SOURCE: Gibson, William, and David L. Ulin. “Present Worries in Future Tense.” Los Angeles Times (4 March 2003): E1.

In the following interview, Gibson discusses Pattern Recognition within the context of American society after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

The last year and a half have been difficult for fiction writers. How, after all, are they to provide, in Lionel Trilling's phrase, a “buzz of implication,” a sense of cultural context, when the entire idea of context is now up in the air?

Last March, at a symposium on post-Sept. 11 literature, one frustrated novelist framed this conundrum explicitly, bemoaning her inability to evoke the textures of daily living in a world where even the most trivial interactions could no longer be assured. How, this writer wondered, was she to re-create the present when the present could now be altered in an instant? How was she to...