"maddox.interview" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Gibson - Agrippa)

through the lookinglass darkly, a strangely warped reflection in the left lens
of the author's mirrorshades... it doesn't matter which metaphor you use,
because the upshot of it all is that Gibson sees a blackness in our society
that very few people are anxious to hear about, much less do or say anything
about. So when someone picks up a Gibson novel which describes a world where
multinational corporations have more personality than the people they employ,
where the US navy "recruits" dolphins by hooking them on heroin, where people
would rather live vicariously through media personalities than cope with their
own lives, a little voice starts up in the back of their head. Our world isn't
like that at all. Oh no.

Bruce Fletcher (Virus 23 staff writer) and I met Gibson and Maddox in
Edmonton, where they were guest writers at ConText 89 (Gibson was the Guest of
Honor), and persuaded them to talk for several hours about many of the things
that make Gibson's work unique. My starting place was the Summer 1989 issue of
the Whole Earth Review, "Is the Body Obsolete?" [5]. In attempting to deal
with the question of bodily obsolescence, Whole Earth lays bare the
connections between most of the important work being done today in, well, in
just about every field you can imagine (and a few others): cybernetics,
theories of the body, downloading, feminist theory, artificial intelligence...
the list goes on and on. Essentially, this is the same weird collection of
oddities--gomi--that Gibson is so fond of. Sure, it's intellectualized gomi,
but gomi nonetheless. The section on Gibson himself falls right in the middle
of the magazine, acting (intentionally or not; there are no accidents, right?)
as the point where all the other articles converge. It seemed to me that a
natural place to begin an examination of Gibson's fiction would be the
exploration of some of these connections. Judging from the range of the topics
we covered in about 2 hours--many of which I've never seen mentioned in
another interview with Gibson--I think it worked pretty well.

What follows is a sliced, diced (and hopefully coherent; everyone
present was nursing a hangover) version of that conversation.

* * * * *

Darren Wershler-Henry: (Producing a copy of the Whole Earth Review, Summer
1989: "Is The Body Obsolete?") Have you seen this? It's a collection of a
whole bunch of different things that seem to crystallize around your work:
theories of the body, information theory; there's a piece on Survival Research
Laboratories [6], a list of the major influences on cyberpunk writers, and
(pointing out the interview entitled "Cyberpunk Era") they even did a
[William] Burroughs-style cut-up of your old interviews.

William Gibson: No... show it to me. (To Tom Maddox) Have you seen this? This
is really bizzarre. I wouldn't give them an interview so they cut up a bunch
of old interviews.

Tom Maddox: Who did this?

WG: Kevin Kelly. It's the Whole Earth Review.