William Gibson
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 November 1999
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is William Gibson. Long before the existence of the Internet, he wrote about 'cyberspace', a boundless world reached only through computers. External space travel, to the Moon and Mars, had become old hat. By creating internal space, he breathed new life into science fiction. In conversation with Sue Lawley, he talks about his life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: (Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For? by Nick Cave Book: Complete Works by Jorge Luis Borges Luxury: Junk yard
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. As the age of the personal computer dawned, he it was who created the concept of cyberspace. |
| 0:39.0 | He invented a world where people wire their brains into computer systems and inhabit a nightmare future of data, |
| 0:45.8 | deception and designer drugs. |
| 0:48.2 | This world was revealed to the public in 1984 in a |
| 0:55.0 | 1984 |
| 1:02.0 | neuromanse, neuro as in brain. It was hugely successful |
| 0:56.0 | and its author who'd become by his own admission a prototype slacker |
| 1:00.0 | was hailed as the savioriour of science fiction. |
| 1:03.0 | There have been many more books since in which high-tech and low life are natural partners |
| 1:07.5 | where information junkies travel at a fast-forward pace |
| 1:11.0 | through a world that has no countries. But their creator isn't |
| 1:15.0 | turned on by computers and enjoys a conventional lifestyle in Vancouver. He |
| 1:20.0 | sees himself, he says, almost as a surrealist. |
| 1:23.2 | Science fiction is my excuse for what I do, |
| 1:26.3 | rather than what I do. |
| 1:28.1 | He is William Gibson. |
| 1:30.1 | It's a kind of flag of convenience then is it William? |
| 1:33.0 | Yes it is and I sometimes feel ambivalent about it |
| 1:38.0 | but then I remember that science fiction is my native literary culture so it's it's where I'm from rather than |
| 1:46.3 | what I am but why do you feel ambivalent about it somehow you don't want to be called |
... |
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