4 ms·
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
by api 11y ago
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.
- MaysonL 11y agoHave you read/reread Bruce Sterling lately? I reread Distraction recently, and it's scary how much closer real politics have come to his satire since publication.
- digi_owl 11y agoI think Gibson has claimed, and more recently echoed by Doctorow, that he was basically predicting the present. Both basically include stuff they hear or read about outside the mainstream media in their writings, and thus appear prophetic when it reach said media. Lately i have also heard Gibson make the statement that the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed. One example may be smartphones, as they existed in some form for a decade before MSM made such a big fuss over a certain Apple product (and it may well not have been a proper smartphone until a year or two later).
- celticninja 11y agoI don't really understand the thought that Apple created the smartphone. It was essentially a logical next step in mobile development. Phones were big and clunky, then they got smaller, then they hit features, then they got bigger to accommodate features, then they got more powerful to deal with the features, then they were mini computers.
- jhbadger 11y agoAlso, the smartphone is pretty much a combination of a PDA (which existed since the mid 1990s, eg. the Palm Pilot, or even Apple's own Newton) plus a phone.
- T-A 11y agoAs did smartphones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator
- lmm 11y agoOne of Gibson's recurring themes is that enough money is like being in the future. Apple couldn't do anything on a technical level that other manufacturers couldn't. But they were the only company that could charge $500 for a phone (at a time when high-end premium phones cost less than half that), play hardball with the carriers, and have people buy it. Which, it turns out, is a lot like leaping a couple of years into the future.
- digi_owl 11y agoApple also had the attention of more than the tech press, thanks to being the de-facto standard in media production.
- sireat 11y agoHe 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.
- jhbadger 11y agoExactly. People wanted to create the world he presented, even though it was clear it wasn't a very nice place even if the technology was cool.
- api 11y agoInterestingly, I recall reading once (forget where) that Gibson didn't see his world as that pessimistic. It was no utopia, but it was also not a radioactive post-WWIII or post-ecological-collapse wasteland. Keep in mind he was writing just after the 70s during the height of the Limits to Growth hysteria and also during the cold war when nuclear armageddon was viewed as a strong possibility. The series also ends on a positive note with what felt to me like a real sense that things could get better.
- stuxnet79 11y agoMaybe a relevant read: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza... 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 11y agoAn 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.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoI agree, he did go through a slump, but I recently listened to The Peripheral as an audio book, and it was excellent! His early books really set high standards for distopian scifi.