I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.
William GibsonI think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
William GibsonThree in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
William GibsonHis teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
William GibsonIf youโre fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you donโt know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know oneโs own culture.
William GibsonOne of the things I have taken for granted, in terms of how technology works in the world, is the people that develop it and get it out there don't really know what we are going to do with until we have really gotten ahold of it and it has become ubiquitous. And then we wind up doing things that its inventors never dreamed of and those things become the real change drivers. That is actually where the whole technocracy thing falls apart for me, because the people who invented it can't predict what we're going to do with it.
William Gibson