William Gibson: Seeing the Future in Science Fiction
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
One of the most elegant qualities about everyday technology is how it fits into our lives in a very natural and economical manner. This is both what makes it very hard to write good science fiction, and what makes it hard to simply appreciate how quickly technology evolves every year. My smartphone is a natural extension of both my arm and my mind, my body just fits into my car and I rarely make a concious choice between the numerous different ways I have to get in touch with any of my acquaintances. I just reach for my cellphone, skype, facebook, email, gtalk, twitter etc whatever is more convenient without much thought about how none of those existed just a few years ago.
This brings to me a deep awe and trust in my current future. I am very comfortable to say that in ten and twenty years I will be equally satisfied with the mind blowing pace of tech evolution. And it makes it even more awesome that every step on the way will fit so perfectly into my life that it is only in hindsight I will recognize the sheer magnitude of it's awesomeness.
However, no Internet.
I've seen people blaming NASA's need for protecting jobs (shuttle) for the stalling of the space age. Things seem to have started moving. For real bases, two-three decades.
Fusion power? Check Polywell and General Fusion, et al. There is hope.
Strong AI? No clue.
Fusion - we're probably 40+ years from a commercial plant (ITER is being constructed, then there is probably going to be a DEMO plant and only after that would there be a commercial design). Assuming, of course, that someone doesn't do a SpaceX round the current Big Science projects.
Strong AI - very unlikely, unfortunately, as it would presumably help with everything else on the list.
And I am not talking about recursive self improving AI growth - just that each additional improvement in Nonhuman intelligence increases the total intellectual efficiency of humanity and that these benefits are multiplicative.
Here are a couple of links:
Google for the funded Tri Alpha, too. And then there is Lerner and team. I hope at least one of the groups succeed, the world will change.
(If you check talk-polywell.org, there is some positive info which is "only" 6 months old.)
Samsung recently used the movie as evidence of prior art against apple [1].
[1]: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/08/samsung-uses-2010-a-space...
https://twitter.com/#!/GreatDismal
The disjoint collection of esoteric minutia on his feed is a window into Gibson's brand of science fiction. The reason he is so good at 'seeing the future in science fiction' is that he is always converging onto an immediate moment. And I mean that in the short term, from sentence to sentence, and from novel to novel. IMHO, Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition (the Bigend trilogy) are more sci-fi than Neuromancer.
They are still good books (I finished Neuromancer a few days ago) and I'd recommended them to people who are already into science fiction. Having said that, I hope you'll understand when I say that I also consider them the worst that science fiction has to offer. They aren't only inaccessible but actually off putting to anyone but a dedicated reader.
I'm not a fan of it, but Ender's Game is the exact opposite. Not great science fiction, but very accessible. Whatever your thoughts on SciFi, you'll fall in love with Ender and take a very deep interest in his story.
I read Neuromancer as a teenager, and it had a profoundly transformative effect on my life (probably more than any other book). It first introduced me to the idea that a person like a hacker existed. That it was a viable thing to become. I may have discovered this at a later time on my own, but I'll never know.
I was so enraptured by the ideas contained in it, that I was able to look past what was mechanically, a style of writing that I really didn't like (the prose felt very disjointed).
When I moved on to Count Zero, I found that the story wasn't sufficiently enthralling to make up for the issues I had with the style, so I could never get through it.
About ten years later, somehow or another I came to find myself in possession of Gibson's Pattern Recognition (I don't remember if I bought it because of a good review, or just wanted to give him another shot).
For whatever reason, I found that I didn't have any of the issues with his style getting in the way for me. I don't know if his writing actually changed (a possibility, as it was his 7th novel), of if I was just a different person by that point, and now more able to appreciate the way he writes.
I ended up liking Pattern Recognition immensely (and both of the other novels in that trilogy), even though people have made valid complaints about the actual plot of the novels.
I then went back and re-read the rest of the Sprawl trilogy, and found it easier to digest this time.
So you might also find that his later work is less confusing.
I don't really have an opinion as to how it relates to SciFi as a whole, as I really don't like SciFi as a genre in and of itself (as a contrast, I actually hated Enders Game when I read it as a kid).
As we approach 2015, his novels become less and less far-flung. In ca. 2005, I used to find myself in Gibsonesque situations about once or twice a year, now it's monthly...
Pretty soon we'll be living there.
GIBSON: There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.
When you put down a Card novel, you remember the story arc. When you put down a Gibson novel, you remember the images. Everyone knows the opening line of Neuromancer, but few people quote lines from Ender's Game. Everyone remembers the ending of Ender's Game, but many people forget the ending of Neuromancer, even if they enjoyed it.
