week, my mother and I were back in Wytheville.
INTERVIEWER
How did he die?
GIBSON
It’s odd the way families try to help people grieve—it doesn’t always work out. I was told at the time that he had died of a heart attack. Then later, I began to think, You know, he was young—that’s pretty scary! Twenty years later somebody said to me, Actually, he choked on something in a restaurant. It was a Heimlich maneuver death prior to the Heimlich maneuver.
It was a hugely traumatic loss, and not just because I’d lost my father. In Wytheville, I felt I wasn’t in that modern world anymore. I had been living in a vision of the future, and then suddenly I was living in a vision of the past. There was television, but the world outside the window could have been the 1940s or the 1930s or even the 1900s, depending on which direction you looked. It was a very old-fashioned place.
Towns like that in the South were virtually tribal in those days. Everything was about who your kin were. I was this weird alienated little critter who wasn’t even that into his own kin. I was shy and withdrawn. I just wanted to stay in my room and read books and watch television, or go to the movies.
INTERVIEWER
What drew you to that stuff?
GIBSON
It was a window into strangeness. Any kind of foreign material got my interest, anything that wasn’t from the United States
My mother got me an omnibus Sherlock Holmes for a tenth-birthday present and I loved it. I remember casting one particular brick building that I walked by every day as a building in Sherlock Holmes’s London London London
Part of my method for writing fiction grew out of that fundamental small-town lack of novelty. It caused me to develop an inference mechanism for imagining distant places. I would see, perhaps, a picture of a Sunbeam Alpine sports car and infer a life in England
it migrated into my early fiction, particularly where I would create an imaginary artifact in the course of writing and infer the culture that had produced it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think fiction should be predictive?
GIBSON
No, I don’t. Or not particularly. The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby, it seems to me. Used bookstores are full of visionary texts we’ve never heard of, usually for perfectly good reasons.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.
GIBSON
There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.
There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.
In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.
Of course, we might be Victorians, too.
INTERVIEWER
The Victorians invented science fiction.
GIBSON
I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.
INTERVIEWER
Were you hunting around for books as a kid?
GIBSON
I knew what day of the month the truck would come and put new books on those wire racks around town, but sometimes I would just go anyway, on the off chance that I had missed something during the last visit. In those days you could have bought all of the paperback science fiction that was being published in the United States
A couple of times I found big moldering piles of old science fiction in junk shops and bought it all for a dollar and carted it home. These magazines were probably eight or ten years old, but to me they were ancient—it felt like they were from the nineteenth century. That there could be something in one of these magazines that was completely mind blowing was an amazing thing.
INTERVIEWER
What was so affecting about it?
GIBSON
It gave me an uncensored window into very foreign modes of thought. There was a lot of inherent cultural relativism in the science fiction I discovered then. It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to question anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own culture’s most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of—where else could I have gotten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick’s brain!
That wasn’t the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn’t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J. G. Ballard.
And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn’t know, your parents didn’t know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn’t have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.
INTERVIEWER
Who were the writers that were most important to you?
GIBSON
Alfred Bester was among the first dozen science-fiction writers I read when I was twelve years old, and I remember being amazed, doing my own science-fiction-writer reconnaissance work a decade or two later, that someone I had discovered that young still seemed to me to be so amazing.
Bester had been doing it in the fifties—a Madison Avenue hepcat who had come into science fiction with a bunch of Joyce under his belt. He built his space-opera future out of what it felt like to be young and happening in New York, in the creative end of the business world in 1955. The plotlines were pulp and gothic and baroque, but what I loved most was the way it seemed to be built out of something real and complex and sophisticated. I hadn’t found that in a lot of other science fiction.
INTERVIEWER
What other writing interested you then?
GIBSON
Fritz Leiber was another culturally sophisticated American science-fiction writer—unusually sophisticated. Samuel Delany, too. I was a teenager, just thirteen or fourteen, reading novels Delany had written as a teenager—that was incredible to me.
I started reading so-called adult science fiction when I was eleven or twelve, and by the time I was fourteen or fifteen I had already moved on, into other kinds of fiction, but somewhere in that very short period I discovered British science fiction and what was at that time called British New Wave science fiction, led, it seemed to me, by J. G. Ballard.
There was a kind of literary war underway between the British New Wave people and the very conservative American science-fiction writers—who probably wouldn’t even have thought of themselves as very conservative—saying, That’s no good, you can’t do that, you don’t know how to tell a story, and besides you’re a communist. I remember being frightened by that rhetoric. It was the first time I ever saw an art movement, I suppose.
When I decided to try to write myself, in my late twenties, I went out and bought a bunch of newer science fiction—I hadn’t been reading the stuff for a long while. It was incredibly disappointing. That window to strangeness just didn’t seem to be there anymore. It was like, when I was twelve there was country blues, and when I’m twenty-six there’s plastic Nashville
INTERVIEWER
When did you encounter the Beats?
GIBSON
More or less the same time I found science fiction, because I found the Beats when the idea of them had been made sufficiently mainstream that there were paperback anthologies on the same wire rack at the bus station. I remember being totally baffled by one Beat paperback, an anthology of short bits and excerpts from novels. I sort of understood what little bits of Kerouac were in this thing—I could read him—but then there was William S. Burroughs and excerpts from Naked Lunch I thought, What the heck is that? I could tell that there was science fiction, somehow, in Naked Lunch. Burroughs had cut up a lot of pulp-noir detective fiction, and he got part of his tonality from science fiction of the forties and the fifties. I could tell it was kind of like science fiction, but that I didn’t understand it.
