Tag Archives: William Gibson

Found Objects

Yesterday my Mr and I went to see a conversation with William Gibson and Cory Doctorow at the Vancouver Writers’ Fest. We left in (I thought) plenty of time, knowing that the parking situation is always dreadful at Granville Island, and never more so than on a (somewhat) sunny Saturday afternoon. The tickets had a very ominous NO LATECOMERS stamped on them, so we were getting a bit nervous as the clock ticked toward 2:00 and we were still searching.

In the end, of course, we found a spot (a free one, even!) and zoomed along to the venue. There were very few seats left, but we found two near the back. Unfortunately I could see one or another small head only intermittently, depending on the positioning of several people in the rows ahead of me, but we were able to hear pretty well since the speakers were miked.

The conversation began with Bill and Cory talking about book tours, and I tweeted a few things that Bill said. They also discussed lots of other stuff, and it was a very lively and interesting discussion. A particularly engaging and unexpected tale for many of us was when Bill told a story about his childhood. To satisfy the curiosity of a few pals, I will try to convey the sense of it here, since twitter’s character limit doesn’t really work well to convey The Gibson’s storytelling style. With all apologies to the teller.

As a child in the 1950s, in a certain swampy area of the South, WG used to play with a pal in a big old house, which had belonged many years past to the pal’s wealthy great-grandparents. This house was no longer lived in, but was still full of all kinds of stuff, and was the site of many a game of Hide and Seek, and Cops and Robbers, and Cowboys and Indians.

So it happened one day, in the seemingly neverending quest to open every drawer in the house (the drawers being filled with all manner of curious things), in the “second-best guest bedroom” or so, that they came upon a nightstand drawer that held something like 30 small guns. Tiny, variously one-shot and two-shot, ornate, filigreed, and curious, that once had held bullets of forgotten calibres.

This of course was a treasure trove for two young boys, and over the years, Bill and his pal both kept a couple of these small, strange guns.

So as Bill told it, these guns remained a mystery to him for years, and then one day decades later, he ran into the sister of his old friend, and somehow the conversation turned so that Bill asked the sister, “So, what was the story with all those Saturday Night Specials in the drawer of that old house?”

And she responded, “Oh! those were the guns of suicides!”

And Cory Doctorow exclaimed as though he had been punched in the gut. As did many of us in the audience.

Because the wealthy homeowner of olden days had been a family lawyer, often called to scenes of death; and he had collected these terrible objects, and kept them out of sight.

Cory was entirely gutted, and instructed Bill to tell another story as he was, at that point, incapable of speaking.

And that is a pale retelling of the story of the Suicide Guns of William Gibson.

On being a fan. [Expanded version]

While I am far from being as OCD and committed a fan as many I know, I think I have a fairly good handle on what it means to be a fan.

I tend to be a completist, even for artists or writers that aren’t my very favourites, as much as my wallet will allow. So even though I don’t actually have every single thing that Radiohead has released, I managed (largely through a stroke of eBay) to accumulate something like 30? 40? separate titles in my iTunes. O, CD singles! I have seen them live many times, and will see them again next time they’re in the neighbourhood.

I am enough of a fan to read things that cross my path about things I’m interested in, although not necessarily committed enough to go out of my way to track down MOAR. This, I think, is largely a function of age, since not that long ago I was staying up all night in the interest of obtaining Radiohead tickets. These days, there aren’t many things I find that much more interesting than a good night’s sleep, especially on a school night.

I think I have read nearly everything that William Gibson has published since I became aware of him in the mid-late 80s (I think it was then, because I’m pretty confident I had read Neuromancer while I was at university, but I’m just not 100% sure), barring Agrippa, which is a self-destructing anomaly of a work from what I gather, with a (necessarily) limited audience. So I don’t feel bad about that. [Edited to add that Agrippa is available under the SOURCE CODE button on williamgibsonbooks.com, I've been informed. BAD FAN!!] I have all the novels, though, and have read most of the articles and essays, although some of them only recently with the release of the new collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor. And then because I’m fortunate enough to live in the same city he does, I usually get to see him speak/read on his book tours, although the number of authors I’ve bothered to go see live so far in my life can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Gibson, Douglas Coupland, and Michael Ondaatje, and then Neil Gaiman as an adjunct to his adorable wife, Amanda Palmer, whom I find fascinating.

So I’m not a really die-hard author groupie or anything like that, but I do read quite a lot. And I do read a fair number of “male” oriented books, if that’s a valid term, and I don’t read a particularly large number of “female” oriented books, for a female. (I read Tolkien and Hornblower and Ian Fleming and Conan-Doyle as a child/teen, as well as my Louisa May Alcotts and fairy books and Georgette Heyers and the odd bodice-ripper, for example, and my grown-up bookshelf has lots of Neal Stephenson and Gibson and Tom Clancy (till the politics intruded) and only a little Jilly Cooper corner (she is SO FUNNY) and then a lot of gender-neutral stuff like spy fiction (Le Carré and Ken Follett and Len Deighton) and lawyer stuff and “literary” fiction like Timothy Findley and Ondaatje.) I mean you are quite unlikely to ever catch me reading a Harlequin Romance, or these flimsy little “chick-lit” books you see at book stores’ cash registers. Nor am I a reader of “fantasy” as a genre, although the way those authors tend to have dozens of titles is attractive to me as a reader.

