William Gibson interviewed in The Paris Review

Kevin Kelly pointed to this great interview with William Gibson. Kevin says, "This long revealing interview with William Gibson is a gold mine. In addition to being a gifted writer, Gibson is one of the best conversationalists I've encountered. I could listen to him all day."

GIBSON
I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.

INTERVIEWER
Why not?

GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.

But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.

But I don’t think that writers are very reliable witnesses when it comes to influences, because if one of your sources seems woefully unhip you are not going to cite it. When I was just starting out people would say, Well, who are your influences? And I would say, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Those are true, to some extent, but I would never have said Len Deighton, and I suspect I actually learned more for my basic craft reading Deighton’s early spy novels than I did from Burroughs or Ballard or Pynchon.

I don’t know if it was Deighton or John le Carré who, when someone asked them about Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for years. I was really interested in that idea. Here’s Fleming, with this classist, late–British Empire pulp fantasy about a guy who wears fancy clothes and beats the shit out of bad guys who generally aren’t white, while driving expensive, fast cars, and he’s a spy, supposedly, and this is selling like hotcakes. Deighton and Le Carré come along and completely reverse it, in their different ways, and get a really powerful charge out of not offering James Bond. You’ve got Harry Palmer and George Smiley, neither of whom are James Bond, and people are willing to pay good money for them not to be James Bond.

William Gibson, interviewed by David Wallace-Wells

• [Bob]

  Why is this being posted again?

  • [Mark_Frauenfelder]

    Could you provide a link to the post you are talking about, Bob? Thanks.

    • [Jonathan Badger]

      Not Bob, but presumably this:
      http://boingboing.net/2011/10/14/william-gibson-interview.html

• [malthusan]

  Likely because the first time the article was only available in the magazine, whereas now the entire article is available online.

• [Genre Slur]

  yes!

• [sgtdoom]

  Excuse me, but Gibson is even more lamer lately than Kelly.  In Gibson’s recent NY Times Op-Ed piece of drivel, he assininely calls Stuxnet just simple street stuff, or a teenage bedroom hacker’s project.

  This clown is completely daft!  Stuxnet was correctly described (although I never use the term “cyber”) as the most sophisticated “cyberweapon” yet devised.

  Gibson is a complete hasbeen —- after Mona Lisa Overdrive he went south, or jumped that ferocious shark.

  Although, to compare the conversationalist Gibson with the conversationalist Kelly might prove daunting.

  1010 zmw/variants on standby 1010

• [jimh]

  I have always felt the same re: Hammett and Chandler. For reasons I could hardly articulate as well as Mr. Gibson does here.

• [Katrina Voll-Taylor]

  I felt the same way about Chandler… he was so busy drooling over, and in love with, his creation Marlow that he never invested the character with much humanity. It seemed as if Chandler instead choose to make him the glorified version of himself he’d personally like to have been, always tougher and sharper than any other character Chandler ever had him encounter. Marlow doesn’t connect as a person who’s a detective, rather he comes across as a know-it-all-seen-it-all type operating almost parallel to the world that Chandler purports he lives in: Marlow never particularly loses control of  any situation. Nothing is ever really at stake in the Marlow novels, nothing is ever really risked.  Marlow’s only an idealized object objectifying everyone else he comes into contact with. His deification of Marlow inhibited his plots in a way that Hammett’s characters didn’t. Even with Hammett’s weaker works like The Dain Curse, which is admittedly quite flawed, at least you feel like something unexpected could happen. Hammett, as opposed to Chandler, was writing about people whose imprecise humanity can surprise you, rather than simply pouring all his effort into maintaining characters or a style.

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    But Sam Spade and the Continental Op were rather more obviously Hammett’s glorified versions of himself, given that Hammett was an actual private investigator at one point.

    I’m a Chandler man, myself. But I live in San Diego, where our two literary saints are Chandler and Dr. Seuss, as they both lived their elder years in La Jolla.

    • [Katrina Voll-Taylor]

      Spade and the Continental Op were depicted as flawed people, degraded even, so I feel like they never quite fit anyone’s idealized alter egos, let alone the author’s?

      That said, if I had to pick a California’d literary saint, I’d go with Ross MacDonald, who (eventually) found a way into honoring the best of both Hammett & Chandler without descending into derivativeness, so as it’s often said, “YMMV.”

• [Stefan Jones]

  Great interview, with a lot of interesting stuff about Gibson’s genesis as a person and a writer.

  The stuff about Wythville was fascinating. I’m glad he got the hell away from there.

• [Genre Slur]

  Declaring a position in a manner which includes using the word ‘lamer’ and a reference to ‘jumping a shark’? Hmm. That is something I had never thought of doing until seeing the example above. I now feel pretty good about myself for never having thought of declaring a position in such a special fashion.
  Thanks for the heads up, Sgtdoom! Any other illustrations of things I should not think of doing, please toss them up here — rooks like me could use the mentoring, so-called.

• [Amelia_G]

  Charlie Stross appreciated Len Deighton as well! I bought some Len Deighton novels on the strength of it but am having trouble reading them for the same reason I’m having trouble rereading the awesome le Carré these days. Post-Cold War, instead of thrilling they seem so tragic, stories of lives highjacked in youth and then atrophied and wasted. Rereading Dashiell Hammett in conjunction with Lillian Hellman still rocks though. Clear-eyed vision. I haven’t read Chandler, but one of my French professors in college, a Uruguayan novelist named Hiber Conteris, was a political prisoner in Uruguay for eight years (tortured for two?) and used Chandler during that time. At one point they let him write again and he was allowed to produce an homage to Chandler.

  The charming Charlie Stross and the unpleasant Neal Stephenson have shone a light on how much fun it might be to play with James Bond characters in future novels. Stross’s Bond novel was exquisite. Stephenson’s recent Bond character is a Chinese-English woman working for the British secret service (sorry about the terminology, not sure what people are called over there). Also very much enjoyed how Alan Moore dealt with the Bond oeuvre in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• [Bob]

  Hey Mark, Here’s the link:

  http://boingboing.net/2011/10/14/william-gibson-interview.html

• [Halloween_Jack]

  Don’t have the time to read the entire interview now, but this early bit isn’t promising:

  I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.

  Gibson doesn’t seem very genre-savvy, or at the very least hadn’t seen Star Wars.

• [huskerdont]

  Chandler novels now seems so much caught in their time. Men were men, they were never wrong or questioned their initial ideas on a subject, and “fruits” were to be derided or beaten. I can admire a tough guy, but he has to have some self-doubt to be human.

• [Jack]

  I’m a big Chandler fan. I figured Gibson was influenced by Chandler’s cynical view of the world, if not his protogonists’ heroism. In the late 80′s I mailed Gibson a first edition of Neuromancer to sign and a first-paperback edition of Chandler stories as a gift. Gibson wrote back to thank me and say that he had never read Chandler before.

• [Lt. Col. w00t]

  Halloween_Jack:

  In the era he’s talking about, Star Wars didn’t exist.

• [VerySincerely]

  I understand the alienation of a largely unsympathetic lead character, but for me the alienation caused by chapter after chapter of foggy plot and only a vague sense of place is much worse. Two of the worst offenders are Pynchon and Gibson. 

• [Colin Doyle]

  “I don’t know if it was Deighton or John le Carré who, when someone asked them about Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for years.”
  Le Carré said this, more or less, in part 2 of an extended interview with CBC Radio in 2010. You can listen to it here. Great interview!
  http://www.cbc.ca/andthewinneris/