![]() ![]() He hadn’t yet written any science fiction-he hadn’t read any science fiction since adolescence, having discarded the stuff more or less completely at fourteen, just, he says, as its publishers intended. He thought he might become a film-cell animator. He hadn’t yet heard of the Internet, or even its predecessors arpanet and Telenet. He hadn’t been to college and didn’t yet intend to go. He had never been to the Far East, which would yield so much of the junk-heap casino texture of his early fiction. Gibson came to Vancouver in 1972, a twenty-four-year-old orphan who’d spent the past half-decade trawling the counterculture in Toronto on his wandering way from small-town southern Virginia. But large parts of Vancouver are traversed by trolley cars, and on clear nights you can gaze up at the wide expanse of Pacific sky through the haphazard grid of their electric wires. ![]() There are periods in the year when it’ll rain for forty days, William Gibson tells me one mucky day there this winter, and when visibility drops so low you can’t see what’s coming at you from the nearest street corner. Vancouver, British Columbia, sits just on the far side of the American border, a green-glass model city set in the dish of the North Shore Mountains, which enclose the city and support, most days, a thick canopy of fog. Interviewed by David Wallace-Wells Issue 197, Summer 2011 ![]()
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