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	Penguin Putnam
	Neuromancer

So you know, we're not going to ask you about cyberspace. All we want to know is what you think about space -- outer space.

I invented cyberspace because traditional space travel as a metaphor, as it was in the books I read as a boy, wasn't doing it for me emotionally.

In Neuromancer, space travel is deliberately relegated to Vegas/Disney style operations, very lowball orbital real estate. They don't seem to look beyond that -- nobody ever goes anywhere.

We're also living in an age of increasingly sophisticated telepresence, I don't know what that does to the urge to colonize. You should get Stan Robinson in here -- he could tell you everything about what it takes to terraform Mars [laughter].

Is Mir still up there or has it fallen down already?

It's up there, but it's empty. The lights are out, it should go down next year.

I was really deeply moved by one of the last photographs to come out of that station, an image of the Earth seen during the solar eclipse. I thought to myself, "we've never had that camera angle before."

Are you disappointed with our progress toward space? You've mentioned that when you were 15, you would have expected us to be on Mars by now.

I'm not as disappointed as I am grateful we haven't blown ourselves to shit. I remember waking up every day when I was that age and fully expecting the possibility of global annihilation.

And now, with all these stories coming out of Russia, it turns out that it was infinitely worse than the Pentagon thought. They were completely paranoid. It was mad! Do you know about the big floating bomb they had planned?

It was in New Scientist last year. They had to make absolutely sure there wouldn't be a world without Marxism, so they were going to build this massive floating nuclear bomb disguised as a luxury liner. It would have wandered the seas until it detected signs of a nuclear exchange, at which time it would have blown itself up and taken the world with it. The trigger wasn't on the ship itself, it was connected to Geiger counters monitoring the ambient radiation level of Moscow.

I think they got as far as building the keel before other people in the government pointed out just how insane it was. But the fact we didn't do ourselves in is, in the long view of the species, probably a more salient point than the fact that we didn't go jaunting around in interplanetary space or colonize the moon.

I was really happy with the Mars lander. I really got off on that. Given budget considerations, it makes more sense to do it that way, with telepresence. How much of Apollo or the moon rover would we have undertaken, if not for political reasons -- would we have sent those men up there?

How are communication -- embodied by "telepresence" -- and travel different?

There's less difference between them for us than there was for our grandparents. When I was a kid in the 1950s -- the golden age of space travel [because] it was all potential back then -- none of it had been achieved, time and distance still meant something.

The irony for me, looking back, is that there has been some progress in transiting these vast, really unimaginable gulfs of distance, but there has been more real progress in high-bandwidth communication. Geography no longer matters. Distance no longer matters.

While we were dreaming about spreading our chromosomes, the species was spinning this prosthetic nervous system for itself, and that's what's driving social change now. It's not legislation, it's not population pressures. Where we're going is the result of emerging technologies, and that's terribly rich ground for a science fiction writer.

A teacher of mine [Mark C. Taylor] always said the "Internet has destroyed space." Has our growing fascination with this network down here taken our attention off other planets?

Well, I think the steam locomotive abolished time and distance, so that's a process that's been going on for awhile. But I come back always to space travel and especially J.G. Ballard's famous proclamation that "Earth is the alien planet."

I just wonder why at this point we would use up a lot of capital to go somewhere else. Do we want to spread our chromosomes? Is there some military or economic advantage we could get up there? I grew up with all these rationales, but it seems like a nostalgic product.

We're capable of telepresence to the level of high-end virtual reality, where you can just sit in Palo Alto and drive the probe to Mars. And then you can get out, have a shower, get dinner while the next guy drives the probe.

Sending chromosomes.... If I want to activate my rusty Stapledonian mode, I'd say by the time we get there, we won't be human anymore. By the time we're seriously achieving big-time planetary action, we'll be indistinguishable from our equipment. We'll be posthuman hybrids, and I don't think the change will be along the way -- using "us" in a rhetorical sense, the first of "us" to go to Mars will be very different from you or me.

So you don't get there in tin cans?

I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be floating around in tin cans, it's just that the issues of post-human technology aren't anything we'd understand. We'll carry our issues with us. Where we go and when and how will be a function of those issues, whatever they are by that point.

Is there anything up there we can't get down here? Your later books have shown an increasing sense of "play," of activity without any overt purpose. Why not just go to see the sights?