INTERVIEWER
Was Dick important to you?
GIBSON
I was never much of a Dick fan. He wrote an awful lot of novels, and I don’t think his output was very even. I loved The Man in the High Castle, which was the first really beautifully realized alternate history I read, but by the time I was thinking about writing myself, he’d started publishing novels that were ostensibly autobiographical, and which, it seems to me, he probably didn’t think were fiction.
Pynchon worked much better for me than Dick for epic paranoia, and he hasn’t yet written a book in which he represents himself as being in direct contact with God. I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America America , you wind up with Chandler Chandler ’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler Chandler
But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler Chandler Chandler
But I don’t think that writers are very reliable witnesses when it comes to influences, because if one of your sources seems woefully unhip you are not going to cite it. When I was just starting out people would say, Well, who are your influences? And I would say, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Those are true, to some extent, but I would never have said Len Deighton, and I suspect I actually learned more for my basic craft reading Deighton’s early spy novels than I did from Burroughs or Ballard or Pynchon.
I don’t know if it was Deighton or John le Carré who, when someone asked them about Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for years. I was really interested in that idea. Here’s Fleming, with this classist, late–British Empire pulp fantasy about a guy who wears fancy clothes and beats the shit out of bad guys who generally aren’t white, while driving expensive, fast cars, and he’s a spy, supposedly, and this is selling like hotcakes. Deighton and Le Carré come along and completely reverse it, in their different ways, and get a really powerful charge out of not offering James Bond. You’ve got Harry Palmer and George Smiley, neither of whom are James Bond, and people are willing to pay good money for them not to be James Bond.
INTERVIEWER
Were you happy in Wytheville?
GIBSON
I was miserable, but I probably would have been anywhere. I spent a year or two being increasingly weird and depressed. I was just starting to get countercultural signals. It’s almost comical, in retrospect—1966 in this small Southern town, and I’m like a Smiths fan or something, this mopey guy who likes to look at fashion magazines but isn’t gay. I was completely out of place, out of time. None of it was particularly dramatic, but I’m sure it was driving my mother crazy. Pretty soon I had become so difficult and hard to get out of bed that I let myself be packed off to a boys’ boarding school in Tucson
INTERVIEWER
Were you close with your mother?
GIBSON
She was difficult. She was literate—she was actually a compulsive reader, and really respected the idea of writing—and she was very encouraging of any artistic impulses I might have had. Writers were her heroes, and that made her kind of a closeted freak in that town. She was one of maybe ten people who had a subscription to the Sunday New York Times.
But she was also an incredibly anxious, fearful, neurotic person, and I would imagine she was pretty much constantly depressed, except that depression didn’t exist in those days, people were just “down” or “difficult.” But she was a chronically depressed, anxiety-ridden single parent who wanted nothing more than to read novels, chain-smoke Camels, and drink bad coffee all day long. There are worse things a parent can do, but it was still hard.
INTERVIEWER
Were you in Arizona
GIBSON
I was still in school, but not for much longer. I was sufficiently upset, after she died, that they wound up sending me home after a couple of months. But I didn’t get along with my relatives, so my mother’s best friend and her husband finally took me in. This was a woman who’d been my mother’s literary buddy all her life. She was the only other person in town who cared about modern literature, as far as I knew. It was lifesaving for me, because it gave me somewhere I could be where the people I was with weren’t trying to figure out how to get me into the army.
INTERVIEWER
Had you already decided to avoid the draft?
GIBSON
I’m not sure what would have happened if I had been drafted. I was not the most tightly wrapped package at that time, and I think it would have depended on the day I got the draft notice. I suspect I would have been equally capable of saying, Fuck it, I’m going to Vietnam
I never did get drafted, but I went off to Canada Toronto
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
GIBSON
I didn’t belong. I hadn’t made their decision. And I found them too sad, too angry. Some of their families had disowned them. They could feel, I guessed, that they’d brought dishonor on their families by resisting the draft. Some of these were people who had no intention of ever leaving the United States
It was 1967, and the world was in the middle of some sort of secular millenarian convulsion. Young people thought everything would change in some Rapture-like way. Nobody knew what it was going to be like, but everybody knew that pretty soon everything would be different.
INTERVIEWER
Did you?
GIBSON
I do remember thinking that the world I was seeing around me probably was going to be very different in relatively short order. But I didn’t assume that it would necessarily be better.
I had become interested at some point, before I got to Toronto
INTERVIEWER
Congeal?
GIBSON
Like bacon fat in the bottom of the pan. It was ghastly—the nuked psychic ruins of 1967.
INTERVIEWER
And how were you passing the time?
GIBSON
I was one of those annoying people who know they are going to do something in the arts, but never do anything about it. But then, in 1967 and 1968, if you were a part of the secular millenarian movement, even on the fringes, you basically didn’t do anything, you just got up in the morning and walked around, and figured out what you had to do to make that happen again the next day—where you were going to sleep and what could be done to pay the rent. Soon, the hippie rapture would happen and it would all be okay. In the meantime you just hung out. While I suspected that wasn’t really sustainable, I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
I had been hugely fond of Toronto
INTERVIEWER
You met your wife in Toronto
GIBSON
I took her coffee one morning. I was staying at my friend’s place, and he had spent the night with some woman and didn’t want to get out of bed, so he called to me and asked me to make them some coffee. I said sure, I made them some coffee, brought it up on a tray, and there was my wife.
After we had been together for a while, I began complaining about the weather in Toronto Vancouver
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