In the presence of the Prophet

Two weeks ago, I talked about the thirtieth anniversary of William Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer, the importance of it and his subsequent works on modern science-fiction literature. I also mentioned that on November 25th, 2014, I was going to get to meet the man himself. That was yesterday. I was tempted to write this blog straight away last night, but decided I needed a day to chill and let the giddy fan-boy squealing bleed off first.

To my somewhat credit, I did manage to contain a lot of my squealing. I only tripped over once sentence when I met the man himself, when I expressed a strange sense of joy and affinity with a fellow left-handed writer as Gibson signed the pile of books I brought out of my Chatsubo Bar messenger bag. At the sight of the stack he said, “I don’t remember writing all of those.”

When I first heard words escape his mouth, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I know he’s American, residing in Canada, but the accent threw me for a second. Before I realised that the ever-so-slight twang was from his native South Carolina. The realisation was swiftly swept away by the awe of hearing the man speak. I was in a room with one of my absolute heroes. I may have to make that point two or three times before I shut up.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one in the room star-struck in the presence of the Noir Prophet himself. I’m fairly certain everyone was. The young chap from Topping and Company who introduced him expressed similar feelings of awe during the introduction. During the Q&A session after he read an extract from his new novel, The Peripheral, the audience quizzed him on matters of the future. Here was our oracle, the prophet of the future gods, and we mere mortals dared to ply him for predictions of what will happen next. He answered with clarity and grace, with the ease of one used to being tapped for perceived prescient knowledge as so many of his novels have hooked onto trends in our society before they even emerged.

A year ago, I had the pleasure of meeting fantasy authorPeter V. Brett. I hold in him in very high regard, giving him the title “DUDE”. In capital letters because that’s how much of an awesome DUDE he is. Last night, William Gibson proved himself to a quieter, but no less utterly awesome DUDE. Once again though, this is not my story, but a story of a friend.

Last night, I attended the William Gibson event with my friend Jester, who has a good few years worth of experience on me and has read further and wider than I have. But it all started when one of his friends lent him a copy of Neuromancer. That was the first sci-fi that Jester read and was the beginning of a long and voracious love affair that remains passionate to this day. Jester had Gibson dedicate the book to his friend and explained that this friend introduced him to not only Gibson, but sci-fi literature. And Gibson said, “The next time you speak to your friend, tell him thank you.”

Such a subtle, small phrase, but boy does it carry weight. When Jester told me the story...I was in further awe. William Gibson says thank you. If a friend of mine called me and told me that, I would no doubt squeal so loud the Martians would be yelling at us to keep the noise down. Holy frak, what a dude.

Now I say that I managed to contain most of my giddy fan-boy squealing (something Jester was VERY glad about), but I did have a moment of what I would characterise as total fan-boy-ness. When Gibson had finished signing all twelve books I brought with me, I sheepishly produced one last item. The essay, “Wisdom of the Noir Prophet: Arguing for the inclusion of William Gibson in the literary canon”. I explained that I wrote in my final year of university and asked if he would sign it. He did. I then scooped up my pile of books and scurried on so other people could have their moment with one of the greatest minds in modern science-fiction.

Last night, I basked in the presence of the Prophet. My life is the richer for it and this world richer for containing his works.

The Wisdom of the Noir Prophet

My affection for sci-fi has infected nearly every aspect of my life. In the space of a few days, maybe weeks, of conversations with my regular customers at work, they will discover how obsessed I am. Some share my affinity, others are bemused by it, and others share my kinship with the genre in certain mediums. One such case is one of my die-hard regulars, who I’ve been serving for as long as I’ve been working at Boston Tea Party Bath. He’s a recently retired English teacher. Naturally, we’ve bonded over a shared love of books.

The other day, he came in and presented me with an article from The Guardian – a short piece about William Gibson’s seminal work of sci-fi literature, Neuromancer. That was published thirty years. To my shame, I had failed to remember that it was thirty years since. Ask me what great things happened in 1984, I can say that Ghostbusters was released and Neuromancer was published. I’ll rave about Ghostbusters being an awesome movie, then I will go on about how much of a game-changer Neuromancer was.

