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CYBER LIT
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William Gibson's latest story costs $450, comes on disk, and self-destructs
after one reading. A real page burner.
By Gavin Edwards (Details, June '92) Transcribed by Debaser
Once you start reading Agrippa (A Book of The Dead), you literally
can't stop. Agrippa continues without you, because Agrippa is not a
conventional book. You can't pause in the middle or reread your favorite
passage, because it's text comes on a computer diskette that, like an
assignment for "Mission: Impossible", self-destructs after one play.
Behind this volatile text is William Gibson, the author of the award-
winning novel "Neuromancer" and one of the preeminent minds in science
fiction. Instead of just speculating about the future, Gibson has created
an object that actually brings us there, a harbinger of a time when books
are pay-per-view events that arrive over the phone lines.
"Books have lives of their own," says the author from his home in
Vancouver. "They find their way into astonishingly peculiar company.
I got my first screenwriting job because one of the producers had been in
some resort in Thailand and found a waterlogged copy of 'Neuromancer'
that somebody had left on the beach. 'Agrippa' is like a message in a
number of bottles."
Only 455 copies of "Agrippa" will be published, with the cheapest
priced at $450 and the most expensive, in a bronze case, at around $7,500.
Gibson doesn't know who's going to buy it -- art collectors, libraries,
Silicon Valley technocrats, tenage hackers pooling their money -- but he
hopes the audience will include more than well-heeled Gibson fanatics.
The forty-six-year-old author made his name in the 1980's by envisioning
an information-society-gone-amok in novels such as 'Neuromancer' and
'Mona Lisa Overdrive'. But once hordes of young writers started to mimic
his vision and don their own mirror shades, Gibson abandoned cyberpunk.
Last year's 'The Difference Engine', written with Bruve Sterling, imagined
a Victorian world that invented the computer instead of the steam engine.
"What I'm doing is different from a lot of people who are marketed as
science fiction, but more and more I like the idea of coming from something
that's profoundly disreputable."
For 'Agrippa', Gibson collaborates with Dennis Ashbaugh, an abstract-
impressionist painter with a heavy art-world resume. Five years ago,
Ashbaugh wrote Gibson a fan letter and the two quickly became phone buddies.
Though they've only met once, at a technology conference in Barcelona,
they began colluding a year ago.
'Agrippa' comes in a rough-hewn black box adorned with a blinking
green light and an LCD readout that flickers with an endless stream of
decoded DNA. The top opens like a laptop computer, revealing a hologram
of a circuit board. Inside is a battered volume, the pages of which are
antique rag-paper, bound and singed by hand.
Like a frame of unprocessed film, 'Agrippa' begins to mutate the
minute it hits the light. Ashbaugh has printed etchings of DNA nucleotides
but then covered them with two separate sets of drawings: One, in ultra-
violet ink, disappears when exposed to light for an hour; the other, in
infrared ink, only becomes visible after an hour in the light. A paper
cavity in the center of the book hides the diskette that contains Gibson's
fiction, digitally encoded for the Macintosh or the IBM. Though he's aware
of the market for bootlegs, Gibson has vowed never to publish his story in
any other format: He's even deleted the file from his hard disk.
In 1923, surrealist artist Man Ray made a sculpture called 'Indestruct-
ible Object (Object To Be Destroyed)'. When an anonymous museum-goer
accepted the title's challenge and smashed the object in 1957, Man Ray was
furious. You'll hear no such teases from the 'Agrippa' crew; in fact,
they relish the idea of the core of their project going up in digital flames.
Says Gibson: "The first thing I'll do when I get it is plug the disk in,
because I really want to see it fall apart." And Ashbaugh is gleeful about
the dilemma it will pose to librarians. To register the book's copyright,
he must send two copies to the Library of Congress. To classify it, they
must read it, and to read it, they must destroy it.
All these elaborate trappings may seem like an expensive art-school
"fuck you" to those who only want to read Gibson's latest short story.
But 'Agrippa's creators are benign souls: They iced plans to infect the
disk with an entertaining computer virus when they realized it would
probably crash some innocent's system. And this fall they are planning a
global transmission of the text, broadcast from a barn in Jackson Hole,
Wyoming.
And the contents of the top-secret, explosive story? Gibson divulges
that 'Agrippa' was a common brand of photo albums in the 1920's. He claims
the story explains how he became a science-fiction writer, but, of course,
he doesn't really explain it. "It starts around 1919 and moves up to today,
or possibly beyond. If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware
of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past.
You can see it in Westerns, the way the 'mise-en-scene' and the collars on
cowboys change through time. It's never really the past; it's always a
version of your own time."
'Agrippa's temporal dislocations will likewise multiply: If Macintoshes
aren't around in thirty years, some collectors will find themselves the
owners of a rare, expensive, unreadable book. As the supply of copies
dwindles, each decision of whether to read a pristine copy will become
more urgent. It's no surprise that Gibson even dreams of the day when some
academic doing a thesis on his work will have to petition 'the grandchild
of some collector' to play -- and destroy -- one of the last remaining
copies of the book.
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