"The enemy's gate is down" is fairly quotable and has appeared both in http://xkcd.com/241/ and in HPMOR (Chapter 33 from memory...)
"Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too." - Ender's Game
If you don't know what Ender is referring to, this quote loses almost all of its power. If you've read the story, though, this line is killer.
"The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there." - Neuromancer
You don't need to have read the novel to appreciate the quote. Beyond the novelty and aesthetic beauty of the writing, it's very information-dense: You can get an excellent sense of the novel's setting, themes, conflict, and main character just from these three sentences.
A couple of things to bear in mind when reading it.
First Neuromancer was published in 1984. It was the novel that pretty much invented the whole cowboy-hacker image that's been reused a bazzilion times since. The whole idea of "cyberspace" the "matrix". Of custom hacker tools. Super-human AIs with less than human motivations. Of an international data-sphere used by companies. The rise of the global multi-national. The magical influence of the 1% of the 1% superrich. All of it in a much more "gritty" realistic world. Neither dystopian or utopian.
So much of this is just the general background to the whole SF genre now. Or indeed reality.
Just as a book of ideas it just blew me away at the time I first read it in 1989. Five years after it was first published. When most of the world had no clue what e-mail or the internet was. When my neighbour thought the AI in my degree was "Artificial Insemination" not "Artificial Intelligence" (that was a really confusing and funny conversation - "I never knew you were interested in farming" :-)
Second was how it compared to the rest of SF at the time. The kind of fiction folk like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley were putting out was just so... different from most of the SF that was out there at the time. Gibson's was the first novel length work I'd read in that style and... wow... it just blew me away.
Don't get me wrong - I love Ender's game too. In the same way I can love "Of Mice and Men" and "Moby Dick" - despite there radically different literary styles.
It's hard for me to divorce Neuromancer from the time I read it in. If I'd grown up reading Charlie Stross, Neal Asher and Richard Morgan then I'm sure that it would feel vastly less original. But for me, anyway, its a book I still love.
Compared to Gibson, I would describe Scott Card's work as very crisp high contrast paintings of stick figures. Easy reading, but really nothing of interest in the slightest if you are looking for more than just a plot. The XKCD of SF. (Also, I'd highly suggest sticking to the Ender series of books if you do insist on reading Scott Card. I made the mistake of reading A Memory of Earth without knowing what I was getting myself into first...)
For what it's worth, Gibson's Bridge trilogy is much more accessible than Neuromancer, though I can't say that I think he ever quite hit as high a note as Neuromancer.
> They aren't only inaccessible but actually off putting to anyone but a dedicated reader.
Can't really agree with this, but I'm not sure how to respond without sounding like an elitist prick. If someone made the same comment about, say, functional programming languages, wouldn't you say it's not so much a matter of them being inaccessible and off-putting as simply different? And isn't there some value -- a lot of value, actually -- in those differences?
I don't understand the affection for Ender's Game. I read it in grade school and I reread it last summer; the plot is elementary (Ender's a textbook Mary Sue) and the takeaways are either empty or grim -- there's so much wanton violence (think back to the incident with the bully) and either Card is excusing it 'for the greater good', or condemning basically every character in the novel for engaging and condoning it.
The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, was much more interesting, but I think my perceptions of that book are a bit too tainted by my knowledge of the author's personal opinions.
It's the character himself that's appealing. He's innocent and his burden is so huge...You just feel for him. You want him to get through it...it doesn't seem fair..you want to help him...protect him.
That said, I've stopped recommending anything in the Ender books. There's just not enough there anymore.
(Source is Card's afterward to the 20th anniversary edition of Ender's Game.)
I think even Gibson wouldn't disagree with what you wrote.
His later books reflect what he later found out. That reality has in many ways caught up with his books.
But to me those books still stand above many else cause I read them at a time where they were seen as a possible scenario. They where the promise of a darker but more exciting future.
I read it when I was about 12ish, so nearly 15 years ago. Reading it at that point in my life, in that point of human history as computing was starting to become an incredibly large part of daily life made it a lot more interesting, but society and science and fiction have come a long way since this, so it feels quite anachronistic in it's own way.
I've read Neuromancer multiple times, because I just love Gibson's style, high tech low life has never been done better.
The multitude of ideas in each paragraph is simply stunning. There are thousand short sci-fi stories hiding behind each allusion.
That said, I have to agree, it is not very accessible to someone new to science fiction.
Still... reading "virtual light" last summer I got confused by the embedded fax machine everywhere (even in the back of car seats if I remember correctly...) trashing out some papers for reading... How did he miss e-mails or "text on screen" for these scenes ?
He's solving for the general case.
(Please don't capitalize the C, there is no pun intended.)
PS: I know that you meant clothing, but I was trying to illustrate something. :)