3 ms·

William Gibson? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_themes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_them...

• frisco 16y ago
  That's different. A generation of engineers and scientists grew up on science fiction of authors like Gibson and deliberately went out to create it.
  • tjmaxal 16y ago
    deliberately? Maybe subconciously
    • frisco 16y ago
      No, deliberately. I'm one of them. A lot of my friends who are grad students are the same way. Gene Roddenberry, Stephenson, Gibson, and maybe like 5-10 others have probably had more effect on the development of modern technology than Washington has over the past 25 years (ignoring the fact that DARPA has financed a lot of it).
• bitwize 16y ago
  Stephenson got closer to the mark; the world described in Snow Crash is more accurate, more believable, and more fun than Gibson's self-absorbed, nihilistic works. In addition to various technical details (like showing effects of latency and jitter over real-world network links in the Metaverse), Snow Crash presents a confluence of the culture of technology, the culture of the arts, and punk/skater culture that is a reasonable extrapolation of what we see today. It is a marvellously prescient work, especially when you take phenomena like Second Life into account.
  • dpritchett 16y ago
    You're certainly right about Snow Crash but in Gibson's defense his book came out 8 years earlier.