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You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tr

You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different. And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.” So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.

Apocryphon 7y ago
Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a sci-fi political spy thriller taking place in a very intensified war on terror, with a backstory that Gore was elected president. The alternate history backstory was intended by MacLeod to show that the paranoid milieu and the security state could take place under any president. The difference is that he didn't have an in-universe explanation for the divergence, the sci-fi in the story didn't deal with it.
xvilka 7y ago
The future world premise was in his previous book - The Peripheral. With the same characters. So I wonder why the article said he created this future world just to "fix" his story's timeline.
- sphynxypoo 7y ago
  Yeah I thought that was very odd as well; the intersection of the two stubs seemed inevitable. Not like a last minute correction at all. I think the article must be taking him wildly out of context. At the same time, we have this: "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either" This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style. That being said, he did discuss a lot of revision due to current events in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi... Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.

Apocryphon 7y ago

Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a sci-fi political spy thriller taking place in a very intensified war on terror, with a backstory that Gore was elected president. The alternate history backstory was intended by MacLeod to show that the paranoid milieu and the security state could take place under any president. The difference is that he didn't have an in-universe explanation for the divergence, the sci-fi in the story didn't deal with it.

xvilka 7y ago

The future world premise was in his previous book - The Peripheral. With the same characters. So I wonder why the article said he created this future world just to "fix" his story's timeline.

sphynxypoo 7y ago
Yeah I thought that was very odd as well; the intersection of the two stubs seemed inevitable. Not like a last minute correction at all. I think the article must be taking him wildly out of context. At the same time, we have this: "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either" This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style. That being said, he did discuss a lot of revision due to current events in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi... Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.