Gibson has just returned from touring Agency. He tells me that in these down periods between novels, he mostly looks forward to catching up on housework—doing anything with his hands besides typing. Unable to read fiction while writing it, Gibson suspects he’ll be ready to dig into his to-read pile any day now.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “that always signals that it’s time to start writing a book.”

GQ: I was at the Montreal stop of the tour you just wrapped up, and you mentioned that you only really figure out what the book you’ve just written is about after getting to read it aloud to people. So, I’m curious to know what sorts of insights have risen from the muck.

William Gibson: Well, it’s a good question, but the process is still in play for me. There was something that I studied as an undergraduate, an idea in comparative literary critical methodology called the interpretive fallacy: the belief that the author of a text has any more idea of what it’s about than anyone else does. If I were a critic, I would tend to go for that. I tend to somewhat take that for granted. And I know that over the course of my fiction writing career so far, my own sense of what I’ve written is about has constantly been changing. It’s a strange thing, when I think about it. Part of it is because we have this cultural expectation that the author is trying to tell us something. I’m inclined to believe—and this is another thing that I got from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel when I was an undergraduate—is that works of fiction that are intended to teach us anything in particular are inherently inferior works of fiction. Any didactic work of fiction, according to Forster, is going to suffer from the author thinking they know something that they want to tell us.

It also tends to be kind of obvious when the author thinks they’re teaching us something. It rarely sits well with people.

No, it rarely does. An exception to that, I think, would be Orwell’s 1984, where he’s full-on lecturing us the whole time, but somehow it never feels didactic. It feels like, “Whoa, he’s telling the truth.” When he was telling that truth, he was telling it for the first time. No one had ever written that way about fascism and totalitarianism and the authoritarian state before Orwell, that I know of.

Something I see in your work, that speaks to the idea that you’re not necessarily trying to say anything specific, is that your books feel as though they're as much about exploration for yourself. You’re outlining the textures of these worlds and…not discovering them at the same time as the reader, necessarily, but following an intuitive thread.

That’s the thing that keeps me going while I’m writing the book. The more I allow myself to do it, the more I enjoy it. But, I think it’s probably possible to take it a bit too far. I can get really, really, really interested in something that very few people in the world might actually be that interested in. Although, there are always a few [who are]—“My god, I’ve waited for somebody to write a book about combat pants all my life!”

You definitely have a community that’s picking up what you’re putting down. I’ve described the plot of Zero History to friends who aren’t necessarily huge fashion people, and certainly aren’t people you’d expect to be interested in the pipeline from military garment construction to streetwear, but they seem to find it fascinating, as well.