Four years ago, the halcyon days of 2010, I was in my final year of my creative writing degree. My final deadline was an essay for a module called “Reading as a Writer”. In this module we picked a writer we loved, someone who inspired us, then using academic sources and their own text, argue for why they are significant and should be included in the literary canon. Naturally, I chose William Gibson. I re-read all his books, piling through the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies in a matter of weeks. I had my core argument ready and waiting to go – William Gibson created cyberpunk and gave voice to a generation of science-fiction authors, television shows and movies.

I was around fifteen when I truly found my calling, settled into a genre and wrote with confidence and bravado that only a fifteen year old boy can muster when he has decided his life’s dream. I was a cyberpunk, though I would not realise it until years later. My defining piece of writing was a fifteen page short story about an assassin who was double-crossed and sought revenge on her employers. Hardly an original tale, one that has been examined in many forms from many angles. My angle – the story was set on a terraformed Mars in 2207.

In 2007, prior to escaping my home in Wales to live in Bath, I realised that I needed to expand my reading and most importantly, read some frakkin’ sci-fi! I settled on I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (I had watched the Will Smith movie and loved it. Yes, yes, I know, book is INFINITELY different and I love and respect that about it) and this curious novel Neuromancer. I had heard that it and its author were quite important in sci-fi circles. Upon reading this book, being mesmerised and disorientated by the world cannibalised by war and cybernetic augmentation, I realised that the sci-fi I truly loved and that felt most at home writing was this. Cyberpunk. To coin a theological analogy, I was a pilgrim who had just discovered his god.

Tracking back to 2010 and tying in the title of this blog. The essay I wrote was entitled “The Wisdom of the Noir Prophet: Arguing for the Inclusion of William Gibson in the Literary Canon”. I am damn proud of this essay. My last piece of academic work and it netted me a mark of 72. Sure, it didn’t push my overall grade from a 2:1 to a First, but by gods I was mighty happy with that. My last official piece of coursework and one of my favourite authors helped me to get a First for it.

Now, I should probably tell you all why Neuromancer is so important and how it changed the landscape. I’ve skirted the idea briefly earlier, but here’s some big red letters on the side of Mount Everest exposition. In 1984, Neuromancer introduced the world to the very concept of cyberpunk. It had been slowly building, fragments of the code drifting together and forming the ghost in the machine (to borrow and paraphrase from James Cromwell’s portrayal of Doctor Alfred Lanning in the aforementioned Will Smith movie), in the form of short stories written by Gibson and his cohorts Bruce Sterling and Tom Maddox (to name but a few).

But it was Neuromancer that came crashing through sci-fi’s bubble, trashing the place, then piling it all up into a corner of the genre and saying “This is our spot. We’re here to stay.” From the early movie example of RoboCop (a defining piece of cyberpunk cinema in my opinion) and the later TV example of James Cameron’s short-lived Dark Angel, cyberpunk’s mark was made, it stayed and people have taken up its mantle. It has even become a sub-culture, characterised by lots of shiny metal (be it implanted or just studded upon one’s clothing) and bright neon tubes in your hair, just to name the most obvious traits.

One of the most important aspects of Neuromancer and its wider cultural impact is the cultural imagery Gibson helped to define. Tron, admittedly pre-dating Neuromancer by two years in 1982, can be seen as one of the progenitors of this too – the perception of the Internet as this ethereal plane, vast flows of neon data pulsing up and down grid-lines, huge blocks of colour, geometric shapes, representing locations, websites, the targets of the hacker. While you can argue Tron created the visual, it was Neuromancer that gave it the name that has infiltrated its way into our common vernacular – cyberspace.

There is further significance to my raving about the brilliance of William Gibson. In honour of the publication of his new book, The Peripheral, he’s doing that funny odd thing that authors do – a book tour. And on November 25th, 2014, he is going to be in Bath. I am going to get to meet one of my literary heroes. I must struggle to contain the urge to squeal like a giddy little fan-boy.