I assumed The Paris Review, a literary publication I’ve only ever been dimly aware of, was too high-brow for genre. Man, was I wrong. They’ve published wide-ranging interviews with the likes of Sam Delany, Ursula Le Guin, David Mitchell, and others. 
It was a remarkable interview with William Gibson, however, that really caught my eye. Gibson is erudite, interesting, and able better than just about anyone to articulate a set of profound insights into culture, technology and literature.
I won’t try and explain his ideas, as I will inevitably fall spectacularly short. I’ve simply included below some of the sections that particularly resonated.
The full interview is here. It is a compulsory read.
On Charles Dickens:
INTERVIEWER
The Victorians invented science fiction.
GIBSON
I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a 
quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, hang on, we think the birds are dying.
I haven’t read Bleak House, but I have pulled it off the shelf to read next.
On reading science fiction while growing up in a small town:
INTERVIEWER
What was so affecting about it?
GIBSON
It gave me an uncensored window into very foreign modes of thought. There was a lot of 
inherent cultural relativism in the science fiction I discovered then. It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to question anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own culture’s most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of—where else could I have gotten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick’s brain!
That wasn’t the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn’t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the 
gateway drug to J. G. Ballard.
And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn’t know, your parents didn’t know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn’t have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.
It’s quite strange for me to hear this from the mouth of Gibson (or read it from the transcript, anyway). It touches on an aspect of my youth I’d perhaps forgotten – discovering Philip K Dick when twelve, a collection of short stories handed to me by a parent who had no idea what they 
had purchased for me. Feeling the brain expand or thoughts twist in on themselves after PKD short story was one of those things that would happen and you wouldn’t even bother trying to explain it to someone. I mean, how does a 12-year-old explain PKD to anyone?
On his writing schedule:
INTERVIEWER
What is your writing schedule like?
GIBSON
When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise?
GIBSON
Every day, when I sit down with the manuscript, I start at page one and go through the whole thing, revising freely.
INTERVIEWER
Does your assessment of the work change, day by day?
GIBSON
If it were absolutely steady I don’t think it could be really good judgment. I think revision is hugely underrated. It is very seldom recognized as a place where the higher creativity can live, or where it can manifest. I think it was Yeats who said that literary revision was the only place in life where a man could truly improve himself.
I love the reference to ‘Internet ablutions’. I certainly wake up in the morning, do all that addictive, cant-help-myself, compulsive Twitter and Facebook and Email checking, and then hopefully move on doing some real work. Yes, social media as the first dump of the day: a filthy necessity of life.
The quote from Yeats is quite interesting. Healthy for a writer, as well, to know how much the even greats depend upon constant revision.
I’ve read his ‘Sprawl’ trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and after reading this interview I went ahead and ordered his ‘Bridge’ trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties). Three more to-reads to add to the growing pile.
