
William Gibson: Seeing the Future in Science Fiction - jseliger
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_gibson?currentPage=all
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martinkallstrom
One thing I am very happy about is the undeniable signs in my everyday life
that tell me that I without a doubt now live in the future of my childhood. My
phone, laptop, my work are all things that not only didn't exist as they are
back then, but didn't even exist in earlier versions. The exception, in one
way, is my iphone which had a precursor in our heavy mechanic rotary dial
landline telephone with spiral cord back home (still remember our phone number
- 0345-12119). But it is just an example of how extremely fast technology has
moved, since my phone now serves me with not just the ability to talk to
others but to access vast libraries of information, schedule my haircut and
transportation, and just about anything at all in life.

One of the most elegant qualities about everyday technology is how it fits
into our lives in a very natural and economical manner. This is both what
makes it very hard to write good science fiction, and what makes it hard to
simply appreciate how quickly technology evolves every year. My smartphone is
a natural extension of both my arm and my mind, my body just fits into my car
and I rarely make a concious choice between the numerous different ways I have
to get in touch with any of my acquaintances. I just reach for my cellphone,
skype, facebook, email, gtalk, twitter etc whatever is more convenient without
much thought about how none of those existed just a few years ago.

This brings to me a deep awe and trust in my current future. I am very
comfortable to say that in ten and twenty years I will be equally satisfied
with the mind blowing pace of tech evolution. And it makes it even more
awesome that every step on the way will fit so perfectly into my life that it
is only in hindsight I will recognize the sheer magnitude of it's awesomeness.

~~~
arethuza
The future of my childhood had fusion power, strong AI and bases on multiple
planets.

However, no Internet.

~~~
berntb
Give it another decade.

I've seen people blaming NASA's need for protecting jobs (shuttle) for the
stalling of the space age. Things seem to have started moving. For real bases,
two-three decades.

Fusion power? Check Polywell and General Fusion, et al. There is hope.

Strong AI? No clue.

~~~
arethuza
If there is a landing on Mars in the next 30 years I'll be delighted as anyone
(pinning my hopes on Elon Musk for this one).

Fusion - we're probably 40+ years from a commercial plant (ITER is being
constructed, then there is probably going to be a DEMO plant and only after
that would there be a commercial design). Assuming, of course, that someone
doesn't do a SpaceX round the current Big Science projects.

Strong AI - very unlikely, unfortunately, as it would presumably help with
everything else on the list.

~~~
berntb
You didn't check out General Fusion or Polywell, I take it. There are others,
too. One of these dark horses might come in.

Here are a couple of links:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion>

~~~
arethuza
I was aware of the Polywell work - hadn't seen General Fusion before. The
description of how their reactor would work on the Wikipedia page is pretty
interesting!

~~~
berntb
Steam punk fusion is ridiculously cool. :-)

Google for the funded Tri Alpha, too. And then there is Lerner and team. I
hope at least one of the groups succeed, the world will change.

(If you check talk-polywell.org, there is some positive info which is "only" 6
months old.)

------
orbitingpluto
Gibson has a great twitter feed:

<https://twitter.com/#!/GreatDismal>

The disjoint collection of esoteric minutia on his feed is a window into
Gibson's brand of science fiction. The reason he is so good at 'seeing the
future in science fiction' is that he is always converging onto an immediate
moment. And I mean that in the short term, from sentence to sentence, and from
novel to novel. IMHO, Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition (the
Bigend trilogy) are more sci-fi than Neuromancer.

~~~
mahmud
He is _amazing_ on twitter. Sources some of the most interesting stuff on my
timeline.

------
latch
I just started reading the Sprawl trilogy, my first Gibson novels. I find them
contrived and confusing. I've talked to others about this, and so far no one
has disagreed. Also, I've tried to see a reason for it to be like this, and I
can't...confusing for the sake of being confusing.

They are still good books (I finished Neuromancer a few days ago) and I'd
recommended them to people who are already into science fiction. Having said
that, I hope you'll understand when I say that I also consider them the worst
that science fiction has to offer. They aren't only inaccessible but actually
off putting to anyone but a dedicated reader.

I'm not a fan of it, but Ender's Game is the exact opposite. Not great science
fiction, but very accessible. Whatever your thoughts on SciFi, you'll fall in
love with Ender and take a very deep interest in his story.

~~~
jmduke
> Whatever your thoughts on SciFi, you'll fall in love with Ender and take a
> very deep interest in his story.

I don't understand the affection for Ender's Game. I read it in grade school
and I reread it last summer; the plot is elementary (Ender's a textbook Mary
Sue) and the takeaways are either empty or grim -- there's so much wanton
violence (think back to the incident with the bully) and either Card is
excusing it 'for the greater good', or condemning basically every character in
the novel for engaging and condoning it.

The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, was much more interesting, but I think my
perceptions of that book are a bit too tainted by my knowledge of the author's
personal opinions.

~~~
saraid216
I'm pretty sure Card intended to condemn the wanton violence; either that, or
the later books (which I also hugely prefer) were revisionist on the topic. He
never characterizes Ender as anything but a monster, at best, he's an ignorant
monster; the period between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead is an
explicit search for redemption. Ender's Game was meant as a prequel, as I
understand it, rather than to stand on its own.

That said, I've stopped recommending anything in the Ender books. There's just
not enough there anymore.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Ender's Game came about as a necessary prequel to Speaker. Speaker for the
Dead definitely isn't revisionist, it is the _actual_ story.

(Source is Card's afterward to the 20th anniversary edition of Ender's Game.)

------
damian2000
I read somewhere that when Gibson wrote Neuromancer he had never owned a
computer and so still had some lofty ideals of what they were capable of. When
he finally got a Macintosh, the mechanical spinning and whirring of the floppy
during boot disappointed him.

~~~
ilamont
But it was interesting that he saw them as being portable "decks," which
sounded like laptops with sophisticated graphics capabilities. I believe he
wrote this in the early 80s, when portable computers were "luggables" and had
little more than green or amber screens that were meant for displaying text:

<http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/l/luggable.htm>

~~~
damian2000
Yeah I was also interested to hear his 'console cowboy' for what we'd now call
a hacker. I was reading one of his newer books called Pattern Recognition...
it came out well before the iPad, and yet in it he's describing an 'iBook'
tablet computer device as more widely used than the laptop.

~~~
adrianhoward
Heh. He was talking about <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook> :-) iBook was
a type of Apple laptop during the period PR is set.

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kristianp
I wish he still wrote science fiction. His last book was pretty much about
fashion.

~~~
sneak
All of his books have been about fashion, insofar as that that is just a
catch-all term for "culture that is not 100% ubiquitous".

He's solving for the general case.

(Please don't capitalize the C, there is no pun intended.)

PS: I know that you meant clothing, but I was trying to illustrate something.
:)

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dochtman
It's a bit silly that this piece is dated June 4, 2012.

~~~
EliRivers
A piece about the future being from the future? Sounds pretty sensible to me
:)

