WMD: After seeing him appear half a dozen times in recent years haunting the neighbourhood around my office like an apparition of post-hippie art geek coolness, I finally got a chance to sit down and interview William Gibson last week. He was back in Vancouver on the final leg of his book tour for Spook Country, his latest novel. He was 20 minutes late, for which he apologized, but he noted that after weeks of touring he was reaching the end of his ability to keep up with one interview after another. He was also unfailingly polite, thoughtful and intelligently entertaining. Apart from the fact that I dig his writing (although what's up with all the happy endings ...), it was one of the most enjoyable interviews I've had in awhile, largely because he listened, thought and answered in real time, as opposed to spinning off rote answers. That's probably a bonus of interviewing writers.
My latest Courier column, available here, came out of that conversation, although it necessarily contains only a little of what was an hour's worth of Q&A. I've reproduced the text below. We talked largely about Vancouver, where he's lived since 1971. Aside from a short story or two, his adopted home city, for which he has great fondness, has never appeared in his fiction before. I wanted to know why:
Futurist fiction writer never imagined Vancouver in 2007
Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, October 10, 2007William Gibson's fiction has been set in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Most of it is a vibrantly imagined vision of the near future which, when it first appeared in the 1980s, anticipated the wired and increasingly virtual world of 2007.
It's a future alive in technology, with computer interfaces that rival the Matrix movies, buildings that "grow" into being, and people deliberately replacing parts of their bodies with machines. But it's also a harsh world, with lethal violence on the streets, corporate brawn usurping representative government, and a yawning chasm between rich and poor right out of the Fraser Institute's wettest fantasies.
It's also why, having lived here since 1971, the South Carolina-born Gibson never included Vancouver in his novels. He didn't want to do to his adopted hometown what his imagination had done so skillfully to other cities of the world: make them disturbing.
That reluctance ended with his latest novel, Spook Country, a contemporary tale in which Vancouver plays a prominent role in the final third of the book. But while the novel is a fascinating and often funny meditation on how the U.S. has been thrown dangerously off balance in the wake of 9-11, Vancouver comes across as anything but disturbing. We look pretty good.
Gibson didn't set out to include Vancouver in the story, he told me during an interview last week at a favoured Granville Street cafe. He doesn't like to predestine his narratives. On a good day, he said, "I'm not making executive decisions over the life of my characters."
But as the story developed, and the search by competing and shadowy agencies for a shipping container and its mystery cargo seemingly adrift at sea unfolded, his cast of spooks, criminals and former rock stars landed in our town. Gibson said as soon as he knew they were coming, he was nervous for weeks.
It turned out they liked it here, or at least found little that put them off, as they focused on international intrigue. Vancouver in their eyes is freshly scrubbed and clean smelling. Dollar coins baffle them, and they are surprised to be stuck in horrendous rush hour traffic. But the North Shore mountains amaze them. The green and blue glass condo towers of Yaletown and Coal Harbour look like they were built last week. The locals--with the exception of a Downtown Eastside drug dealer--are friendly, and downtown commuters going to work in the morning have, in the charmingly trippy mind of one key character, a low "f--kedness quotient."
Gibson found it "totally cool" to be a tourist in his own city while writing the book, and the experience his characters went through mirror what he's seen in countless other visitors. Cory Doctorow, a Toronto-born science fiction writer and blogger whose intellectual horsepower rivals Gibson's, once told him Toronto is a place that's easy to live in but hard to visit. Gibson says Vancouver, by contrast, is a city newcomers adore. "I've seen people from Paris fall tragically in love with Vancouver," he said. "And they dread having to return to Paris." Who would have thought Robson Street could beat out the Champs-Elysees.
Yet for a science fiction writer, Gibson never expected the Vancouver we have now. He remembers not only when neighbourhoods like Coal Harbour didn't exist, but also when no one ever imagined Coal Harbour was even a remote possibility. He also never thought Vancouver would become so dense, or that real estate would morph into a gambler's vocation. The rapid change in so short a period concerns him, and he worries about the city's sustainability.
Will he stay? He doesn't know, but only because he says he never knows what the future holds. But it's clear he'd like to remain here. Vancouver gave him a fresh start. The city wasn't as interesting or as big as Toronto, where he spent part of the hippie era after leaving an America convulsed by Vietnam. But it also had no baggage for him when he arrived 36 years ago. His wife is from here, his children were raised here, and he learned to write fiction here, eventually producing some of the most influential novels to come out of Lotusland.
He's grateful to Vancouver for that fresh start, and it shows.
- Gibson appears as part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, which runs Oct. 16 to 21. For more information, see www.writersfest.bc.ca/.
blink@vancourier.com
Today's bLINKit: The Courier's award-winning historical writer, Lisa Smedman, writes about the coming of the Swede-Finns to B.C., as seen through the eyes of her grandmother.


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