William Gibson Serves Up Zero History

William Gibson focused on the future in Neuromancer . Now he's helping us make sense of the present

By Lev Grossman Saturday, Sept. 18, 2010
    • Christopher Morris / Corbis

    Gibson's 10 novels have focused on how we interact with technology.

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    Neuromancer won every major science-fiction award and became the first novel of a series informally known as the Sprawl trilogy. The Sprawl books were followed by a second trilogy, set in 2006 — which, when it was published in the mid-1990s, was still the future. Gibson's new novel, Zero History , is his 10th, and the third in a trilogy that is set more or less now. Its heroine is a woman named Hollis Henry, who was once an indie rock star and is now, in early middle age, a little bit lost. Hollis' employer is a man named Hubertus Bigend — Gibson enjoys names — who specializes in spotting trends, latent data patterns in the culture, and has built a colossal fortune betting on the next big thing. Hubertus has taken an interest in a fashion label so infinitely cool that nobody even knows who the designer behind it is. He sends Hollis to find out.

    The joke of Zero History , although it's only half a joke, is that while the novel is plotted like a high-tech thriller, a lot of the action revolves around clothes; the characters treat a pair of jeans as if they were bleeding-edge skunk-works military gear. Which, if you follow the strange mirror logic of the information economy, as Gibson does, makes a certain kind of sense. In an age when information circulates so rapidly and uncontrollably, secrets, and the dark niches where they reside, are increasingly rare. Under such conditions, the extreme reaches of aesthetic coolness and the bolt-holes of military black ops increasingly resemble each other.

    Often in Zero History , Gibson slo-mos the action simply to describe, precisely and expressively, the way people handle and work with objects. In doing so, he brings into the domain of literature the mundane technological interactions that have become part of our daily lives: "British electricity," one character notes, "was some brutal other breed, their plugs three-pronged, massive, wall sockets often equipped with their own little switches, a particularly ominous belt-and-suspenders touch."

    It's a basic tenet of science fiction that our tools shape us as much as we shape them, and for that reason, Gibson likes to keep a watchful eye on our tools. "It can be dismissed as trivial or superficial or an obsession with surfacey things," he says. "But I don't think we're actually seeing the surface of things. I think we're seeing cultural code."

    Gibson isn't writing about the future anymore, as he did in Neuromancer . He is writing about the present as if it were the future — as if he were a time traveler to whom everything seems fresh and new and strange. (Or as if he were a shy, orphaned kid from a tiny town in the Appalachians.) This, more than an ability to make educated guesses about the future, is his gift. He's the first to point out what he got wrong in Neuromancer : nobody in the book has a cell phone, for example. And cyberspace hasn't turned out to be much of a space at all — it remains stubbornly two-dimensional, trapped in the flat plane of the browser. If anything, it has entered our space, via mobile devices and augmented reality, rather than the other way round. "My guess has always been that the thing our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we made the distinction between here and the Internet," Gibson says. "'Here' has been colonized by what used to be the other place."

    If anything, what Gibson has is a sense of the past — the past that our present is constantly, relentlessly, irreversibly becoming. He floats the idea that he might return to writing science fiction next, but he also throws out the idea of writing something set during the Civil War. "I always took it for granted that I was living in somebody else's past," he says. "And somebody else's future. And that my position on the time line was where it was. But in my imagination? I could move both ways."

    This article originally appeared in the September 13, 2010 issue of Time magazine.

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