IN 1981, the science fiction writer William Gibson made up a word to describe a space he imagined kids were trying to inhabit when they played arcade games.
And it was somehow the same space that money moved through during wire transfers, and where phone calls actually “happened.” There were all these electronic spaces on top of the real world, where media and data were more important than geography and distance. Gibson imagined that these spaces were actually all the same place. He called it “cyberspace.” It was not something he invented, it was something he could already see.
The story he built around this concept, “Burning Chrome,” was as groundbreaking in its style as it was in its ideas. Gibson’s was hard-edged and evocative. The story wasn’t a dystopia or a utopia but instead a noir. It looked at the world from the fringes of society. The main characters were criminals, using military software to break into computers. The narrator tells us, in what would become a widely quoted maxim, “The street finds its own uses for things.”
“Burning Chrome” was not only the prototype for Gibson’s debut novel, Neuromancer (1984)—arguably the defining sci-fi novel of the ’80s—but also the prototype for a whole artistic movement dubbed “cyberpunk.”
“I never assumed when I was writing science fiction set in the future that I was writing about anything other than the world on the day that I was writing,” Gibson says. “Because that was where I was drawing all of my sense of what the world is from. I took that for granted when I started writing science fiction, that every imagined future can only really be about the moment in which it was written.”
In 1999, William Gibson published the novel All Tomorrow’s Parties and then promptly stopped creating imaginary futures. But he didn’t stop writing science fiction. The three books he’s written since the turn of millennium—Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, as well as his latest, Zero History (Putnam; $26.95 hardback), which comes out this month—are all set on the edge of the present, in that place we don’t yet know enough about to really dwell in, and from which our future is emerging, and to some degree, is already visible.
And Gibson writes of this place the way he used to write of the future. He makes it seem real by not presenting a seamless “now” but instead by creating a mammoth accretion of history, a rich material world where every object is a link to the past.
Zero History is centered around a part of our culture that novelists often overlook: clothing. The novel looks at the military origins of street wear, and the marketing reasons for why the military might want to borrow back from the streets.
The main characters—Hollis Henry, a journalist living in the shadow of her past cult-fame as a rock singer; and Milgrim, a translator recovering from an addiction to anti-anxiety drugs who hasn’t been at all present in his own life or the world for more than 10 years—are being paid to track down the maker of a secret brand of clothing. But in the process, they find themselves in the dangerous nexus where the cloak-and-dagger world of private military contracting meets the cloak-and-dagger world of marketing.
I spoke with Gibson over of the phone about the issues in his novel.
METRO: How did clothing get to be the focus of this book?
WILLIAM GIBSON: I don’t think of it as being that much about clothing itself, or fashion. I think of it as being about the cultural codes with which people communicate with one another. In the case of this particular story, those particular codes are the ones we wear, because everything we do as a culture is information of a sort.
And the people who design clothing think to some extent about function, but to an even greater extent about conveying information to the person who’s going to buy the clothing. And the person who’s buying is thinking as often as not about what information other people will be receiving when they see the buyer wearing the clothing.
What do you think it is about the information in military clothing that so many people find useful for other purposes?
I think it’s complexly historical. The mass-produced clothing that’s taken for granted in the world today began, really, during World War I. And it began with the need to manufacture huge amounts of military clothing which had to fit individuals that the manufacturer had never met. Things like standardized sizing didn’t actually exist before World War I. That’s when that was invented.
That’s like a late industrial invention in our culture. We hadn’t really seen it before. There’d been a little bit of it in industrial work-wear, but there hadn’t really the urgent need to put a lot of money into figuring out how to do it, and the United States led the way. And after World War I, it gave the United States a global edge. The United States didn’t export a lot of clothing then, but they were able to provide it domestically much more efficiently than any other country.
When we get to World War II, which is really the beginning of what seems to us as the modern world, that happened again, but it happened in a bigger and much more involved way. So that the clothing that the characters in my book talk about as being sort of the root code of what we wear is late World War II, early post-war, military clothing.
One of the reasons we copy it is that the government was willing to spend a fortune on the research it took to get it functional and get it comfortable and get it durable. More design hours went into that stuff than any fashion house would be willing to put into a season’s product. And it was all tested to destruction, to see how long it would last. It was very carefully worked out.
There’s a huge amount of information embodied in each of those garments, and my guess is that we can recognize the information content of clothing, whether we know or it not.
The idea of the secret brand is a big part of this book—clothing lines that are very difficult to track down, unknown in origin and in fact unknown altogether, except for by a very clued-in and devoted few. The concept is as much about creating a meaningful relationship between the brand and the buyer as it is about mystery and coolness.
