
William Gibson, the Art of Fiction No. 211 (2011) - dnetesn
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson
======
api
I re-read Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive a while back, and
was absolutely struck by how accurate his view of the future was. I mean
obviously many nit-picky details were wrong, but the general feel of what the
21st century is shaping up to look like is something he nailed. I consider him
to be the most accurate and prophetic of all science fiction writers.

IMHO he went through a bit of a mid-career slump, but his most recent work is
back to top form. The Peripheral is excellent. But none of it approaches the
prophetic density of his earlier work.

His prophesy is not necessarily a good one... he achieved his incredible
accuracy in part by being optimistic about technology but pessimistic about
human nature.

~~~
sireat
He was prophetic but some of the eerie similarities of today's world to
Gibson's imagined is that people shaping today were influenced by Gibson.

~~~
stuxnet79
Maybe a relevant read:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/)

Yudkowsky's post doesn't support your argument, but I think you've identified
one weakness of his argument - by being influential fiction can be its own
self-fulfilling prophecy.

~~~
sireat
An example relevant to 2015: we wouldn't have so many hoverboard related
startups/projects if not for Back to the future.

No matter how aware you are of your fallacies and biases (as Kahneman attests)
you are still influenced by them.

------
roymurdock
_I think I was starting to realize that the only image I had for total
artificial intelligence or total artificial reality was Borges’s Aleph, a
point in space that contains all other points. In his story “The Aleph,” which
may be his greatest, Borges managed to envision this Aleph without computers
or anything like them. He skips the issue of what it is and how it works. It
just sits there under the stairs in the basement of some old house in Buenos
Aires, and nobody says why, but you have to go down the stairs, lie on your
back, look at this thing, and if you get your head at the right angle, then
you can see everything there is, or ever was, anywhere, at any time._

Here's the short story (10 minute read) for anyone who is interested:

[http://www.phinnweb.org/links/literature/borges/aleph.html](http://www.phinnweb.org/links/literature/borges/aleph.html)

------
stuxnet79
> Every day, when I sit down with the manuscript, I start at page one and go
> through the whole thing, revising freely.

I cringed at this.

I've tried my hand at writing fiction and I can't think of a better tactic or
excuse to spin your wheels and not progress.

Revising is easy whereas writing content is hard. I'd rather vomit out a semi-
structured mess of a story and impose structure on it through revision (a
minimal # of times) than have to constantly revise each time I sit down to
write.

~~~
aidenn0
I suppose it at least partly depends on how much time per day you spend
writing. Presumably you can go through the entire manuscript in under 8 hours,
so you can make progress every 8 hour day you put into it.

[edit] Reading more closely he starts out with 7 hour days and ends up at
about 12 hour days, so if the final manuscript can be read and revised in 5
hours it's a fairly constant amount of writing per day.

