Movie: William Gibson: No Maps for These Territories

The most formative writers for me as a kid were Spider Robinson, Robert Heinlein, and in 1984 (I probably read it in 1985) William Gibson. “Neuromancer” was such an awesome book, it so shaped what Science Fiction was about, I didn’t want to read anything else. I read a fair amount of the other cyberpunks, Rudy Rucker, in particular. But none of them were William Gibson, and none of their works had the same effect on me as “Neuromancer.”
I was a young computer geek (which was a fairly rare thing in the early ’80s), and the thought that Case, a hacker, essentially, could be the hero of a great SF novel… well that was a drug greater than anything I had experienced.
And I loved Gibson’s style. I loved how he rarely explained things; that he assumed that you were hip enough to get it, and if not you should be reading something else. Never mind that he possibly lacked the technical expertise to actually explain technology — he was writing the damn thing on a typewriter, after all. But his quick-cut, dense, but always human narratives were the best things going. I think I had read his short story “Dogfight” before Neuromancer, written with Michael Swanwick. I still think of that story as just about the perfect short story. Maybe I’ll write more about that some day.
I caught some bits of the documentary “No Maps for these Territories,” on Bravo or somewhere and wondered where in the hell that had come from, but couldn’t find it to Tivo. Recently, I was reminded of it again and purchased it from the iTunes store. It cost $5.
Never mind the theoretical artiness of the movie. I gather that the producers watched “My Dinner with Andre” and decided that watching two guys just talk at length is too boring, and watching just one guy would be lethal, so they put poor Gibson in a limo and drove him around so that they could play with the scene outside his window, sometimes playing the view outside the car backwards, or more quickly or more slowly, or bringing up text in some weird “electric window” effect. It feels like that guy at the office that just figured out how to use animations in Power Point and is determined to put every single Fly In and Shutter Out into his presentation.
But mostly it is just Gibson talking. There are a few comments from other SF writers, including a brief sit down with Bruce Sterling, who I think is one of the smartest guys, maybe with Clay Shirky, writing today. For some reason they have the Edge talking about “Neuromancer” and Bono reading it. But that’s OK. Over-exposed or not, they are still pretty cool.
Gibson talks about the stuff you would hope he would talk about. He talks about his early works, and coining the term “cyberspace”, and developing the whole “consensual hallucination” concept that the term refers to. I found it especially interesting hearing him talk about how painfully he struggled to write his first novel and how he really was just groping for a way to pull it off. He talks about how the whole “simstim” business (at least I think that’s what he is referring to) was essentially developed to help him move characters from Point A to Point B in his stories. He says he didn’t know, otherwise, how to get his characters up the stairs or out of the car. But if they could just slap in a cartridge and be virtually elsewhere… well, that worked for him.
He talks about the transformative power of technology and what he thinks it will inevitably lead to. Gibson comments on the irony that the DARPANet was developed (forget about whether this is true, or not, for the moment) to help the U.S. government survive a nuclear war, but that the continued growth of the Internet will lead inexorably to the destruction of the nation-state.
He talks about religion in a surprising ambiguous way. He says that this life isn’t a rehearsal for anything, this is all we have, but then he talks very vaguely about whether “it is happening” in church or not. What “it” is, I didn’t really follow.
He talks about drugs. He talks about whether he fled to Canada to escape the Draft. He talks about making peace with the death of William Burroughs, who obviously meant a lot to him.
One of the most human moments is when he talks about Detroit, and what a wasteland downtown Detroit is, but how the “burghurs” of Detroit opposed simply letting the buildings fall down, even though they “can’t get anyone to live there.” He sort of mocks the citizens of Detroit in a way that makes him feel more like a regular guy, talking about the kind of things that regular guys talk about. He is so smart, and — I mean this in the best possible way — unusual and thoughtful, that his rare descent into mean-spiritness pulls him out of the clouds.
If you enjoy Gibson’s works, I think watching this movie is a must. I totally enjoyed watching it. It felt right, rather than burning it to DVD and watching it on the TV (though I’ll probably do that, too), to play it in QuickTime on the external monitor hooked up to my MacBook. So I could surf and be plugged in, while listening to and watching William Gibson talk. Listening to him talk about writing was as compelling as anything this side of Stephen King’s “On Writing.”
I’d love to see a feature like this on Spider Robinson.