“The property they [developers] built on had been farmland, overlooked by a big rickety-looking wood frame house,” the science fiction writer William Gibson tells me of his time living in a Charlotte, North Carolina, suburb (“on Blackberry Circle, where all the homes seem to have been built in 1954”) that today is called Collingwood. “I once referred to it [the farmer’s home] as a poor people’s house, and my father corrected me, saying that they [the farmer who owned the land] had lots more money than we did, because they’d sold the rest of their land to the company he worked for, which had built the development,” he recalls of the property the homes were built on.
Gibson once described living in that suburb as “like living on Mars,” with no grass and orange clay all around. I remember reading that and thinking about how much his suburban experience sounded like an old sci-fi story.
In the eighties, Gibson introduced readers to a burgeoning strain of science fiction dubbed “cyberpunk,” a noirish, computer-and-technology-choked futurescape. Nearly forty years after his groundbreaking 1984 novel, Neuromancer, some would describe Gibson as a modern-day prophet. Set largely in the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (basically the bulk of the Eastern Seaboard), Neuromancer depicts a near future affected by war, environmental catastrophe, huge wealth gaps, dependence on the internet, and people looking for any way to dull the pain, from drugs to entertainment. The nickname for this area is “the Sprawl,” and it always struck me as a sad, lonely place.
Gibson’s vision influenced Anthony Bourdain. He describes the “amazing sprawl” of Tokyo in his book Kitchen Confidential as “something out of William Gibson,” planned to build a food court influenced by cyberpunk literature and movies, and told the New York Times that while he typically avoided most science fiction, he read Gibson. I related to that because, even though I went through my own short-lived sci-fi phase as a kid, what really stuck with me and helped mold my views of the world from my teenage years to the present day was reading stories by J. G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick and watching movies like Akira and Blade Runner; but especially Gibson. I distinctly recall being around fifteen, sitting in the back seat of a car as we drove down some stretch of suburban road that never seemed to end, just miles of power lines, chain stores, and flashing lights everywhere, thinking of Gibson’s books. The orange of Home Depot gave way to the gray and blue of the Ford dealership, which gave way to a Toyota dealership, a used auto lot, car horn honking mixed with whatever was playing on the radio as the soundtrack.
I can tell you exactly where I was, but really I could’ve been nearly anywhere in America, and as I got older I realized it could’ve been on almost any continent as well. In my young, early-nineties mind—after I first read Neuromancer and right before I had internet access and other opportunities to read about Gibson and his work—I concluded that what I was passing was indeed the sprawl Gibson wrote about.