WILLIAM GIBSON
Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like
being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization
there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my
story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was eighteen.
Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you'll find
an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception.
I was born on the coast of South Carolina, where my parents liked to vacation
when there was almost nothing there at all. My father was in some sort of middle
management position in a large and growing construction company. They'd built
some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoiac legends of "security" at
Oak Ridge were part of our family culture. There was a cigar-box full of strange-looking
ID badges he'd worn there. But he'd done well at Oak Ridge, evidently, and so
had the company he worked for, and in the postwar South they were busy building
entire red brick Levittown-style suburbs. We moved a lot, following these
projects, and he was frequently away, scouting for new ones.
It was a world of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship
styling, toys with science fiction themes. Then my father went off on one more
business trip. He never came back. He choked on something in a restaurant, the
Heimlich maneuver hadn't been discovered yet, and everything changed.
My mother took me back to the small town in southwestern Virginia where both she
and my father were from, a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but
was deeply distrusted. The trauma of my father's death aside, I'm convinced that
it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past,
that began my relationship with science fiction.
I eventually became exactly the sort of introverted, hyper-bookish boy you'll
find in the biographies of most American science fiction writers, obsessively
filling shelves with paperbacks and digest-sized magazines, dreaming of one day
becoming a writer myself.
At age fifteen, my chronically anxious and depressive mother having demonstrated
an uncharacteristic burst of common sense in what today we call parenting, I was
shipped off to a private boys' school in Arizona. There, extracted grub-like and
blinking from my bedroom and those bulging plywood shelves, I began the forced
invention of a less Lovecraftian persona - based in large part on a chance
literary discovery a year or so before.
I had stumbled, in my ceaseless quest for more and/or better science fiction, on
a writer name Burroughs -- not Edgar Rice but William S., and with him had come
his colleagues Kerouac and Ginsberg. I had read this stuff, or tried to, with no
idea at all of what it might mean, and felt compelled - compelled to what, I
didn't know. The effect, over the next few years, was to make me, at least in
terms of my Virginia home, Patient Zero of what would later be called the
counterculture. At the time, I had no way of knowing that millions of other
Boomer babes, changelings all, were undergoing the same metamorphosis.
In Arizona, science fiction was put aside with other childish things, as I set
about negotiating puberty and trying on alternate personae with all the urgency
and clumsiness that come with that, and was actually getting somewhere, I think,
when my mother died with stunning suddenness. Dropped literally dead: the
descent of an Other Shoe I'd been anticipating since age six.
Thereafter, probably needless to say, things didn't seem to go very well for
quite a while. I left my school without graduating, joined up with rest of the
Children's Crusade of the day, and shortly found my self in Canada, a country I
knew almost nothing about. I concentrated on evading the draft and staying alive,
while trying to make sure I looked like I was at least enjoying the Summer of
Love. I did literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, and
have lived here in Canada, more or less, ever since.
Having ridden out the crest of the Sixties in Toronto, aside from a brief, riot-torn
spell in the District of Columbia, I met a girl from Vancouver, went off to
Europe with her (concentrating on countries with fascist regimes and highly
favorable rates of exchange) got married, and moved to British Columbia, where I
watched the hot fat of the Sixties congeal as I earned a desultory bachelor's
degree in English at UBC.
In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for
anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest
in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York
and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile
buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a
sign. And I began, then, to write.
And have been, ever since.
Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something
that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy
journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a
typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual
because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid
the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a
magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I
probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar
thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours
of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An
individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't
have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision.
I do have an email address, yes, but, no, I won't give it to you. I am one and
you are many, and even if you are, say, twenty-seven in grand global total, that's
still too many. Because I need to have a life and waste time and write.
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the
average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as
anything, may be the real secret here.
Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like
being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization
there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my
story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was eighteen.
Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you'll find
an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception.
I was born on the coast of South Carolina, where my parents liked to vacation
when there was almost nothing there at all. My father was in some sort of middle
management position in a large and growing construction company. They'd built
some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoiac legends of "security" at
Oak Ridge were part of our family culture. There was a cigar-box full of strange-looking
ID badges he'd worn there. But he'd done well at Oak Ridge, evidently, and so
had the company he worked for, and in the postwar South they were busy building
entire red brick Levittown-style suburbs. We moved a lot, following these
projects, and he was frequently away, scouting for new ones.
It was a world of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship
styling, toys with science fiction themes. Then my father went off on one more
business trip. He never came back. He choked on something in a restaurant, the
Heimlich maneuver hadn't been discovered yet, and everything changed.
My mother took me back to the small town in southwestern Virginia where both she
and my father were from, a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but
was deeply distrusted. The trauma of my father's death aside, I'm convinced that
it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past,
that began my relationship with science fiction.
I eventually became exactly the sort of introverted, hyper-bookish boy you'll
find in the biographies of most American science fiction writers, obsessively
filling shelves with paperbacks and digest-sized magazines, dreaming of one day
becoming a writer myself.
At age fifteen, my chronically anxious and depressive mother having demonstrated
an uncharacteristic burst of common sense in what today we call parenting, I was
shipped off to a private boys' school in Arizona. There, extracted grub-like and
blinking from my bedroom and those bulging plywood shelves, I began the forced
invention of a less Lovecraftian persona - based in large part on a chance
literary discovery a year or so before.
I had stumbled, in my ceaseless quest for more and/or better science fiction, on
a writer name Burroughs -- not Edgar Rice but William S., and with him had come
his colleagues Kerouac and Ginsberg. I had read this stuff, or tried to, with no
idea at all of what it might mean, and felt compelled - compelled to what, I
didn't know. The effect, over the next few years, was to make me, at least in
terms of my Virginia home, Patient Zero of what would later be called the
counterculture. At the time, I had no way of knowing that millions of other
Boomer babes, changelings all, were undergoing the same metamorphosis.
In Arizona, science fiction was put aside with other childish things, as I set
about negotiating puberty and trying on alternate personae with all the urgency
and clumsiness that come with that, and was actually getting somewhere, I think,
when my mother died with stunning suddenness. Dropped literally dead: the
descent of an Other Shoe I'd been anticipating since age six.
Thereafter, probably needless to say, things didn't seem to go very well for
quite a while. I left my school without graduating, joined up with rest of the
Children's Crusade of the day, and shortly found my self in Canada, a country I
knew almost nothing about. I concentrated on evading the draft and staying alive,
while trying to make sure I looked like I was at least enjoying the Summer of
Love. I did literally evade the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, and
have lived here in Canada, more or less, ever since.
Having ridden out the crest of the Sixties in Toronto, aside from a brief, riot-torn
spell in the District of Columbia, I met a girl from Vancouver, went off to
Europe with her (concentrating on countries with fascist regimes and highly
favorable rates of exchange) got married, and moved to British Columbia, where I
watched the hot fat of the Sixties congeal as I earned a desultory bachelor's
degree in English at UBC.
In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for
anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest
in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York
and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile
buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a
sign. And I began, then, to write.
And have been, ever since.
Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something
that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy
journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a
typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual
because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid
the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a
magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I
probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar
thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours
of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An
individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't
have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision.
I do have an email address, yes, but, no, I won't give it to you. I am one and
you are many, and even if you are, say, twenty-seven in grand global total, that's
still too many. Because I need to have a life and waste time and write.
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the
average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as
anything, may be the real secret here.