Off the Cuff on Gibson

I’ve just wrapped up my thesis writing on Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, and I’ve got a lot of bits and pieces of larger ideas still rattling around in my head, and I feel that I might as well just write them here, over a period of time while I’m figuring out how and if to keep writing.

I keep seeing a misunderstanding about Gibson - that he’s writing a critique on capitalism, or that he’s writing a “dystopia,” and neither of those are really the case. Like, it’s not as though he’s of the opinion that capitalism doesn’t have its victims, or that there are some dystopia-esque regions in what he tends to characterize as the First World, but his politics tend to run on the neo-liberal-libertarian axis, with distinct attention paid to a kind of (Karl) Rovian nu-realpolitik that his writing constructs as inevitable.

More than anything, Gibson strikes me as a fatalist. Like, I enjoy his writing an awful lot. I actually find his essays to be even more engaging than his fiction. But politically, despite his intentions (per interviews and whatever), he’s the opposite of punk and the opposite of revolutionary. (Which also makes sense, to a degree, since he’s never liked the “cyberpunk” nomenclature.) His politics are right in line with 1980′s pop culture, just allowed to mature (or ferment, if you like that more) for several decades. He follows the super-individualist line - the idea that only the individual is worthwhile, that collective action can’t succeed, and his writing seems fixated on the existence of a future that is already largely determined by momentum and can only be diverted by key individuals in the know, and then only by so much.

His books always kind of read like near-future Horatio Alger novels, where the protagonist wins a little, but affecting real change in the face of the incredibly wealthy and powerful is essentially impossible.

I’m not really suggesting this is bad, or Gibson is bad, or anything like that. I can empathize and even, to a degree, respect this kind of fatalism. Additionally, it’s not Gibson’s job as a storyteller or a writer to adopt a revolutionary mindset or craft a revolutionary story, or push a revolutionary narrative. It’s just that as long as you read his cyberpunk work expecting that, you’ll be eternally stymied. I’ve read several published books and papers making just that assumption, all based on the word “cyberpunk,” and presuming that Gibson’s adopted a “normal” political spectrum of “right-wing” vs. “left-wing” and his writing doesn’t “track” as traditional right-wing (military wank) sci-fi, so he’s gotta be left-wing. When, in reality, I’d say that he’s probably part of the ferment that gave rise to the techno-libertarian Silicon Valley God-King complex, while he personally skews liberal-libertarian in his writerly ideology.