2012 jan 13 by Pagan Kennedy<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 it seemed to wander around SoHo and materialize on unpredictable streets. When\u00adever he peered through it at the treasures within, he felt as if he were glimpsing the props from a dream. \u201cThere is no knowing what might appear there,\u201d Gibson writes in one of the essays collected in \u201cDistrust That Particular Flavor.\u201d Once, he spied a collection of toy-size missiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another time, a \u201cflorally ornate cast-iron fragment\u201d 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\u2019s what makes this first book of Gibson\u2019s nonfiction so exciting. He has handed us a map to his own \u00admagic doorways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cNeuro\u00admancer\u201d popularized the term \u201ccyberspace,\u201d describing the hacker-scripted fantasies of a shared digital realm. A decade later, when we all stepped into cyberspace, the word seemed just right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although some of his novels have an almost reportorial quality, Gibson didn\u2019t initially intend to write nonfiction. As a young writer, \u201cI became uncharacteristically strict with myself,\u201d he recalls. He banned anything that wasn\u2019t fiction from his type\u00adwriter, 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\u2019t resist, especially when the assignments involved a free airplane ticket. The pieces collected here, he confesses, are \u201cviolations of that early prime directive\u201d to rely sheerly on invention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m so glad he did cheat on the novels. In \u201cDistrust That Particular Flavor,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gibson\u2019s 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 \u201cMartian jet lag,\u201d an actual sleep disorder suffered by people whose jobs require them to stay in sync with the Red Planet: it\u2019s \u201cwhat you get when you operate one of those little RadioShack wagon\/probes from a comfortable seat back at an air base in California.\u201d In another essay, and seemingly in his own state of Martian jet lag, Gibson explores Singapore. \u201cDisneyland with the death penalty,\u201d he calls it, describing the country as \u201ca relentlessly G-rated experience,\u201d a place stuck in 1956. \u201cThe only problem being, of course, that it isn\u2019t 1956 in the rest of the world.\u201d\\<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe future is already here. It\u2019s just not evenly distributed yet\u201d \u2014 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 \u201cThe Difference Engine,\u201d an alternative history that takes the uneven-future idea to an extreme. In the novel, the computer revolution happens in Disraeli\u2019s era, and the Victorians work out their calculations on steam-powered thinking machines. The book introduced a vision of \u201csteam\u00adpunk\u201d to a broader audience, and also anticipated a fashion movement whose enthusiasts mix corsets with goggles and pearl-\u00adhandled cellphones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Steampunk is more than mere fantasy. It\u2019s all around us. In many cities, the petti\u00adcoats 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 \u201csuccessive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel.\u201d Lurking in the back corner of a noodle stall, he watches a man playing with his phone. The gadget is glossy, \u201ccomplexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral-looking,\u201d shining with \u201cBlade Runner\u201d-ish reflections of the city around it. Gibson zooms in on an accessory hanging from the phone \u2014 a \u201crosarylike anti\u00adcancer charm.\u201d According to Japanese pop-\u00adculture lore, such talismans are supposed to protect against microwaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s the perfect Gibson detail: a hybrid of high technology and magic wand. Every\u00adthing he notices seems to be a this<\/em> grafted onto a that<\/em>. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson\u2019s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like \u201ccyberspace,\u201d into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think \u2014 anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-\u00adtogether paradox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the delights of \u201cDistrust That Particular Flavor\u201d is its autobiographical stories, in which we learn how the author\u2019s highly original take on the future evolved. He grew up in a time of paperbacks with googly-eyed aliens on their covers, \u201ca world of early television, a new Olds\u00admobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science-\u00adfiction themes.\u201d 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\u2019s father couldn\u2019t be saved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fatherless boy, exiled in rural Virginia, \u201ca place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted,\u201d became a geekling with his nose always in a book \u2014 in particular, he was besotted with H. G. Wells\u2019s \u201cTime Machine,\u201d a perhaps obvious choice considering the details of his father\u2019s death. \u201cI . . . filled a Blue Horse lined notebook with elaborate pencil sketches for my own, actual, working time machine,\u201d he writes, adding that he decorated his diagrams with Babbage-y gears stolen from Wells\u2019s Victorian era. He longed to explore a ruined London of the far-\u00addistant future, its postapocalyptic landscape of secret tunnels inhabited by molelike humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But his interest in science fiction began to fade, he says, after the Cuban missile crisis. Schooled on Wells\u2019s novels and other classic science fiction, he had come to expect a capital-F \u201cFuture\u201d that would look nothing like the present \u2014 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. \u201cI can\u2019t recall the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis at all,\u201d Gibson writes. \u201cMy anxiety, and the world\u2019s, 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,\u201d its sense of events seemed so far off the mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so Gibson began to think about building another sort of time machine, one made of words \u2014 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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