XPress: What are your impressions of Ottawa? Have you visited
the city before?
William Gibson: I've never been here before. It seems like a more
pleasant place than I would have expected of a 'company town'.
There are an awful lot of people walking around looking like my
idea of Canadian bureaucrats but I suppose that's to be expected.
X: With Virtual Light you've taken a more different, subtle
approach to writing, do you feel the book is significantly
different than what you've written before?
WG: When I gave the publisher the proposal for it a couple of
years ago I said it was supposed to be like an Elmore Leonard
novel set in the early twenty-first century. It also has a lot of
peculiar agendas running simultaneously, one of them being to
deconstruct and poke fun at a lot of my earlier work or at least
a perception of it. I don't think it's too much of a departure -
I'm really happy with how it turned out.
X: There was never any pressure to write a more
technology-oriented novel from the publisher, like writing
another hook-filled story like Neuromancer?
WG: I'm sure it would have delighted the publishers, but no, I
don't want to write Neuromancer again. I think it would be great
if somebody wrote Neuromancer for the 90s, as long as it doesn't
have to be *me*.
(cut was a follow-up - did Gibson feel that Neal Stephenson had
achieved that distinction? His reply: He's capable of it, but
Gibson didn't like it when he felt that in _Snow Crash_, Stephenson
was intent on telling him how much he knew about computers)
X: How about other writing friends of yours? Anyone in the
Vancouver area, like Doug Coupland, or perhaps Nick Bantock or
Brian Fawcett?
WG: No, the only one I know is Coupland, and I've only known him
for a couple of months, I didn't even realize that he *lived* in
Vancouver. When I started writing in 1976, I didn't have any
friends in Vancouver who were like Vancouver writers. Coupland is
a wonderful guy, he's a relentlessly creative individual, he's
always making something, a lot of art, particularly, he takes it
as seriously as his writing. Last time I saw him he was making
life-sized human skulls out of white Lego bricks, very very
detailed and amazing.
X: Do you have a final answer to 'is the cyberpunk phenomenon
dead, should it ever have existed'?
