William Gibson
For me, the author with the most finely tuned instincts about culture and where it is moving, long before there are actual signals for that movement.
He coined the term ‘Cyberpunk’. He was also part of the Global Business Network.
Favorite Quotes
From Conversations with William Gibson1
“Cayce has a concern for things that transcend fashion, that remain good for a hundred years and would fit in anywhere just because they’re well designed and well made. I believe in design. I don’t believe in fashion. There are a lot of places where those two modes overlap but for me they’re very separate. There’s a company in Scotland that makes lovely jackets-I have a couple. The company’s motto is “never in fashion, never out of style.”” (Patrick A. Smith, Conversations With William Gibson)
“Whatever it is I do when I write fiction involves a kind of cultivated hyper-awareness.” (Patrick A. Smith, Conversations With William Gibson)
”Now I get up in the morning and check the newsfeed on my laptop and there’s all this material, and it’s better material than I could make up. Crazier shit than anything I ever dreamed up. And I have a toolkit that was in large part provided by science fiction, and the toolkit turns out to be, I think, really good for getting a handle on the world today, which is not that easy to get a hold of.” (Patrick A. Smith, Conversations With William Gibson)
“What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.” (Patrick A. Smith, Conversations With William Gibson)
“I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent.” (Patrick A. Smith, Conversations With William Gibson)
“But I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emergence-it actually seems to be quite a random thing. That’s a vision of technology that’s diametrically opposed to the one I received from science fiction and the popular culture of science when I was twelve years old.
In the postwar era, aside from anxiety over nuclear war, we assumed that we were steering technology. Today, we’re more likely to feel that technology is driving us, driving change, and that it’s out of control. Technology was previously seen as linear and progressive-evolutionary in that way our culture has always preferred to misunderstand Darwin.” (Patrick A. Smith, Conversations With William Gibson)
From an Interview with Gibson about Pattern Recognition2
“I don’t go back and re-read my own work, but it always seemed fairly obvious to me that at one level Neuromancer was a fable of Reaganomics. It’s set in a world that’s what you get when you don’t have any more middle class. It’s just like very poor people and very rich people going Darwinian on each other.”
“The present’s gotten too short and too incredibly brief for us to have a place to stand to spin those big Wellesian futures and Heinleinian future histories.”
“The one constant in my view of the world at large is that the majority of change is technologically driven, and that this is actually not that new and 20th, 21st century phenomena that has been going on that way for a while. These aren’t legislated into being. They just arrive through some magic of applied science and the free market or military industrial competition. They arrive and then they change things. The ways they change things are usually unintended by the people who designed or invented these technologies.”
From an old interview with Gibson:3
I think a relative lack of interest in real technology means I can see the forest for the trees. It gives me an overall picture.
Neuromancer_ is probably set around 2035, Virtual Light is probably set around 2005. It’s really our world with a lot of knobs turned up. I did that deliberately because I find it challenging and also I wanted to get away from the idea that what I’m doing is the traditional and supposedly predicative SF thing. When I wrote Neuromancer I had no Internet and no World Wide Web to extrapolate from, when I wrote Idoru, the web was there so I had something to base things on. I think that’s the difference.
Here’s Gibson in 1996 predicting what would become [[ Readwise/Books/Pattern Recognition|Pattern Recognition ]]:
I think that what is eventually going to happen – given that the world has become such a drastic science fiction scenario in its own right, and seems to get more so everyday day – is that I’ll be able to write a naturalistic mainstream novel that describes the real world. It will have exactly the texture of a William Gibson novel. But it won’t have to be science fiction, but it will feel like because so much of the world we live in today feels exactly like science fiction.
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