IFOA 2010: William Gibson & David Mitchell

Bridges Over Time: William Gibson & David Mitchell in Conversation

International Festival of Authors (Fleck Dance Theatre). Wednesday, October 27, 2010.

A big crowd for this one, with the lower seats filled up and some people even sitting in the balcony. I was here to see William Gibson, author of many novels of speculative fiction, and a canny observer of technology and the way that people interact with it. He read a chapter from his new Zero History, set in the same universe as his previous Pattern Recognition and Spook Country — a universe not too different from what next week might be like in our own. Choosing a passage that was mostly conversation-based and expository, his prose was filled with the vividly specific textures and bits of stuff that fill his work. Standing slightly stoop-shouldered, the gangly Gibson had a folksy sort of quality, speaking unhurriedly and with a hint of twang revealing his Virginia upbringing. As he read, he was clearly enjoying himself, almost laughing along with the audience, as if he were letting us in on a code-cracking conspiracy. Very enjoyable.

David Mitchell, the evening's other author was unfamiliar to me, although being twice-shortlisted for the Booker, he obviously has some cachet. Although here promoting his newest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (set in 18th century Japan) he instead read a new short story — very new, in fact. "I'm still working on it, so I need you to be friendly, Torontonian guinea pigs tonight," he told the crowd. The story had a science-fiction basis, but with a streak of folk tale and social realism, Mitchell relating it to "Gordon Lightfoot, guesting with Rush, singing a song by The Smiths". The tale cross-cut between two stories, each hinging in a different way on the value of the elderly in a society defined by scarcity. Mitchell was even editing the story in real time. On hitting the sentence, "there was a fierce glint in his look." he stopped. "That's a rubbish sentence, isn't it — 'fierce glint in his look'?", crossing it out before moving on.

And then the authors were interviewed by Mark Askwith. Gibson was placid and unruffled on the stage, cool in the McLuhanesque sense. Mitchell, meanwhile, gave the impression of a clever seminar student trying to impress a professor, taking notes and visibly thinking on stage. The interview revolved around, as Gibson characterized it, how "everyone's present is always some else's future and someone else's past" — the means by which fiction can give us the gift of atemporality, "of not being too now-centric." This would serve as the link between the two books, Mitchell's set in the past and Gibson's in the near-future, both agreeing that ultimately imagining the future and past are equally speculative — although the ways that the author could get each of them wrong is different.

There was some talk about writing strategies, and of the narrative value of outsiders — and in both of these books, translators — as protagonists. Askwith, fascinated with both authors' neologisms (Williams' story memorably featured a character being issued tic-tac-like "mercy beans" as a last option) enquired about the drift of language and the need to have new words to describe things in the future.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation came around the topic of what we might call ubiquitous intertextuality. Gibson discussed how he now takes it for granted that readers will automatically google unfamiliar names or phrases, and how "every published text today is surrounded by an invisible virtual cloud of hyperlinks" — a radical game-changer for how authors handle exposition. He further proposed that in a couple years, every e-reader will be connected to Google, and the reader could click through on every word to wikipedia — meaning that an author could slip in relatively obscure references and assume that the reader will get some pleasure out of googling it, working their way through the same websites that the author found.

Some questions from the audience were answered with thoughtful paragraph-length answers, and not just quick sentences. On literary influences, Gibson observed that although he always mentioned William S. Burroughs at the top of his list, he realized with age that that was partially because he thought he'd be seen to be cool to name Burroughs, where, in reality, the spy novels of Len Deighton might have been just as formative. Thought-provoking stuff throughout.