2012 jan 13 by Pagan Kennedy
On one of his trips to New York, William Gibson stopped before an antiques shop that would end up haunting him. He tried the door. It was locked. Over the years, he searched for the shop window many times — it seemed to wander around SoHo and materialize on unpredictable streets. Whenever he peered through it at the treasures within, he felt as if he were glimpsing the props from a dream. “There is no knowing what might appear there,” Gibson writes in one of the essays collected in “Distrust That Particular Flavor.” Once, he spied a collection of toy-size missiles.
Another time, a “florally ornate cast-iron fragment” that might have been a chunk of the Brooklyn Bridge. The window winked like a portal to another universe, yet it was real. And that’s what makes this first book of Gibson’s nonfiction so exciting. He has handed us a map to his own magic doorways.
Gibson is, of course, one of our greatest science-fiction writers, exalted for his talent for depicting futures that are just around the corner. His 1984 novel “Neuromancer” popularized the term “cyberspace,” describing the hacker-scripted fantasies of a shared digital realm. A decade later, when we all stepped into cyberspace, the word seemed just right.
Although some of his novels have an almost reportorial quality, Gibson didn’t initially intend to write nonfiction. As a young writer, “I became uncharacteristically strict with myself,” he recalls. He banned anything that wasn’t fiction from his typewriter, worrying that if he delved into essay writing, he might drain the jet fuel from his imaginary worlds. But editors kept asking him for travelogues and memoirs and literary musings. Gibson couldn’t resist, especially when the assignments involved a free airplane ticket. The pieces collected here, he confesses, are “violations of that early prime directive” to rely sheerly on invention.
I’m so glad he did cheat on the novels. In “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us as a science-fictional marvel.
Gibson’s writing enters the bloodstream like a drug, producing a mild hallucinogenic effect that lasts for hours. In one essay (originally a talk he gave in 2008) he introduces us to “Martian jet lag,” an actual sleep disorder suffered by people whose jobs require them to stay in sync with the Red Planet: it’s “what you get when you operate one of those little RadioShack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an air base in California.” In another essay, and seemingly in his own state of Martian jet lag, Gibson explores Singapore. “Disneyland with the death penalty,” he calls it, describing the country as “a relentlessly G-rated experience,” a place stuck in 1956. “The only problem being, of course, that it isn’t 1956 in the rest of the world.”\
Such is the power of his prose that when I glanced up from the pages of this book and surveyed the street-side around me, I felt as if I were wearing Gibson-glasses. Cars lumbered past like ponderous elephants of rusty steel, not so different from the cars of 30 years ago, and seemed not to belong in the same world as the tattooed kid punching code into his laptop nearby. Under the spell of this book, I suddenly understood my surroundings not as a discrete contemporary tableau but as a hodgepodge of 1910, 1980, 2011 and 2020.
“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” — this quote is often attributed to Gibson, though no one seems to be able to pin down when or if he actually said it. Still, it neatly sums up his own particular flavor. In 1991, he and Bruce Sterling wrote a novel called “The Difference Engine,” an alternative history that takes the uneven-future idea to an extreme. In the novel, the computer revolution happens in Disraeli’s era, and the Victorians work out their calculations on steam-powered thinking machines. The book introduced a vision of “steampunk” to a broader audience, and also anticipated a fashion movement whose enthusiasts mix corsets with goggles and pearl-handled cellphones.
Steampunk is more than mere fantasy. It’s all around us. In many cities, the petticoats of Victorian buildings brush up against Wi-Fi hot spots, and if you want to time travel, all you have to do is walk down a street and open your eyes. In Tokyo, Gibson detects “successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel.” Lurking in the back corner of a noodle stall, he watches a man playing with his phone. The gadget is glossy, “complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral-looking,” shining with “Blade Runner”-ish reflections of the city around it. Gibson zooms in on an accessory hanging from the phone — a “rosarylike anticancer charm.” According to Japanese pop-culture lore, such talismans are supposed to protect against microwaves.
It’s the perfect Gibson detail: a hybrid of high technology and magic wand. Everything he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson’s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like “cyberspace,” into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think — anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-together paradox.
One of the delights of “Distrust That Particular Flavor” is its autobiographical stories, in which we learn how the author’s highly original take on the future evolved. He grew up in a time of paperbacks with googly-eyed aliens on their covers, “a world of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science-fiction themes.” When Gibson was 6, his father left on a business trip and never returned: in some faraway restaurant, he choked and died. Twenty years later, the Heimlich maneuver was introduced, and asphyxiation deaths in restaurants became more or less obsolete. But locked in the 1950s, Gibson’s father couldn’t be saved.
The fatherless boy, exiled in rural Virginia, “a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted,” became a geekling with his nose always in a book — in particular, he was besotted with H. G. Wells’s “Time Machine,” a perhaps obvious choice considering the details of his father’s death. “I . . . filled a Blue Horse lined notebook with elaborate pencil sketches for my own, actual, working time machine,” he writes, adding that he decorated his diagrams with Babbage-y gears stolen from Wells’s Victorian era. He longed to explore a ruined London of the far-distant future, its postapocalyptic landscape of secret tunnels inhabited by molelike humans.
But his interest in science fiction began to fade, he says, after the Cuban missile crisis. Schooled on Wells’s novels and other classic science fiction, he had come to expect a capital-F “Future” that would look nothing like the present — either a radioactive wasteland or a crystal city surrounded by flying cars. Thus as the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war in 1962, he prepared himself for Armageddon. After all, according to the logic of those old science-fiction books, civilization should have ended when Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off; a rain of missiles should have reduced the human race to a band of mutant survivors. Instead, the crisis fizzled, and became for him a footnote. “I can’t recall the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis at all,” Gibson writes. “My anxiety, and the world’s, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on. . . . I may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently,” its sense of events seemed so far off the mark.
And so Gibson began to think about building another sort of time machine, one made of words — bolted together, spliced, enjambed. In this beguiling collection, we have the chance to travel with him as he rockets around in that machine, visiting a future that already exists.