> "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'" Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it g…
Actually, there are some interesting facts about COVID and 5G radiowaves.
>You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read I accept that. But I'm commenting on the article that OP linked which quoted Gibson.
You’re commenting on the plot of a book you haven’t read.
He is working with what was provided. Both of you are correct.
>"Cyberspace, as described in Neuromancer, is nothing at all
like the Internet that we live with, which consists mostly of utterly banal and silly stuff."
Ultimately, there are a lot of boring and average intelligence people in the world who spend a lot of time doing banal boring practical stuff and have always liked low brow entertainment. The Internet reflects that.
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here." Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun , a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here). In the earlier editions, from 1989 through…
Serial Experiments Lain seems to be kinda happening.
This article is odd. It gives a shallow treatment of the subject in the headline, and then takes a wild turn into talking about the 2016 election, his emotions around it and its hypothetical impact on a future climate change-induced apocalypse.
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.
>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…
You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different. And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is no…
Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a sci-fi political spy thriller taking place in a very intensified war on terror, with a backstory that Gore was elected president. The alternate history backstory was intended by MacLeod to show that the paranoid milieu and the security state could take place under any president. The difference is that he didn't have an in-universe explanation for the divergence, the sci-fi in the story didn't deal with it.
>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...
>>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election. Not only would t…
I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.
> But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world…
>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…
William McKinley was assassinated 120 years ago and I wouldn't bat an eye about an alternate timeline story involving that. It put Teddy Roosevelt in the office and probably had a massive effect on our current politics.
But as others have pointed out, Gibson was simply trying to salvage his existing manuscript.
But also, I'm blanking on what 2015 event you're referring to. Do you mean 2005 and Katrina?
>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…
You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different. And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is no…
The future world premise was in his previous book - The Peripheral. With the same characters. So I wonder why the article said he created this future world just to "fix" his story's timeline.
>I don't see this as a pathetic premise. You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle: Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had bee…
> Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.
It's true that Gibson's work is compelling because like all great cyberpunk writers, it grafts real world social, cultural, and political considerations in with his futuristic technology. That said, good world-building doesn't mean the author himself might not have naive or problematic politics. J.K. Rowling's expressed views on Twitter have been an ongoing source of controversy. Or perhaps more relevant, Ray Bradbury in his old age became a staunch supporter of George Bush and the wars waged by his administration: