FIGHT THE FUTURE

Escape From The Future: He created modern science fiction, way back in 1984. Now, for the first time, his new novel is set in the present. Has the future finally caught up with William Gibson? (Barry Didcock, 4/28/03, Sunday Herald)

It's hard to get very far into a conversation with Gibson before Neuromancer crops up. Like his friend and fellow Vancouverite Douglas Coupland, who wrote Generation X and will be forever reminded of the fact, Gibson will always be known as the man who coined the phrase cyberspace, who wrote about the internet years before anyone else, and who penned one of the greatest opening sentences in post-war fiction: 'The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.'

Writing in a 10th anniversary edition of Neuromancer, Gibson cited his influences as Galaxy (a 1950s sci-fi comic), the poetry of the Beats and the Velvet Underground, whom he first heard in Canada, having skipped the US to escape the Vietnam draft. These were 'the parcels of incoming mail' he reassembled into that novel. Believe that if you will.

Do believe, however, that its power is undiminished in fiction (the cyberpunk genre owes him everything) and, more relevant this month, in film. Read Neuromancer then watch The Matrix and say it isn't an almost straight lift.

Watching sci-fi films and spotting their Gibsonesque flourishes seems to have become something of a sport for the author in his Canadian eyrie. But despite the feeling that the makers of The Matrix may owe him rather more than a tip of the hat, he likes the film and laughs when I mention it. He had, he says, already made sly reference to it when we talked about Gibsonesque films earlier. (Not sly enough to actually name it, I note.)

'A couple of years before it was released someone had shown me the screenplay and said 'You'd better read this, it's quite a lot like your stuff.' But I couldn't read it, it actually didn't seem to be very well written.' So when the film appeared, he was prepared to hate it. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised.

'I really liked it and the subtext wasn't inherently repellent, which was something I'd been prepared to expect. I'd always loathed something about the subtext of the Star Wars movies, that kind of bad misreading of Joseph Campbell. So I'd been expecting something like that. But I hadn't been expecting a sort of gnostic parable of Being. I love science fiction films that are abundantly generous with the audience. It seemed to me to be a decent bit of popular art.' And besides, he adds, if it borrowed from anyone, it was Philip K Dick. What, even the leather? 'I have no patent on skin-tight latex,' he laughs.

In his NY Times review of Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive, Thomas M. Disch described "cyberpunk" this way:

Cyberpunk is the label under which some of of the younger science fiction writers of the 1980's have been marketing their wares, and as neologisms go it represents a fair description of their product. Cyberpunk sci-fi, in its ideal form, is compounded of two elements: a re-envisioning of the consensual future in terms not of space travel and other feats of mega-engineering but of a plastic (that is, wholly malleable) mental landscape that derives from the new possibilities of computer graphics; and punk style, in clothes, hair, sexuality and the abuse of controlled substances. Like punk rock, and like most traditional rocket-and-blaster science fiction, Cyberpunk caters to the wish-fulfillment requirements of male teen-agers...

The Matrix obviously plumbs these themes, but what's distinctive about it is that the engineered world is become a prison, a lie, from which the humans desperately wish to escape. At least that was the case in the first film, it will be interesting to see where the sequels take the story. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2003 8:09 AM