William Gibson talks about his writing, and sci-fi more generally, to the Paris Review. I really should read one of his novels that are set in the present. We live in a bizarrely science fiction world. It’s the future, but not the one we were thinking of, and not everywhere yet. Speaking about a conversation he might have had with someone back from our future, talking to his Neuromancer writing 1984 self:
You know how you wrote that the United States is gone and the Soviet Union is looming in the background like a huge piece of immobile slag? Well, you got it kind of backward.
I love that his futures are dirty and imperfect, not smooth and polished. Hacked together from bits of the past, all piled up on each other like compost.
