4 ms·

William Gibson on the apocalypse: “it’s been happening for at least 100 years”

78 points by molecule 7y ago

szopa 7y ago
I read his new book, Agency, sick in bed last week. It hits very close home.
- qubex 7y ago
  How does it compare to The Peripheral? I quit that book about a third of the way through because I had literally next to no idea what was going on in the text.
- rcarmo 7y ago
  Am reading it piecemeal over the past week, quite enjoying the way it mirrors a lot of ongoing paranoia.
harryf 7y ago
Alan Moore (author of Watchmen and many other things) presents a nice interpretation of the Apocalypse here https://youtu.be/cBc71ROdGxU https://youtu.be/cBc71ROdGxU
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  In the northampton Shoe Museum no less https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-26486528 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-2648652... with 12,000 pairs of shoes in their collection.
ksdale 7y ago
I love William Gibson but it rubs me the wrong way a bit that he (or the author) so casually attributes the apocalypse to flying (among other things) and then, without irony goes on to say that he’s been visiting London for several decades.... I’m assuming by plane, from Vancouver.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Acknowledging a truth does not make you duty-bound to address the problem. Indeed, even though I know that a traffic accident is one of the most likely ways that my children will die, and even though I adore my children, I still drive them around almost every day.
  - arkitaip 7y ago
    But it does make someone a hypocrite and maybe not someone you want to spend time listening to. In your example, it would be more relevant if you were a public figure who talked about the dangers of car driving wrt kids...
    - rebuilder 7y ago
      That really doesn't leave many people worth listening to.
    - nothrabannosir 7y ago
      Hypocrites aren’t wrong; they’re just hypocrites. We need to detach our ego from this debate if we ever want to find a solution, and just so that of others.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    Though I agree in general, I think acknowledging it kind of smugly changes the calculus a bit.
    - Roritharr 7y ago
      Why?
      - ksdale 7y ago
        If someone says, “Here is a wrong thing,” that’s just an acknowledgement that the thing is wrong, but there is no hypocrisy. If they say “Here is a wrong thing and anyone who does it sucks,” then it is the definition of hypocrisy if they do it themselves. The smugness is an implicit moral judgment, and the moral judgment has to create a duty to act, or else it’s not a moral judgment (maybe? I’m not a philosopher...)
Apocryphon 7y ago
> Agency focuses on an alternate present in which Britain did not vote to leave the EU and the US did not elect Donald Trump as its 45th president. But this is no Remainer fantasy: an unspecified conflict in the Syrian city of Qamishli has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Reminds me of Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel, which goes out of its way to mention that Gore was elected president- and an alternate 9/11 that hits Boston and Philadelphia leads to the War on Terror anyway. Though written in 2006 or so, it felt particularly prescient a peace later despite being pre-smartphones and social media- it capture an increasingly paranoid world choked full of state-sponsored internet disinfo, influential conspiracy theory bloggers, climate change refugees. Despite the weird ending and not the best plot, the world-building and general tone manages to have resonance nearly fifteen years later.
alecco 7y ago
I used to be a big fan of his work in the 80s and 90s. But after 2000 I can't finish one of his novels. And I read a lot.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Why not?
  - ryan_h 7y ago
    I've read all of Gibson's books, but I found Agency hard to finish. The book has two parallel story-lines, and very short chapters which makes it a very disjointed read. The characters were also very flat. For the last quarter of the book, the main character's dialog is almost all short questions and other characters explaining things to her. e.g. <paragraph explanation> "why's that?" <paragraph explanation> "oh really?" <paragraph explanation> etc.
  - alecco 7y ago
    Unappealing characters. Boring plots. Whole novels based on a couple of ideas. It feels like 90% filler.
- aaron695 7y ago
  I agree except after Pattern Recognition (2003) was to me the change. But Pattern Recognition was amazing at the time, but now a lot of the stuff in it is normal. Like Influencers in it was a really novel idea at the time, now considered everyday. I waited ages after Spook Country (2007) to try and read it, so perhaps it was to late. Internet changed it all. What he was amazing at, now gets just served up to everyone. The future is still un-evenly distributed, but viewing it is evenly distributed.
  - jhbadger 7y ago
    That was actually kind of the point of the "Blue Ant" trilogy ("Pattern Recognition" and its sequels). It was supposed to be set when it was written, not the future. It was a type of requiem for cyberpunk because we are living in the cyberpunk universe. With "The Peripheral/Agency" he is returning to actual science fiction but of a type that is very different from cyberpunk.
golergka 7y ago
Assuming that his fans on the other side of political spectrum somehow don't understand the message is very naive – you don't have to agree with the author, or even interpret the work in the same way to enjoy it. After the work is finished, author's intent – who was supposed to be the villain, what was supposed to be the moral of the story – matters not. And, well, his thoughts about theoretical "UN with teeth" is such a textbook example of Utopiah fallacy, I'm amazed he's actually saying something like this with a straight face.
lopmotr 7y ago
The funny thing about ends of the world is they're all so politically correct. What if an apocalypse is caused by something we're taught to believe is good? Some examples: Maybe social welfare and international aid are selectively breeding a race of humans who are unable to sustain their own lives without support of the superior but relatively shrinking productive class? What if repeated famines were the cause of the high intelligence we have today? We stopped famines. Maybe the pressure to outsmart each other has gone too. What if Islam continues to spread? It's a kind of mind-virus filled with techniques to keep its hosts infected (don't ask difficult questions about God, kill people who stop believing, etc.) and to spread (kill or tax people who don't believe, and when you might have killed someone in war, allow them to live if they convert to Islam). Everyone being infected might be OK if it was benign, but it's also anti-science (Predicting future outcomes is usurping the power of God who's the one who decides what will happen). This is perhaps what already happened due to Christianity in the dark ages. Took 1000 years to recover from that end of the world. Maybe modern medicine is breeding a race of unhealthy people who depend on it for survival. Maybe we're in an arms race of humans needing ever-better medicine and medicine having to treat ever-more difficult diseases. How can you defend against a politically incorrect end of the world? The obvious direct course of action is forbidden, which means even mentioning the possibility of those being problems is forbidden socially, which means it might blindside us. We might even welcome it coming. I can imagine future degraded people laughing at their silly ancestors wanting technology and healthcare instead of fighting enemies with their fists like a natural real man. They might ostracize tinkerers who try to build useful things instead of participating in the tribal rituals and fighting.