So when a girl at the Gibson reading the other night commented how there were so many females there as compared to, say, a Stephenson reading, and why did Gibson think that was the case? all I could think was, “Have you actually read any of Gibson’s books, and any of Stephenson’s?” because Gibson has had central, pivotal, strong female characters from the get-go, while Stephenson had pages and pages of … code. (I read Cryptonomicon first, so I tend to think of that as his first but of course it wasn’t. It still pretty much distills his themes, characters and style, though.) I like him well enough to have all of his stuff, and I read and re-read it, but it’s not as exciting and sexy to quite as many people as, well, Molly, is it? (and Tally Isham and Mona and Chevette and Chia Pet McKenzie and Hollis Henry and Cayce and and and!) (And my Mr has reminded me of several female Stephenson characters, like Nell and YT, and the one from System of the World, whose name I can’t think of, and we discussed this at dinner tonight, and sort of came to the conclusion that we both liked Gibson’s females better (nothing personal, YT!) and that even the SOTW one slept her way to where she went in spite of her prodigious brain power and financial wizardry, which, we agreed, while perhaps accurate to the time, was distasteful nonetheless.)

Anyway, to me it’s no mystery why there are fewer women at Stephenson readings than at Gibson readings, in spite of some really entertaining work on both sides. Although Gibson himself said that his audiences used to be basically all-male as well. Which then leads me to think about my friend Portia, who encouraged me to read Neuromancer in the 80s, and later Cryptonomicon, for that matter. She has always been plugged into the Sci Fi scene, and has been my tastemaker in these matters for decades. She also introduced me to Gaiman’s stuff, I think, long ago? anyway, I owe her a massive debt, obviously. She made me go to SIGGRAPH because SIGGRAPHs were full of smart geeky boys, and we both like smart geeky boys. And also, well, awesome computers and art and amazing parties and swag and stuff. So I was a billion times less branché than she, but I suppose we were pretty damn cool and kind of unusual for liking that kind of stuff, but I mean it seemed like such obvious stuff to like! and still does, to me.

On another note, someone else at the reading was asking a very long and convoluted question peppered with “clever” neologisms and simply fraught with drama about, basically, what Gibson thinks about the consumerist culture and never-ending need for new, better gadgets, and whether he felt guilty about possibly contributing to that or something.

And he was incredibly polite and considered in his answer, as he always is. (I would lose my mind if I had to answer the same questions as often as he does. The man is as gracious as a human being can be, I do believe.)

I would have said, “Well, if you read Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History, you’ll see that my protagonists tend to be allergic to labels and not terribly fond of, let alone enslaved by, gadgetry, while Hubertus Bigend is constantly, conspicuously, and rather unappealingly consuming basically everything at a level higher than most. So, no, I don’t feel guilty.”

Gibson has always struck me as the type of person to have one or two choice items rather than one of everything, in their dozens, one after the other, and I got that impression from his text long before I had seen him live and in person, and had that sense confirmed.

So but whatever. Sum of all of this is that I feel old, and unusually perceptive but I know the second part of that isn’t actually true :p I have read and re-read the canon, to the point that I am reasonably confident I have a sense of it, and its author. And while I’m not normally particularly articulate about it, I can say that I’m a fan, and proud to be so.

 

If somehow you are reading this and don’t read Gibson, you really should fix that. Start with the new non-fiction collection, even. If you’re going to start with Neuromancer, which really is a great book and deserved all of its awards IMO, see if you can somehow temporarily strip your brain of the intervening nearly 30 years of popular culture, because all that shit was not a cliché back then. I mean, truly. If that feels impossible and you suspect you’d make a face when you got to Trinity’s progenitor (and I mean, she is so much cooler and more complete a character than Trinity), start with Pattern Recognition, which sucked in a whole new generation of fans.

If you’d like some female-authored “speculative fiction” as they tend to call it these days, Lauren Beukes is a South African author about whom Gibson tweets, whose work I have enjoyed. I was introduced to Kate Griffin by a Gibson Board friend, and while I find her stuff a bit uneven, I think it’s worth reading and look forward to whatever comes next.

Listen to this!

My friend Peter Darling, whom some of my readers have met, lives in Seattle. We first met because we were in  a “tribe” of William Gibson fans on tribe.net, many moons ago. In any case, Pete and I met up IRL and have kept in some kind of touch ever since, and he and his wife Cecilie have come up to Vancouver a few times, and my MD and I have gone and seen them in Seattle too. They are smart and cool people with excellent taste in music :D

Pete is a writer, and has been working on a novel for some time; I had the privilege of being an early reader. (Pete has fewer spelling errors per thousand words than just about anyone I’ve ever read, FWIW.) He’s published it now, as an e-book on Barnes & Noble. I can’t recommend it enough, because IMO he writes very well, and it’s a good and interesting story. I’m seriously excited to read it again, tweaked and tightened as no doubt it has been.