One reason we might go to Mars would be the Chinese enthusiasm. We'd be afraid the Chinese will get there first.

China has invested enormous emotional belief in the goodness of space travel. Their enthusiasm is the highest in the world -- where we were in the 1950s. And it's remarkable when you consider that this is a nation that's only recently built its first ICBM. When was the last time you heard anyone talk about ICBMs? [laughter]

There's that Leonard Cohen song ["Death of a Ladies' Man"], where he says,

"So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far."

It's like the journey is for nothing.

Why not make the journey for nothing, then? Just to make the trip, instead of having the postcards beamed back.

Space travel is like making movies, but it costs more. Spend $20 million, you go with some weird-ass baggage. You can go out a Byronic urge, but you'll be up there with a Byronic urge and you'll be wearing mylar coveralls swathed in Nike swooshes.

Might we not be absurd enough as a species to, apologies to Nike, "just do it"?

We're definitely absurd enough to just do it, but it boils down to economics. If functional nanotechnology took off and really clicked, we'd be in a really interesting situation. The concept of wealth would be meaningless, you could do what you want then. You can take your friends and go to Mars.

That's a messianic vision, though, don't you think? Many people get very angry about that sort of post-human thinking because it absolves us of having to worry about next year, or the next generation.

Oh yes. That's valid, and there are a great many very corporate futurological thinkers preaching that gospel these days.

But what's been most obvious for me is that futurological prediction -- so-called -- is completely assumptive. That's why the most meaningful way to study science fiction is that it's never about the future, it's about the time in which it was written. The kind of future history that Heinlein constructed, I read as a boy and was incredibly impressed, but look how it turned out! It would probably have even less to do with the future if he tried something like that today.

The most I get from that is the idea that as emerging technology gathers force, the future is so different, it's like an ontological black hole. Who knows what's on the other side? We can't predict it.

Something like the end of your new book, All Tomorrow's Parties. Tomorrow comes, and suddenly the world has changed. She [Rei Toei, the virtual superstar] has become a real girl.

Yes! Or she's become a bicycle, or a flashlight, or whatever she becomes. There's that unbridgeable gap between today and tomorrow. Our children will probably look back on us and be very critical. Or our grandchildren. They won't be able to imagine what our lives were like.

Isn't that always true with grandchildren, though?

Oh yes, but the unbridgeable gaps are coming closer and there are more of them. After thousands of years of nothing happening, there are more discontinuities.

Speaking of generational discontinuities and space, why were the Tessier-Ashpools so sad in Neuromancer?

They were a pretty pathological bunch! I described them as being this historical anomaly, as being like old-fashioned rich people. Individuals.

For me, though, the real space imagery in that book is Zion Cluster. Rastafarians drifting around, stoned in space as a tribute to the "stoned" thread of science fiction in the 1960s.

I loved them.

I love them too, but I wouldn't want to depend on them to maintain hull integrity! [laughter] In their sections of the book, there's all this caulking-gun imagery. Although some of the Mir imagery showed that that sort of thing might actually be the future.

[Bruce] Sterling and I wrote a story, "Red Star, Winter Orbit," set in Mir or something like it. What happened up there actually surprised us.

But then, neither of us managed to predict the end of the Soviet Union. Jim Oberg or someone took photographs in Kazakhstan, it was Ballardian to beat the band.

Major ecological catastrophe -- it seems they have those with surprising regularity. You can't drink the water, you can't even wash in it. But there was one picture of Sterling hauling himself up a booster, like he was inching up a whale....

They always ask you what you're reading or what you're listening to. What're you watching?

Well, I'm reading Iain Sinclair from Scotland. Him and Cormack McCarthy.

I'm working on another X-Files. I'm also working on a project with Chris Cunningham, the New York video director.

Neuromancer? I didn't know you were heavily involved with that.

Oh yes.

Will you have more control over the film than last time [Johnny Mnemonic]?

I have more, yes, but it's hard to be sure that's enough. I have more control -- an anomalous degree of creative control, really -- but there's that karmic weight of $30-$40 million. It's very difficult to steer something that large.

We're almost out of time. I should return you to your publicist, but should we talk about the book?

Oh, I don't need to. [shrugs]

I wish we had more time with you.

Think of me as a virtual avatar. Think of it as telepresence!