7 ms·

This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions

This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.

toyg 7y ago
It's a junket for his new book, probably summarized from a longer interview for the radio.
_red 7y ago
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
- machello13 7y ago
  > "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either." It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
  - toofy 7y ago
    That’s a pretty uncharitable assumption to make regarding one of the better authors of modern times.
  - arkades 7y ago
    Is giving his sentence the least possible charitable reading to make a quip a good use of your time, or anyone else's?
- justin66 7y ago
  Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?
- arkades 7y ago
  > But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present." I don't see this as a pathetic premise.
  - _red 7y ago
    >I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up.... Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future? The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
    - Proven 7y ago
      Well said!
    - justin66 7y ago
      You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review. > The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris. Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.
- lpah4all 7y ago
  There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge. It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously. By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment. By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago. The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them. What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people." Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
  - futureproofd 7y ago
    Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.
- whyleyc 7y ago
  Have you actually read the book? Or it’s precursor “The Peripheral” which began the development of these concepts. Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description! It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.
- naravara 7y ago
  >>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election. Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ." No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
  - anotherman554 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Eh, maybe Colin Powell beats Gore for reelection or wins in 2008.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter). You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.
- subsubzero 7y ago
  agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.
  - atombender 7y ago
    That's not the premise of the book at all. First, there's no time travel. Secondly, the plot is set after Clinton is elected.
justin66 7y ago
The article is an abbreviated version of the radio clip. There's a bit more information and context if you listen to it, although I got the impression the editor might have cut him off mid-rant at the very end. Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.
nsfw-wfsn 7y ago
Gore/GWB was the most important climate election
bitwize 7y ago
Everything took a wild turn after the 2016 election. Electing Trump will be remembered as the time when America's history took a massive nose dive. One thing I think we'll see is the rise of a left-wing version of the Dark Enlightenment wherein a contingent of leftists, disillusioned with democracy after Trump, just go full tankie and start calling for the purges to begin. And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.

toyg 7y ago

It's a junket for his new book, probably summarized from a longer interview for the radio.

_red 7y ago

>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...

machello13 7y ago
> "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either." It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?
- toofy 7y ago
  That’s a pretty uncharitable assumption to make regarding one of the better authors of modern times.
- arkades 7y ago
  Is giving his sentence the least possible charitable reading to make a quip a good use of your time, or anyone else's?
justin66 7y ago
Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?
arkades 7y ago
> But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present." I don't see this as a pathetic premise.
- _red 7y ago
  >I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up.... Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future? The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.
  - Proven 7y ago
    Well said!
  - justin66 7y ago
    You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review. > The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris. Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better. Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.
lpah4all 7y ago
There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge. It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously. By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment. By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago. The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them. What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people." Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
- futureproofd 7y ago
  Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.
whyleyc 7y ago
Have you actually read the book? Or it’s precursor “The Peripheral” which began the development of these concepts. Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description! It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.
naravara 7y ago
>>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election. Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ." No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.
- anotherman554 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Eh, maybe Colin Powell beats Gore for reelection or wins in 2008.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter). You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.
subsubzero 7y ago
agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.
- atombender 7y ago
  That's not the premise of the book at all. First, there's no time travel. Secondly, the plot is set after Clinton is elected.

justin66 7y ago

The article is an abbreviated version of the radio clip. There's a bit more information and context if you listen to it, although I got the impression the editor might have cut him off mid-rant at the very end. Since the results of the 2016 election prompted a total rewrite of Agency, discussion of that is hardly a wild turn.

nsfw-wfsn 7y ago

Gore/GWB was the most important climate election

bitwize 7y ago

Everything took a wild turn after the 2016 election. Electing Trump will be remembered as the time when America's history took a massive nose dive. One thing I think we'll see is the rise of a left-wing version of the Dark Enlightenment wherein a contingent of leftists, disillusioned with democracy after Trump, just go full tankie and start calling for the purges to begin. And then we risk a civil war between the left authoritarians and the right authoritarians, each side convinced that America's survival depends on the utter crushing defeat of the other side.