Condition of Mr. Segundo: Puzzled by cyberspace.

Author: William Gibson

Subjects Discussed: Coats, blankets, and carapaces in Gibson’s fiction, textures, characters with shaved heads, on not having technological issues, the Apple Store, cell phones and the natural street state, obsolete technology and thrift shops, ZX81s, VR, sitting atop the technological anthill, the internal combustion engine, how to escape being handcuffed with a piece of a ball point pen, the origin of Blue Ant, color taxonomies, Belgians, locative art, rock ‘n roll novels from the 1960s, the downsides of sitting in a SFWA suite, Bobby Chombo, cigarettes, Cory Doctorow, GPS plausibilities, celebrity deaths, Philip K. Dick, Milgram and Dr. Stanley Milgrim, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, ghostly connections between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, tripartite plot structures, writing while not knowing what was in the suitcase, extra-terrestrial artifacts in Baghdad, how to confuse John Clute, the historical record being determined by Wikipedia and Google results, Google Maps and street view, lonelygirl15, YouTube, Japanese behavioral protocols, responding to Ed Park’s theory about the old man and Win being the same character, unreliable narrators, and Iain Sinclair.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We were talking about the nature of blankets and coats that are in your work, that often protect the characters’ bodies.

Gibson: Warmy blankies in the work of William Gibson! Well, did you notice that a lot? Is it just that book? Is there something I’ve been…?

Correspondent: It’s also in Pattern Recognition, with Cayce and her — the blanket that she actually shifts with as well.

Gibson: Well…

Correspondent: That industrial. And then she eventually goes back to natural blankets near the end.

Gibson: Could this be — could this be the 21st century equivalent of rain-soaked neon?

Correspondent: It could be.

Gibson: The warmy blanky? Maybe so. Maybe so.

Correspondent: Well, maybe it goes back to Neuromancer. Cyberspace back then was very much a matter of being plugged directly in the Internet, before it was known as the Internet.

Gibson: Yeah, but it was never envisioned as a warmy blanky! (laughs)

Correspondent: No, but we’re talking very much about sort of this whole idea of the body protected against things. I mean, you also have a lot of side characters in your books that often have shaved heads. And there’s actually the moment in this where Milgrim actually gets a haircut as well.

Gibson: That’s right.

Correspondent: I’m wondering how these textural elements relate to some of these, I guess, more corporeal ones.

Gibson: Well, not consciously. I mean, not that consciously. I think you’ve moved into the area of unconscious expression on the artist’s part. I mean, maybe, for twenty-five years, I’ve been working up my nerve to shave my head.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Gibson: Not yet, but soon. But I don’t know. Those are truly, you know — usually when people say they have questions I haven’t been asked before, it’s not true. You’ve actually managed to do it.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Denied a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

Guests: Megan Sullivan and Matthew Sharpe.

Subjects Discussed: Post-apocalyptic novels with a sense of humor, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, allegorical representations of Jamestown, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Afghanistan, parallels to Iraq and other military blunders, creation and transposition of vernacular, people named John, Buckaroo Banzai, the Bruces Monty Python sketch, reluctant communications officers, Ed Park’s review, the origins of the Internet, communicating into the void, mishearing things, the dangers of writing, New Journalism and the bus ride, As I Lay Dying, Susannah Meadows’s tone-deaf review, on excluding certain reader sensibilities as a writer, and the plausibility factor.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Sharpe: It’s been pointed out to me quite a number of times that mine is one of a spate of post-apocalyptic novel to hit the stands in 2006, 2007. And the only one I have read is The Road and I actually just read it a couple of weeks ago. There is really one very funny bit. There are a couple of funny bits. I actually do think that Cormac McCarthy has a wonderful understated sense of humor. But it’s not a laugh riot. I think — I suppose I have a number of predecessors or influences, when I don’t know if they’re necessarily apocalyptic novelists, but they are certainly war novelists, who I think are very funny. And Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are two obvious ones. Haruki Murakami, I think, has a great sense of humor. Donald Barthelme’s. I don’t even think I would consider them war novelists, but he — I’ve been influenced by the way that he writes about history. Even in short stories like “Cortez and Montezuma.” And then Susie-Lori Parks, I think, also is somebody whose hilariously funny and scathing about history. So I suppose these are my novels more than apocalyptic novels, per se. I guess Philip K. Dick has written a number of futuristic novels — again, not a hilariously funny guy. So I guess I’m not a terribly well-read person in areas of science fiction or even historical fiction. So I guess I’m deeply underqualified to be entering the genre. But I try to make up for it by being somewhat of a clown.

(A co-production of the Litblog Co-Op and The Bat Segundo Show)

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