{"id":14345,"date":"2015-02-08T22:37:58","date_gmt":"2015-02-08T22:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/william-gibson-explains-why-science-fiction\/"},"modified":"2015-02-08T22:37:58","modified_gmt":"2015-02-08T22:37:58","slug":"william-gibson-explains-why-science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/william-gibson-explains-why-science-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"William Gibson explains why science fiction writers don’t predict the\u00a0future"},"content":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\"image\"<\/figure>\n

William Gibson speaks with Wired<\/i>’s Geeta Dayal about his new book Distrust That Particular Flavor<\/a> (my review<\/a>), and particularly the idea that science fiction sucks at predicting stuff.<\/p>\n

\n

\n Science fiction writers aren\u2019t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are
\nfakes. Fortune tellers are either deluded or charlatans. You can find
\nscience fiction writers who are deluded or science fiction writers who
\nare charlatans \u2014 I can think of several of each in the history of the
\nfield. Every once in a while, somebody extends their imagination down
\nthe line, far enough with a sufficient lack of prejudice, to imagine
\nsomething that then actually happens. When it happens, it\u2019s great, but
\nit\u2019s not magic. All the language we have for describing what science
\nfiction writers and futurists of other stripes do is nakedly a language
\nof magic.\n<\/p>\n

\nI\u2019m having a week where some well-intentioned person on the internet
\ndescribes me as \u201coracular.\u201d As soon as one of the words with a magic
\nconnotation is attached \u2014 I know this from ongoing experience \u2014 as soon
\nas someone says \u201coracular,\u201d it\u2019s like, boom! It\u2019s all over the place;
\nit\u2019s endlessly repeated. It\u2019s probably not bad for business. But then I
\nwind up spending a lot of time disabusing people of the idea that I have
\n some sort of magic insight\u2026. You can also find, if you wanted to Google
\n through all the William Gibson pieces on the net, you can find tons of
\npieces, where people go on and on about how often I\u2019ve gotten it wrong.
\nWhere are the cellphones? And neural nets? Why is the bandwidth of
\neverything microscopic in Neuromancer? I could write technological
\ncritique of Neuromancer myself that I think could probably convince
\npeople that I haven\u2019t gotten it right.\n<\/p>\n

\nBecause the thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the
\ninternet isn\u2019t actually like the internet at all! It\u2019s something; I
\ndidn\u2019t get it right but I said there was going to be something. I
\nsomehow managed to convey a feeling of something. Curiously, that put me
\n out ahead of the field in that regard. It wasn\u2019t that other people were
\n getting it wrong; it was just that relatively few people in the early
\n1980s, relatively few people who were writing science fiction were
\npaying attention to that stuff. That wasn\u2019t what they were writing
\nabout.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nI published an essay with my take on this in Locus<\/i>: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nWilliam Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong<\/a><\/p>\n

\n(Photo: Jason Redmond\/Wired<\/i>) <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents: William Gibson speaks with Wired’s Geeta Dayal about his new book Distrust That Particular Flavor (my review), and particularly the idea that science fiction sucks at predicting stuff. Science fiction writers aren\u2019t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. Fortune tellers are either deluded or charlatans. You can find science fiction writers who are deluded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3Jn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}