He’s also joined twitter at @petercdarling so follow him there if you like; he’s started blogging again (he always had a great blog!) and the link is over here on the right.

Anyway, Pete didn’t ask me to give him props or anything, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather see sell a bunch of books and get some well-deserved acclaim.

Well I’ve changed it.

Less Pepto-Bismol, which I’m sure some of you will like; more black, which I surprisingly am not all that crazy about.

Much more “standard” which I really am annoyed about, but I don’t have the time to tweak everything. I got sick of the previous iteration and the damn theme I used to have and had tweaked to my absolute satisfaction, I was conspicuously unable to adjust, in spite of RingTFM and following forum instructions. So fuck it.

Now that’s my morning gone, and I have much shopping/cooking etc to do.

Have a lovely week! we have a few things going on, a few of which have to do with William Gibson’s appearances at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival.

Distractions

So my sub-head includes the words “easily distracted” and I wanted to share a roundabout example of the things I am so easily distracted by.

The Main Distractor and I went to brunch yesterday, a place close by as he is on call this weekend and liable to be called to the laptop for hours at a time, fixing mysterious things. It had recently come up, prompted by my looking at a map (DANGEROUS!) that if we had, you know, all the money we could want and all the free time that would magically materialize if we had all the money we could want, we’d like to go on holiday to somewhere in, say, the South Pacific or Indian Ocean or something, one of those palpably foreign kinds of places. There was an ad on the TV for some Julia Roberts movie that had a tie-in contest to go to Bali, and so I started exploring Bali destinations on my iPhone. This was all mode more tricky by the fact that I don’t care to go somewhere with chancy politics, likelihood of a coup, or that exploits its people like serfs. Complicated still more as my knowledge of the politics of this part of the world is sketchy at best :p (“Let’s go to Fiji!” “OK.” “Oh wait, their politics are terrible, we can’t go there.” “OK.” “Oh, let’s go to Tahiti! Gauguin! but you would fall in love with a beautiful woman and not care about me any more!” “They speak French there. I don’t speak the language.” “You could learn! I speak French!” “Let’s go to Hawaii. I speak English.” “Hawaii had a royal family who were treated terribly, I think.”) This all led to some semi-serious research in that while there are lots of $500/day hotels in Bali and environs, there are also some that are a little more accessible for the likes of us, although the airfare makes a trip to Europe look cheap.

One of the hotels I found had a pet elephant, and looking a little more, I found several hotels in Indonesia and in India that have either house elephants or proximity to nature reserve elephants or a sort of elephant show, which certainly startled me. I couldn’t and still can’t decide whether this is a good thing, I mean saving the poor loves from starving or being poached is clearly a good thing, but confinement and exploitation are somewhat in the eye of the beholder and potentially quite different from the POV of the elephants. So I’m not sure what to think, although I know I would be completely enchanted to meet an elephant. (There’s so much you can learn/when you’re on a pachyderm!)

Another bit of travel that we are unable to complete just now, but which I cross my fingers for a massive cash infusion more than usual just at the moment, is to go to London in early October in order to attend a William Gibson Board mass meat-up in celebration of the release of his newest, Zero History (available for pre-order now at the usual places! or go buy it September 7 at your local indie bookseller!). Friends met and unmet will be there, and I haven’t been to London in far too long. So I looked at London hotels, and came up with a good few that I would love to stay in. It’s always tricky with the budget-no-object places though, since while I have a certain tolerance for frou frou and baroque whatnot before my eyes start rolling, the Main Distractor’s uniform of choice–baggy shorts and a concert t-shirt–tends not to fit in snooty surroundings, and there’s a limit on how often I can ask him to wear long pants, basically. Not that my wardrobe is stylish enough for 5-star London hotels, either! but I would be willing to upgrade if the need became apparent :D

In any case, if the gods smile on us and we’re able to suddenly take off first class to LHR (between $5K and $15K per person, depending on airline and desirability of the itinerary), we have a choice of two suitable suites available on the desired dates (one at £6K or so for the week, and one at £11K or so). I will let him choose without showing him the prices :D (The thing is, they’re far from the most expensive digs available. The other thing is, that if the many zeroes in my bank balance all appeared to the right of a whole number, rather than to the left, I would be perfectly fine with spending practically a year’s salary for a week in London in order to catch up with friends :) but I’m crazy that way, I guess.)

And that’s how I end up knowing things like the fact that there are elephant hotels, and the Savoy won’t re-open from its 2.5 year renovation ordeal until just after we would want to stay there (I took my parents to tea at the Savoy a few years ago, and loved it), and the Dorchester will prepare you a Champagne picnic basket so you can dine al fresco, and Brown’s (where I have also had tea) is really terrifyingly expensive to stay at although proximity to Smythson’s makes it a seductive location nonetheless, and the really top shelf places don’t check you in at a front desk, but apparently whisk you directly to your room (to spare you the inconvenience/humiliation of queuing in public, perhaps?), and while I don’t mind the Paddington Express, I think it would be rather nice to ride into town in a fancy car from Heathrow sometime, as I’ve never done it.

Because one should always be prepared for any eventuality, however remote.