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“No. The world she’ll live in is on the other side of
a technological singularity. There’s no way I can even
imagine it.”
No seat-of-the-pants fourth book, then. ATP is still a
satisfying conclusion, but it could have gone anywhere.
Many people were expecting a work on the Walled
City from Idoru, for example, yet Gibson bypassed it
to get straight to ATP, and the end of the world centred
around – yet again – San Francisco.
“The bridge was still more resonant, for me. More
fun writing about a physical construct, somehow. And
ATP seems to me to be about cyberspace everting itself
into the physical; about the boundaries starting to blur
from the other direction … Some of the most important
boundaries, to me, being about genre: is this SF, a
thriller, none of the above?
“The San Francisco thing probably has something
to do with it being on the West Coast but having the
core paradigm of a European city. It makes sense in
European terms; Los Angeles, for example, doesn’t.
SF is a city stressed by Postmodernity, rather than an
expression of Postmodernity such as LA.”
Yet Postmodernism is essential to Gibson’s work.
Throughout this series, for example, the media has
been portrayed as ever more sensationalist. How close
does he think we are to shows such as Slitscan actually
coming into being?
“In North America we’re well into tabloid TV, but
BUY William Gibson books online from and
our national print tabs are already way beyond that.
Difficult, if not impossible, to parody.”
But parodied they are, and ATP’s conclusion concerning
information flow is a dichotomy; on the one
hand, increased informational awareness will change
everything, and on the other it will change nothing (for
the majority of ‘ordinary’ people). Is this purposeful?
“The resolution of a dichotomy usually lies in apparent
paradox. But you’ve got your thumb on the book’s
heart, I think, and I can’t really explicate that for you.
Otherwise we’d be talking about a didactic fiction, and
I hope ATP isn’t that.”
Okay, time to stir up the nest. ATP essentially carries
the same message as Mona Lisa Overdrive – that pure
information (and artificial intelligence) will point the
way to society and mankind’s next evolutionary step.
Discuss.
“We seem to be – through genetics, now, mainly
– on the brink of taking ‘control’ of our own evolution.
That’s a matter of ‘pure information’, I suppose.
Though I seem to recall characters in an earlier book
who used the term ‘pure information’ rather than ‘lies’.
“But really I don’t see that as message so much as
mimetic. A depiction of what’s happening now.”
Perhaps inevitable, then, that the meme replicates
from book to book. So let’s get more specific. Harwood,
corporate ruler of the world and primary antagonist
of ATP, declares that he wants to somehow survive
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