AFTERWORD
THE WORLD IMPLIED
To read William Gibson is to be a step behind.
That feeling of someone, very fast, running stride for stride with you. You are exerting yourself right up to the limit of your ability; he is not. You are close but only because he is allowing you to stay close. If you reach out, you think, you might be able to grasp him, to catch him, if only for a second. How gratifying that would be, to pull even, be in step. To move through the world alongside him, seeing it as he does. Except you never quite manage to close that final step. And it’s a wonderful feeling.
To read Gibson is to constantly feel as if you are about to lose your footing, to tumble into the dirt, head over tail, spinning into disorientation. To read Gibson is to get faster, his mind training yours, with each turn of the page, each new shift in perspective, each new corner of a universe being revealed. To read Gibson is bewilderment and exhilaration.
Think pieces, profiles, book reviews, scholarly essays, message board posts, midnight yawps of awe and admiration—how many thousands, millions of words have been written about Gibson’s work? How many of those words focus on Gibson’s uncanny knack for accurately imagining the future?
And for good reason. He nailed it, okay? In about a thousand ways, from nano to macro. Gibson wrote stuff thirty years ago that, when you read it today, feels fresher than the n th generation of his literary offspring and imitators. He’s the before and the after and the during, he’s the origin story and today’s news.
He was a piece of twenty-first-century fiction dropped into the twentieth. Genius here, just unevenly distributed, a disproportionate share of it clumped into his brain. He has said he’s not predicting the future so much as generating scenarios, which is a graceful way of being both modest and precise. To say Gibson predicted the future mischaracterizes and underestimates his contributions. He didn’t just point us in the right direction, he created the map. He didn’t anticipate the future so much as he brought it into being. He didn’t pick a possibility but swept out the range of possibility space. Not the furniture but the architecture. Not the fish in the tank but the tank itself. It’s his water and we’re swimming in it.
. . . . .
If Gibson is properly appreciated in his capacity as a visionary, it may have come at the expense of his other gifts. Namely, as a writer of prose. As odd as it is to think of someone of his stature as somehow underrated, in Gibson’s case, his otherworldly ability to extrapolate possible futures can often overshadow his actual writing.
As good as he is at writing novels, he is even better at writing sentences.
Not that the two are unrelated, of course. Worldbuilding is sometimes thought of as requiring mythologies, back stories, or paratextual material, making worlds out of maps or timelines or family histories (not that there’s anything wrong with any of that!). But in Gibson’s work, worldbuilding is practiced in its purest, highest form: at the level of fundamental particles, in the language itself. Realities built word by word, through syntax, through patois, through granular detail accumulating into pictures, images clicking by at a high frame rate, his expertly operated camera whooshing us into, through, and then up out of the scene before we can fully process what we have heard and seen. By the time we are starting to catch on, he’s already onto the next scene; meanwhile, what our brains are registering is an undeniable, rich, dense, populated, believable universe. His worldbuilding seldom exposits for the audience’s benefit; explanation is kept to the necessary minimum. From this lack of exposition, from the velocity of speech and action, from the way his characters interact, we get not just plausibility but actual immersion.
We don’t visit Gibson’s cities, strolling in for a look. We are dropped in, no map or translator.
From Chiba City to London. Five blinks into the future or the post-Jackpot twenty-second century. Time, continuous or stubby. Space of various flavors, meat-or cyber- or something else yet to be conceived of. All of it rendered in prose constructed of Gibsonium, a gleaming alloy, airtight, strong, light, shimmery, ductile strength off the charts. Never straining or creaking under the narrative burden.
Plus another thing: he’s funny.
“A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.” 1
“Shaylene had big hair without actually having it, Flynne’s mother had once said.” 2
“Like a model from an ad where they didn’t want to stress ethnicity.” 3
Gibson’s wit is a hidden blade, making surgical slices so thin you sometimes don’t notice until you look harder.
. . . . .
In an interview Gibson once said, “What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.” 4
Well he showed us the dirt.
And underneath the dirt, the world implied.