William Gibson, On Collaboration and Science Fiction

00:08 [William Gibson] Bruce Sterling and I were both very interested the nature of the collaborative act, both because there was somewhat of -- there's a big collaborative tradition in science fiction. Collaboration

00:30 is quite accepted in science fiction. The fact that collaboration is accepted in science fiction is one of the reasons that science fiction hasn't been accepted as part of the higher canon, and we were both delighted with the idea that we were about to undertake something that might be seen by the literary establishment as profoundly

01:00 illegitimate and in violation of the auteur theory of literature. But I think we both had very much in mind William "Burroughs's" take on collaboration, which was that it literally created a third person. If done with sufficient passion it would create a third entity who was

01:30 neither author, and the book would be in effect in the control of this stranger, which was our experience. I think that it was facilitated more than anything by technology because it's very much an -- "The Difference Engine" is very much an artifact of word processing. It would have taken

02:00 maybe four working years to write that book by hand, if indeed it had been possible. But because we could deal with it in a fluid state and each of us could constantly overwrite the other until we had a sort of fractal mix, at some point something happened

02:30 and it really began to feel as though it was not -- sort of like playing with a Ouija board. It started going places we hadn't imagined, and we let it go. Bruce and I had a rationale when we wrote "The Difference Engine," just a very, very simple operating program, and that was that either writer had absolute permission to rewrite

03:00 whatever the existing version of the entire text was at any point. And this was pre-Internet, at least for us, so what we were doing was FedExing this increasingly fat stack of old-fashioned floppy discs between Vancouver and Austin, Texas. So he would take a pass on

03:30 whatever existed, I would take a pass, FedEx it back. He would look at what I'd done and then he would start again. So we were both advancing the sort of working face of the narrative and at the same time we were revising what had already been done. The other rule was that neither author could return to any previous version,

04:00 that neither of us could go back to where we had been. We never made printouts. We'd never go back and try to restore some previous version that we preferred, that we could move only forward. It's an unusual thing. When people ask how collaborations work, it's like asking how marriages work. Nobody knows. They're

04:30 all very individual deals. But I think that it's a very, very interesting creative modality. It's one that's accepted in many forms of art and not accepted in certain others. Can you be a really serious painter and engage in collaboration?

05:00 Can you be a really serious author and engage in collaboration?  It's an interesting line there, and it was a fascinating one to cross.