78 points by molecule 7y ago

szopa 7y ago

I read his new book, Agency, sick in bed last week. It hits very close home.

qubex 7y ago
How does it compare to The Peripheral? I quit that book about a third of the way through because I had literally next to no idea what was going on in the text.
rcarmo 7y ago
Am reading it piecemeal over the past week, quite enjoying the way it mirrors a lot of ongoing paranoia.

harryf 7y ago

Alan Moore (author of Watchmen and many other things) presents a nice interpretation of the Apocalypse here https://youtu.be/cBc71ROdGxU https://youtu.be/cBc71ROdGxU

chadcmulligan 7y ago
In the northampton Shoe Museum no less https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-26486528 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-2648652... with 12,000 pairs of shoes in their collection.

ksdale 7y ago

I love William Gibson but it rubs me the wrong way a bit that he (or the author) so casually attributes the apocalypse to flying (among other things) and then, without irony goes on to say that he’s been visiting London for several decades.... I’m assuming by plane, from Vancouver.

IggleSniggle 7y ago
Acknowledging a truth does not make you duty-bound to address the problem. Indeed, even though I know that a traffic accident is one of the most likely ways that my children will die, and even though I adore my children, I still drive them around almost every day.
- arkitaip 7y ago
  But it does make someone a hypocrite and maybe not someone you want to spend time listening to. In your example, it would be more relevant if you were a public figure who talked about the dangers of car driving wrt kids...
  - rebuilder 7y ago
    That really doesn't leave many people worth listening to.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Hypocrites aren’t wrong; they’re just hypocrites. We need to detach our ego from this debate if we ever want to find a solution, and just so that of others.
- ksdale 7y ago
  Though I agree in general, I think acknowledging it kind of smugly changes the calculus a bit.
  - Roritharr 7y ago
    Why?
    - ksdale 7y ago
      If someone says, “Here is a wrong thing,” that’s just an acknowledgement that the thing is wrong, but there is no hypocrisy. If they say “Here is a wrong thing and anyone who does it sucks,” then it is the definition of hypocrisy if they do it themselves. The smugness is an implicit moral judgment, and the moral judgment has to create a duty to act, or else it’s not a moral judgment (maybe? I’m not a philosopher...)

