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William Gibson Gives Up on the Future
Tinkle writes "Sci-fi novelist William Gibson has given up trying to predict the future — because he says it's become far too difficult. In an interview with silicon.com, Gibson explains why his latest book is set in the recent past.
'We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it's going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that — we have no idea at all now where we are going."
"Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilization collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That's a possibility too.'"
she called it "the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage,"
The "worst", as opposed to the "best" kind?
The book is speculative fiction: Is it garbage because its predictions haven't been met? Is it "pseudo-intellectual" because it is a work of fiction, and, to some extent, was intended to entertain? Or is it that she judged the story or the characters or the setting to her disliking insteading judging the writing itself?
Granted, it's not an earth-shattering revelation on the insights of society and technology, but then I don't believe either the book itself or Gibson presented it that way.
I don't know why. I think it's because the millions paid to make Kangaroo Jack could feed an entire African nation for quite some time. And that writing a book usually costs a person just enough to live and get by while it's in the process. I see books as more of a pure form of free speech also and I never want to see a book censored or banned regardless of its content. Purist, idealist view I know but if I had a religion it would be centered around that.
Maybe it's because the world wanted James Joyce to stop writing. Maybe it's because the world wanted Anthony Burgess to stop writing. If they had succeeded, we wouldn't have Ulysses or A Clockwork Orange. Two monumental masterpieces in my mind.
Don't ask him to stop writing, I'm sure someone somewhere still enjoys the works, you don't have to keep reading them. I no longer read Crichton or Stephen King even though I read everything by them in eighth grade. Is it because I've grown up or they've changed? I cannot say but I still hope they author novels until their dying day so that others may enjoy them.
What does a bad book by an author you once loved hurt you? Let them publish, read the reviews and pick carefully. I think that deep down inside you'd still read them and get some enjoyment even if it's just discussing them with your friends.
My work here is dung.
Yes, and in 50 years, they'll calculate more information than is contained in the universe in less than Planck time.
Moore's "law" as you understand it is already plateauing.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I think this is the problem. Look at where we are right now. Extrapolating elements of our present into an interesting future is something many authors have struggled with. Because, quite frankly, the era we're living in is pretty dystopian. For an example: Today Congress passed the "Protect America Act" which grants sweeping surveillance powers to the executive branch with no judicial or legislative oversight. George Orwell didn't know the half of it. How do you work with that? Who is most likely to be able to other throw the totalitarian regime recent US governments have turned the USA into? The Chinese? The other great totalitarian surveillance state?
I really disagree that there were as many issues pressing down on us in the '80's. Barring a Strangelove-esque Doomsday device, MAD was never going to really end it all. The worst issues facing the '80's were the ones that we were blissfully unaware of, or ignoring. Global Warming, Energy crisis in the next 50 years, etc. Worst case (realistic) scenario with the Cold War was the utter destruction of the major world power bases, which doesn't sound all that bad in hindsight.
In my opinion, the best long term extrapolation from our current situation is "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart, and its probably too optimistic.
Neuromancer was very well written, but utterly short-sighted (as all futurism is. Like Cory Doctorow said, futurists only create the present, just more of it). The world he created felt fake, plastic, and surreal.
Neuromancer is absolutely brilliant for what it is -- a dystopian critique of everything that was frightening about the 80's for those who had been adults in the 70's: Corporate mega-mergers; the captivating, numbing, spellbinding nature of television, the "Me generation," the dissolving bond of loyalty between company and employee, the increasing disregard of companies for the lives of citizens, drug use going from drugs for relaxation and communion to those for stimulation and frenzy, weakening government at the same time corporate power began to transcend borders, Japanese dominance of the markets, the transition away from natural folk music to synthetic and hard music, edgier and more aggressive fashion, body modification, alienation and the increasing fraying of social bonds, market booms and busts, the obsolescence of the average worker, etc., etc.
You're right that "futurists only create the present, just more of it," but if you think that the world of Neuromancer was "fake, plastic, and surreal," then that's there's nothing wrong with that. That's what it was supposed to be!
