Paul Graham Raven

William Gibson by Gary Westfahl

Publication type:

Publication date:

September 2013

Original venue:

Interzone #248

See original version

One grows accustomed to books that promise much and deliver little, but when the book in question is a career retrospective of William Gibson, you’d be forgiven for having high hopes; after all, Gibson was an instrumental part of the cyberpunk revolution—a revolution rapidly assimilated back into the skiffy mainstream, admittedly, and a label that Gibson was always uneasy about—and is among the thinkers who’ve shaped, if not the world we live in today, then the language with which we discuss that world. How could one fail to find interesting things to say?

Westfahl’s text suffers the perennial problem of critical works by writers rooted in old-guard fandom: the need to not just celebrate great writers as originating in the generic coffin, but to nail them into it forever, like ageing punks spuriously tracing the lineage of any half-way worthy band all the way back to the Sex Pistols. The jacket copy promises discussions of “more than eighty virtually unknown Gibson publications from his early years”; these are fanzine nuggets which Gibson himself dismisses as juvenilia, and do little beyond delineating a few years of fanac preceding an oft-avowed frustration with (and eventual abandoning of) the sf culture of his time. To Westfahl, though, these texts mark Gibson as One Of Ours in perpetuity—and he’ll reshape both Gibson and the coffin if it’ll help him keep the lid on.

He begins by trying to crowbar Gibson into the shadow of Heinlein, because… um, well, they both brought a few genre-specific advances in technique (i.e. both developed contemporary styles that avoided infodump) and they both stuck to their principles (even if Gibson’s principles are in many cases diametrically opposed to those of Heinlein). Westfahl runs out of steam on this idea before he’s done talking about the Sprawl trilogy, but the ghost of Uncle Bob gets raised again in the conclusion, as if the similarities were both obvious and profoundly telling. Perhaps I just haven’t read enough Heinlein; veteran fans often tell me that, so it must be true.

Later, Westfahl ties himself in knots over the Bigend books as he tries to have his cake and eat it, listing every passing pop-culture reference in Zero History with the slightest sci-fi flavour in order to show that Gibson has reached rapprochement with the genre, then conceding that perhaps it’s a reflection of the ubiquity of skiffy imagery in contemporary mass culture, before concluding that said ubiquity surely indicates that SF Was Right! The evidence suggests otherwise, though: that the mainstream has won (by filching the tools and ditching the dogma), and that skiffy’s greatest triumph is in manning the ghetto wall while wailing that it woz The Mainstream Man wot walled them in, like Randian preppers awaiting the pinko plebocalypse. While one can cherry-pick from Gibson’s interviews to suggest otherwise, the full quotes show unambiguously that Gibson cares nothing for sf as a culture, and little for it as a literature. Fandom’s wishful conflation of the two somehow transmutes his ambivalence into a sort of sleeper-agent status: Codename Heinlein, awaiting his activation signal.

Westfahl has other axes to grind; his distaste for Bruce Sterling (as both writer and personality) radiates from discussions of his Gibson collaborations, for example. Then there’s his theory that Gibson loathes academics and trolls them relentlessly through his portrayals of characters from intellectual milieus: those pretentious po-mo theorists, wanking on about Foucault and the posthuman, taking all the manly competence out of our skiffy with their five-dollar words! But Westfahl also claims that certain shifts of theme or trope from novel to novel were clearly prompted by Gibson absorbing critical receptions of his work and adjusting his output to please them. So which is it?

It’s neither, of course; in the “exclusive” interview near the back of the book, Gibson responds to Westfahl’s critic-trolling theory with a resounding “nah”. (Perhaps the interview would have been better done before the book was completed? That way, questions such as “Every book you’ve published starts with a different letter of the alphabet […] Is this a coincidence, or a deliberate pattern?” might have been replaced with something less… well, less fanzine, basically.)

There will surely be people who concur with Westfahl’s reading far more closely than my own—a very postmodern position for me to take, I know—but I could perhaps have forgiven the parochial anti-intellectualism if Westfahl hadn’t achieved the impossible, and made Gibson and his work seem boring. In the final paragraph of his conclusion, Westfahl writes of Gibson: “[h]e is keenly interested in certain things, and pursues those interests regardless of what others think, while making necessary concessions to market demands”; a graveside eulogy for an unloved travelling salesman.

For all its claims to being definitive, I suspect (and hope) that the academic critiques of Gibson which Westfahl so resents will garner many more citations than this book; they’re just as subjective, but they’ve a damned sight more to say.

Commentary notes

This is perhaps the first negative review I had published anywhere other than my own sites (and possibly even there) in which I really just let it all out. That has its downsides in terms of the piece itself; I think the contempt crowds out the more considered and forensic response that might have been made, even in so small a wordcount. On the other hand, it was a moment of liberation, finally feeling that I was of sufficient stature on ‘the scene’ to be deeply critical of a well-known old hand.

I will go to my grave believing that the criticism was justified in this case, and I recall that others who had read Westfahl’s monograph around the same time were not exactly enraptured by it, though perhaps more diplomatic in their public statements. But in truth, this book made me properly angry; it is not only amateurish, but lackadaisical, utterly unanimated by any sense of passion (or, in many places, knowledge) for the project or its subject. It is, as such, the first academic book I ever read that made me think “I could do better than this”.

Context is important, though, and a look at the dates reminds me that this was not only written in the late phases of the Generic Blog Wars (hence the undisguised animus against the greyest end of fandom), but also at the start of what would turn out to be a number of very stressful years in which my mental health was not at its best. This is the flipside of the freedom already mentioned: I overcorrected from my early equivocality, we might say, and went through a period of writing some pretty excoriating reviews which may have been informed at least in part—but by no means exclusively—by my own anxieties and insecurities as a writer, scholar and human being.

To be clear, I still believe that none of the reviews to which I refer were harsh on books that didn’t merit the treatment, but there are some where I regret the deployment of a rather incendiary and internet-native writing style, which made them perhaps cruel where they only needed to be critical. This one has a bit of that, I think, but it is not the high-water mark of that tendency.

I would add that after submitting this review and having it published, I wondered (as I often do) if I’d been unduly critical, and in particular whether my memory of Gibson’s oeuvre had become rose-tinted by his canon position, leading me to reread the entire works of Gibson in chronological order shortly afterwards. That exercise rather confirmed my reading over Westfahl’s, and left me with notes—which I hope are still somewhere in my archive—for the monograph I would write to counter his. Another for the list of projects that will likely never get written…