William Gibson
William Gibson
William Ford Gibsonis an American and Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were bleak, noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 March 1948
CityConway, SC
CountryUnited States of America
I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.
The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
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.
I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.
The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day.
We were presented with enough evidence for an indictment to be issued,
Ronnie Earle didn't indict him. The grand jury indicted him.
Cyberspace was a consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but actually was a computer-generated construct representing abstract data.
I feel the time is right for me to relinquish the reins. It has become increasingly obvious to me that we are meeting and surpassing all the goals we had in mind when we took the company public in 1993.
It seems as though the Net itself has become conscious,
I've had a growing frustration, particularly when I would go out and do book tours and interviews. I got frustrated with people asking me, "How do you know what the future is going to be like?" And I'd always say, "I don't.
The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.
I'm interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living.