
William Gibson on writing, science fiction and the Future - aditya
http://blog.williamgibsonbooks.com/2010/05/31/book-expo-american-luncheon-talk/
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Simucal
I grew up reading Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy. I can honestly say that
it largely influenced me into my current career (programmer).

I really wish that Gibson wasn't so bored with capital F Future. I would love
to see what kind of hard-scifi novel he could produce today.

Everything he wrote seemed so terrible and magnificent at the same time and I
strongly believed that it helped shape the direction of technological progress
for a generation. You can't capture the hearts and minds of an entire
generation of teen geeks and it not leave its mark.

~~~
vessenes
I was interested to find out that he's not a singularity type (he's at pains
to say this in a way that only singularity types will notice, though).

Many sci-fi authors today do subscribe to the idea of the singularity, and
feel that it is impossible to do the sort of 'life in 50 years' Sci-Fi
prognosticating that Gibson did in Neuromancer.

My favorite of the prognosticators is Vernor Vinge; I loved Rainbow's End for
its balls-out attempt to paint a picture of (and make sense of) a near-ish
future. Even that doesn't get 50 years out, though.

Taking a totally different spin (and one he takes in his essay): Neuromancer
is a product of its time just like, say Echo and the Bunnymen, David Bowie, or
the Cure. Seen in this light, you can complain about the lack of new quality
music today, or just get with the program and learn to appreciate Lady Gaga.

Put that way, this first decade of the millenium is one which holds huge
promise, huge unknown dangers, and a pervasive sense of lack-of-shock by we-
the-people living in it. We should expect our Sci Fi literature to be
variously engaging in this or responding to it.

This is what I've liked so much about his last two novels; the real (or
realistic, or at least possible in today's society) brought out and examined
as the bizarre. I'm really looking forward to the close of this trilogy in the
fall.

~~~
pyre
> _just get with the program and learn to appreciate Lady Gaga._

I know it's a little off-topic, but I don't find Lady Gaga to be all that
'new.' She just reminds me of Cher.

[Further off-topic: Chromium's dictionary didn't think 'reminds' was a word]

~~~
marr
That's because in the capital-F Future you cannot 're-mind'; you can only
'mind'.

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10ren
Sounds like post-modernism, or
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)

I agree the future isn't what it used to be. I think it's that technology
fundamentally changed our social structure, and while it was assimilating the
technology, it created a gap, an unknown, that we could escape to, and which
might answer perennial questions about being a human, for better or worse. But
now we've assimilated it, so that gap is no more.

Perhaps we'll get science fiction again, when next we develop a technology
that fundamentally changes the structure of society. Continuously improving
communication wouldn't do it; that's one of the things we've assimilated.
Don't know what it would be, but perhaps a way of looking for it would be to
examine our social structures, and ask what changes it copes well with, and
what it wouldn't. ie. hack society.

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danbmil99
I loved Gibson at the time, but it seems he doesn't really have the passion of
a futurist, like my personal fave Greg Egan. I've always thought that writers
who use SF merely as a trope to talk about the present sort of miss the whole
point. Yes, the present is the launchpad; but what is interesting is to
speculate about the possible futures any particular now might imply.

I have to assume PKD would find something to write about, were he alive today.

~~~
eru
Yes, probably. PKD wrote paranoid fiction (his own words, I believe)--his
stories are not really tied to an particular technology, but more to a state
of mind.

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kolektiv
I like his thought about the capital-F future only really being present in the
minds of people of a certain age/cultural background, and the alternative
being a kind of endless digital Now, but I don't know that I completely buy
it.

The digital Now, as a concept seems as if it needs some kind of thinking
comprehension as a state. An inward recognition that as he puts it "the future
is always someone else's past". But I don't see that when I look around me. I
don't see a society filled with people conscious of what's around them, I see
one filled largely with sleepwalkers. Where ground-breaking technological
marvels are not accepted as part of a capital-N Now, but simply ignored, or
never apprehended. I don't know, but I fear that the end of the Futurist is
more to do with the end of the Presentist - you can't consider the future
without the springboard of the present, and current culture seems to be too
numbing for most people to have the will, or need, to do so.

Well, that came out much more grumpy than I'd thought.

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aditya
My fave quote from the article: _A book exists at the intersection of the
author’s subconscious and the reader’s response_

~~~
vessenes
This is fairly standard 'death of the author' literary theory, except, Gibson
has a nice way with words. I guess I'd call it style. A really nice book about
modernism meeting post-modernism in literary theory (written for nerds) is
Richard S. Powers' book Galatea 2.0. You might like it.

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sireat
Thing is, while Spook Country and Pattern Recognition are not groundbreaking
the way Sprawl Trilogy was, Gibson still remains a truly gifted writer who has
a way with words.

Too much of sci-fiction has been written by people with great ideas, but
inferior way of writing them down.

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darien
William Gibson - Still my favorite sci-fi author. Orson Scott Card a close
2nd.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
_opens mouth and raises finger_

 _closes mouth and walks away_

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zeynel1
"I called it Zero History because one of the characters has had a missing
decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a
federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he
hasn’t been up to much good, the past ten years. But that quotidian now finds
him. Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a
credit rating, and the need to pay taxes."

Interesting. Will there be a free online version?

