The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.
William GibsonI think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
William GibsonThat's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
William GibsonIt had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.
William Gibson