Well, secret brands aren’t something that I made up, it’s an existing concept. People do it to different degrees. Sometimes deliberately, as a marketing strategy, and sometimes out of some interesting kind of stubborn unwillingness to become a part of the marketing world. It tends to work, to whatever extent it does, just as well, either way. It can be about relationships, but it can also be about, simply, information.
A lot of marketing has been pitched to the idea of some kind of exclusivity. Like, “If you buy one of ours, you get something special, which not everybody has.” But with the total ubiquity of retail in our culture, first with malls, and more recently with web stores, anybody who’s got money can have pretty much any of that stuff delivered next day, without having to leave the house. So there’s been a kind of democratization. With stuff like that the only thing that makes any difference is really the money.
The people who figured out the secret brand strategy decided that what people actually wanted is some kind of genuine exclusivity. A brand could build its cache simply by being very difficult to find. So what you need in order to get that stuff is information. You need to know it exists and you need to find out how you’re going to get it. And that turns out to powerfully motivate some buyers.
And something like that could support a lot of web stores in places that never previously have had that kind retail going on. You can have a web store in Oklahoma and sell stuff to people all over the world just because you’re the only person who’s got it. And you know how to make yourself a part of a web universe that people who want that kind of stuff will go to. It’s a very post-geographical, post-national, model of how you sell T-shirts.
But it works. And there’s a lot of people making a living doing that sort of thing. It’s one of those unexpected results of the Internet, that it’s freed people to sell really, really specialized stuff to global niche markets.
I was glad that Milgrim, a character first seen in your previous novel, ‘Spook Country,’ plays such a big role in ‘Zero History.’ There’s something about his perspective that’s really entertaining. He has his strange near-detachment from both the plot and himself as actor in it.
Yeah, I’m deeply, deeply fond of him, as the author, for that very reason. Something about that slightly cracked lens keeps it very fresh for me. And I kind of literally never know what he’ll think about what’s happening on the next page. I have an idea of what’s going to happen, but I never know how Milgrim will perceive it until he actually gets there.
He’s kind of an unusual character for me in that he arrived in a very odd way. I was writing Spook Country, and I was trying to write another character, one of the villains, as a viewpoint character. It was just a kind of experiment very early in the book, and this guy was breaking into somebody’s apartment to change a battery on a bug, and I couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t write from that character’s viewpoint. And it was very frustrating.
And one day, without really thinking about it, I just put this most minimal point of view character in front of the character I’d been trying to write. So I looked through a different point of view, but I didn’t know who it was. And I sort of shoved that new point of view character through the door and into the room with the other character, the bad guy, right behind him, and it was instantly Milgrim, in this very weird way.
I didn’t know who this guy was, I just knew he had a very strange point of view. Which I quickly tried to account for by giving him as an unromantic a drug habit as I could think of, and then let him go on about his business. And by the end of the chapter, he was pretty much Milgrim as we’ve known him ever since. I usually don’t get that. It’s usually a bigger process to find a central character. By the time I was a few more chapters into Spook Country, I just thought, “Well, how could I have ever considered writing without Milgrim?”
I remember hearing you say that the prefix ‘cyber,’ to mean something having to do with computers, would go by the wayside as we started to assume more and more that everything we do will involve a computer. Do you think it’s significant that we’re still using it for the word ‘Cyberwarfare’?
Well, maybe. It’s kind of ironic, because the Internet is in a large part historically the result of a military research program. The Department of Defense paid a lot of scientists a lot of money to figure out how to build something like the Internet. And it gradually and happily spiraled out of control and it became the Internet as we know it today.
But in becoming the Internet as we know it today, it became something that the military would have to worry about. Because it became where the bank keeps your money, and it became where we do the stock market, and it became where, increasingly, we do a whole bunch of what we do as human beings.
We do it all through the Internet, but the Internet doesn’t live anywhere in particular, and it isn’t under the laws of any particular country. It’s this very strange, global, transnational thing that we are increasingly dependent on. So it’s now for the military to turn up and say, “Hey, we got to be prepared for trouble in cyberspace.” And the funny thing about it is they actually started it.
So you’ve been doing this series of books, with science fiction techniques, looking directly at the present, for quite a while now. Do you ever find yourself wanting to go back to a more traditional kind of science fiction?
Well, writing these last three books, one of the things I’ve been most aware of is how the real world is naturally so infinitely more complex and rich in detail than any imagined world that I can make up. And that’s simply because of the time and labor required to produce enough detail and complexity in an imagined world. In a way it’s a lot more work to write a piece of imaginary future SF than it is to write one of these books, because when I’m writing a book like Zero History, the world constantly provides me with more and crazier detail than I could have ever dreamed up.
You never find the present lacking?
No, I don’t.
William Gibson
Friday, 7pm
Kepler’s, Menlo Park
