William Gibson in conversation with Cory Doctorow

William Gibson on 'Zero History', in conversation with Cory Doctorow

04 Oct 2010

Speakers: William Gibson

Why Now?

In the post Big Brother world, genuine counterculture struggles to take a foothold against high speed media saturation. With the all consuming mainstream co-opting any trend from the ‘street’ in its relentless quest for the next ‘thing’, it has never been harder to see where the next cultural or technological revolution will spring from.

Legendary Canadian author and counterculture icon William Gibson is often hailed as a visionary and prophet, though he would dissuade readers from the latter. Gibson has been at the cutting edge of ‘future cool’ since being credited with inventing the term ‘Cyberspace’ in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer. Since then he has predicted the rise of reality TV and his novels, featuring their nascent mix of alternative futures and amplified presents. His writing continues to inspire fervent discussion as readers try to pick out signposts to the future.

In his latest work, Zero History, Gibson revisits the murky world of the mysterious Blue Ant ad agency, pitching its characters into a paranoia sodden, post-crash London. As the main characters seek to interact with the technological and brand saturation that permeates modern life, Gibson further explores his longstanding interest in how people act around new technologies, and how they can be manipulated for profit and control.

Gibson is a serial Trilogist, with Zero History representing the closing chapter in what could be described as a Trilogy of Trilogies. What began in Neuromancer – a prophetic vision of the dystopian, technological future and its potential impact on human behaviour – has slowly evolved through nine novels spanning three decades. Their themes suck Gibson’s visions of the future into a visceral present where technology has caught up, and even overtaken anything imaged in his early sci-fi stories. A great cultural recycler, who filters Beat Generation imagery through an ultra modern matrix, Gibson has never been more relevant as he reaches the apex of a 30 year literary journey.

Has technology gone too far? Do we drive technological advances, or is technology defining human behaviour? Can true counterculture exist with instant access such as constant Twitter and Facebook status updates? As Zero History hits the shelves, Intelligence Squared asked Gibson’s friend and collaborator Cory Doctorow to take to the stage in Cadogan Hall and quiz him on the world of the Blue Ant ad agency, a life in writing, the current state of subculture, what would happen if Goths discovered brown, and how now, more than ever, the future seems unwritten.

Event information:

This event took place at Cadogan Hall on 4th October 2010.

Full video is now available for Premium members and highlights will shortly be available for free on this page and on Youtube.

Full audio of the event is available on the player below, and can also be found on the IQ² podcast page.

There will also be an excerpt on YouTube.

Event information:

Whilst in London to promote his new book, Zero History, Intelligence Squared paired author William Gibson with popular blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow in a wide-ranging conversation that gives a fascinating insight into the mind of the man heralded as the “architect of cool”.

Kicking off with a summary of Zero History - not in terms of plot and themes, but regarding its genesis and place within ‘the Bigend trilogy’ - Gibson described the function of these three works (the other two being Pattern Recognition and Spook Country) as a ‘pinhole exposure of the first decade of the 21st century.’ The interesting thing, he stressed, is that he didn’t have to move the camera much - it’s the times that change, his lens just remains open. Indeed, Gibson repeatedly underlined the centrality of the present in his work - the title quotation is symptomatic of this - and stressed that good science fiction writing is based on looking at ‘all the things around you’ and finding ‘the ones with the most obvious legs to carry you into the future.’

Gibson reveals to Doctorow his earlier insecurities as a novelist, as although his books looked, were shaped, and provided an experience rather similar to reading a novel, he attributes many of the themes that emerged as only doing so once they had been scrutinised and responded to by his readers. Their conversation brims with enthusiasm for alternative cultures, be it Japanese, Victorian, or Bohemian, and flits from technology to child-rearing, skimming the surface of Gibson’s writing process on its way.

The pair discuss the commodification of Bohemia in all its guises, Doctorow suggesting that the only way to avoid having one’s subculture seized upon, popularized and, ultimately, inverted, is to be so outrageously offensive that it would never be accepted by the mainstream. Either way, neither speaker was left with much optimism regarding the future possibility of a genuine subculture. Gibson concluded that we are now left with only ‘splinters of Bohemia,’ the violation of which seems almost complete in a world where ‘the way D. H. Lawrence looked is…much more important than what D.H. Lawrence wrote.’