Early cyberpunk is nothing but the nightmare shadow the 1980s, and "fake, plastic, and surreal" was the dominant feeling of that era for a lot of people.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What Gibson writes isn't hard sf by any stretch of the imagination. Neuromancer, as I'm sure most of the /. audience is aware, was written by Gibson when he had very little, if any, knowledge of how computers work. Bundles of fiber-optic lines as thick as a horse's tail, for instance. Second, technology isn't the point in most of his stories. In Neuromancer, we have one superhuman entity attempting to merge with another one. Do we have intricate passages in which the technology of this is discussed? Nope. The AIs in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, I'd argue, are closer to traditional definitions of gods than pieces of technology. Look at what we know about the Aleph in MLO: it's a mother-huge slab of nanotech, infinite storage space, and can somehow connect Earth with Alpha Centauri. We're definitely lacking some technical details here. I'm a bit fuzzier on the Bridge technology, but certainly Pattern Recognition isn't sf at all, given that it took place in the recent past at the time of its publication.
Rather than hard sf, let's call Gibson's early writings what they are: cyberpunk, stories about high technology, low lifes, and their interactions in a social millieu. The emphasis isn't technology at all, but social change. I mean, look at the importance of megacorporations and zaibatsus in Gibson's writings, something that's not characteristic of Vinge or Kim Stanley Robinson (who'd I argue is more of a hard sf writer than Charles Stross). Look at Case's first reaction when he is able to punch deck again: there's no technical details for what's been repaired in his brain, but the description of an ecstatic (in the strictest definition of the word) experience. Even the development of the relationship between humanity and AIs over the course of the first trilogy overshadows the technology that drives AIs. There aren't any scientific details and there's no attempt to reconcile science with plot in Gibson's writings. This isn't a bad thing.
To quickly wrap it up, I've always believed that cyberpunk, with its emphasis on heroes, higher [technological] beings, and grand conflicts that change the course of society are new myths for a technological society. Look at Greg Bear's "Petra," Stephenson's _Snow Crash_, Cadigan's _Mindplayers_... the emphasis on the religious/spiritual/pseudo-religious/spiritual is seemingly more important than the technology that drives each of these works. I'm very sad that Gibson is moving away from this, but given Pattern Recognition, he's moving towards an exploration of mass media and society, which is also very fascinating. (And what's this about space operas not being considered sf? Who would say this?)
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
There is only one true future prediction! We'll all die.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
And in turn, I would point out that you appear to know very little science, as your entire assertion here is wrong. GUI abstraction is the basis for GUI's in general. Further abstraction is not unreasonable; I have had demos on my desktop that did quite a few things, including 3D abstractions of various types. Impractical? Possibly. Unscientific? Not even a little bit.
Death by security program? Today on slashdot there's a story about a LED device that makes you puke. We know that electricity can kill you. Stuttering flashes can put humans into an epileptic seizure. Disjoint feeds to your eyes can disturb your orientation. Would you *really* care to say there's no way to shut you down via an interface that is connected to not just your eyes, but your ears, senses of touch, heat, and so forth, electrically, pressure-wise, heat-wise, visually, aurally? What if it can induce visions right into your nervous system, bypassing your eyes? What if it can dispense drugs? Unscientific? Hardly. Socially unlikely? Perhaps, but that doesn't make it bad scientific speculation. That just means there is an onus upon the author to create a story where we can believe such things would have come about so the work will be readable and engaging.
These ideas are far more plausible in hard SF terms than (for instance) Trek's warp drive at this moment in science. That makes Trek lean a lot harder towards fantasy than Gibson's Neuromancer, which is what I presume you're kvetching about here. Even the AIs that Gibson postulates are still viable hard SF elements. At this point in time, we have no reason to believe, scientifically speaking, that computer AI will prove intractable in any of the forms he postulated. And it has been some years since he wrote the novel.
Methinks you would enjoy SF more (hard or not) if your imagination was a little more informed around the edges.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.