William Gibson On the Apocalypse

William Gibson has been getting a lot of well-deserved publicity for his new novel, Agency. Here's another interview with him in which he talks about the genesis of the book and reveals some surprising details about Russia.

Gibson has a surprising story about Russia. In the late 1980s, a little-known but highly influential think tank, the Global Business Network, started bringing together experts on the future to advise governments and corporations on the decades ahead. Gibson was one of its seers. Its annual meetings would be accompanied by tours of places its futurologists wouldn’t otherwise see; one year they visited the headquarters of Visa, which Gibson was told had “tighter security than the Pentagon”. Gibson says the GBN arranged for him to meet with FBI agents who were involved with the Russian security services, and that they told him about their plan for dealing with corruption in the post-Soviet economy, a plan they called the “self-cleaning oven”. “They were simply going to let it run, let these guys kill each other off, and when things had calmed down, they’d step in.” According to Gibson, while Boris Yeltsin was in power US intelligence blithely assumed that the turf war would play out with no clear winner. “I think, in retrospect,” he says with a wry smile, “it wasn’t a very good decision.”