Apocryphon 7y ago

> Agency focuses on an alternate present in which Britain did not vote to leave the EU and the US did not elect Donald Trump as its 45th president. But this is no Remainer fantasy: an unspecified conflict in the Syrian city of Qamishli has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Reminds me of Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel, which goes out of its way to mention that Gore was elected president- and an alternate 9/11 that hits Boston and Philadelphia leads to the War on Terror anyway. Though written in 2006 or so, it felt particularly prescient a peace later despite being pre-smartphones and social media- it capture an increasingly paranoid world choked full of state-sponsored internet disinfo, influential conspiracy theory bloggers, climate change refugees. Despite the weird ending and not the best plot, the world-building and general tone manages to have resonance nearly fifteen years later.

alecco 7y ago

I used to be a big fan of his work in the 80s and 90s. But after 2000 I can't finish one of his novels. And I read a lot.

pjc50 7y ago
Why not?
- ryan_h 7y ago
  I've read all of Gibson's books, but I found Agency hard to finish. The book has two parallel story-lines, and very short chapters which makes it a very disjointed read. The characters were also very flat. For the last quarter of the book, the main character's dialog is almost all short questions and other characters explaining things to her. e.g. <paragraph explanation> "why's that?" <paragraph explanation> "oh really?" <paragraph explanation> etc.
- alecco 7y ago
  Unappealing characters. Boring plots. Whole novels based on a couple of ideas. It feels like 90% filler.
aaron695 7y ago
I agree except after Pattern Recognition (2003) was to me the change. But Pattern Recognition was amazing at the time, but now a lot of the stuff in it is normal. Like Influencers in it was a really novel idea at the time, now considered everyday. I waited ages after Spook Country (2007) to try and read it, so perhaps it was to late. Internet changed it all. What he was amazing at, now gets just served up to everyone. The future is still un-evenly distributed, but viewing it is evenly distributed.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  That was actually kind of the point of the "Blue Ant" trilogy ("Pattern Recognition" and its sequels). It was supposed to be set when it was written, not the future. It was a type of requiem for cyberpunk because we are living in the cyberpunk universe. With "The Peripheral/Agency" he is returning to actual science fiction but of a type that is very different from cyberpunk.

golergka 7y ago

Assuming that his fans on the other side of political spectrum somehow don't understand the message is very naive – you don't have to agree with the author, or even interpret the work in the same way to enjoy it. After the work is finished, author's intent – who was supposed to be the villain, what was supposed to be the moral of the story – matters not. And, well, his thoughts about theoretical "UN with teeth" is such a textbook example of Utopiah fallacy, I'm amazed he's actually saying something like this with a straight face.

lopmotr 7y ago

The funny thing about ends of the world is they're all so politically correct. What if an apocalypse is caused by something we're taught to believe is good? Some examples: Maybe social welfare and international aid are selectively breeding a race of humans who are unable to sustain their own lives without support of the superior but relatively shrinking productive class? What if repeated famines were the cause of the high intelligence we have today? We stopped famines. Maybe the pressure to outsmart each other has gone too. What if Islam continues to spread? It's a kind of mind-virus filled with techniques to keep its hosts infected (don't ask difficult questions about God, kill people who stop believing, etc.) and to spread (kill or tax people who don't believe, and when you might have killed someone in war, allow them to live if they convert to Islam). Everyone being infected might be OK if it was benign, but it's also anti-science (Predicting future outcomes is usurping the power of God who's the one who decides what will happen). This is perhaps what already happened due to Christianity in the dark ages. Took 1000 years to recover from that end of the world. Maybe modern medicine is breeding a race of unhealthy people who depend on it for survival. Maybe we're in an arms race of humans needing ever-better medicine and medicine having to treat ever-more difficult diseases. How can you defend against a politically incorrect end of the world? The obvious direct course of action is forbidden, which means even mentioning the possibility of those being problems is forbidden socially, which means it might blindside us. We might even welcome it coming. I can imagine future degraded people laughing at their silly ancestors wanting technology and healthcare instead of fighting enemies with their fists like a natural real man. They might ostracize tinkerers who try to build useful things instead of participating in the tribal rituals and fighting.