No Maps for These Territories (review)

A non-diegetic voice asks a question. William Gibson answers from the seat of a late model sedan, moving at speed. We are inside the cab, two tiny 'lipstick' cameras looking backward from the front toward the rear windows. We see cars passing and passed. Roadway, overpasses, underpasses. Distant skyscrapers, modern cities. Warehouses, grain elevators. Street scenes and curbs, post-boxes and pedestrians. Mostly day, some night. The colours washed, the light unbalanced, the sound imperfect. Inside the cab. The cigarettes. The wandering elliptical answers, the conversational imbrications and repetitions. The voice asks another question. Gibson gives another answer. The earlier equivocation now clarified, the earlier reductive aside now developed with subtlety. Occasionally we see other human beings. In almost every scene, Gibson wears his safety belt, but no one wears mirrorshades.

No Maps for these Territories is Mark Neale's documentary with, though not really of, William Gibson. Filmed in 1999 – the same moment as the publication of All Tomorrow's Parties, the final volume of Gibson's Bridge triptych – the film was released in 2001, two years before the first of Gibson's 'non-sf sf' novels, Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007). The discussion is pre-post-9/11, but remains remarkably similar to the kind of comments and remarks in interviews given in his last two book tours: we have arrived at a cusp of change; we do not know what precisely it is or what it will bring; it is outside our control to legislate or completely understand; we are already posthuman, the co-opted prosthetic products of interpenetrating technologies; and so forth. Calling it 'My Dinner with André in a car', Neale gives Gibson centre stage to answer at his leisure and at length. Almost the entire film is Gibson talking, though in some short portions we hear from Bruce Sterling, interviewed in an Austin café. For very brief moments, the novelist Jack Womack rides along and contributes, and there are also passing quips from U2's Bono and The Edge. A few sections of the film are given to passages of the final Bridge book, and The Edge reads 'Chiba City Blues', the opening section of Neuromancer (1984). Much of the discussion is underscored by a music track by tomandandy, with additional music from Bono, The Edge, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and others.

What is exciting about No Maps is not precisely what Gibson says, but to be enclosed in the Gibson box for almost ninety minutes. He discusses his current thinking on technology in a 'post-geographical' present; how he came to write Neuromancer and what the novel still means (or does not) to him; recreational drugs, and why he does not use them (anymore); religion; history; his biography, especially his emotional and psychological development; the 'end stage' of capitalism; the very mystery of being human:

I think we live in an incomprehensible present, and what I'm actually trying to do is illuminate the moment – and make the moment accessible. I'm not even trying to explain the moment – I'm just trying to make it accessible.

Recreational drugs are essentially a wank. And a wank is ok, but you really should know it's just a wank.

More real is always better.

I think of religions as franchise operations, sort of like chicken franchises. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?

Many of the questions are about his writing, but a surprising number are the sort that Oprah might ask – 'What is happiness to you?' And also surprisingly, they elicit neither contempt nor denial but thoughtful, heartfelt, witty replies, postmodern irony and naïve sentimentality mixed in almost equal measure.

This Gibson is not the hyperbolic speed demon of Neuromancer, but the more reflective and wry Gibson of the most recent novels. In his quiet, understated and elliptically elegant way, Gibson remains a remarkable writer. His speech carries much of the quality his prose – pithy, often unexpected and occasionally even lyrical...