Background Image

...

One Of The Things I Have Taken For Granted, In Terms Of How Technology Works In The World, Is The People That Develop It And Get It Out There Don't Really Know What We Are Going To Do With Until We Have Really Gotten Ahold Of It And It Has Become Ubiquitous. And Then We Wind Up Doing Things That Its Inventors Never Dreamed Of And Those Things Become The Real Change Drivers. That Is Actually Where The Whole Technocracy Thing Falls Apart For Me, Because The People Who Invented It Can't Predict What We're Going To Do With It.

-William Gibson

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

One Of The Things

William Gibson

...

One Of The Things I Have Taken For Granted, In Terms Of How Technology Works In The World, Is The People That Develop It And Get It Out There Don't Really Know What We Are Going To Do With Until We Have Really Gotten Ahold Of It And It Has Become Ubiquitous. And Then We Wind Up Doing Things That Its Inventors Never Dreamed Of And Those Things Become The Real Change Drivers. That Is Actually Where The Whole Technocracy Thing Falls Apart For Me, Because The People Who Invented It Can't Predict What We're Going To Do With It.

Views: 7

Topic

More From William Gibson

I Have This Prejudice That Trilogies Are Long, Three-volume Novels.

Japan Had A More Radical Experience Of Future Shock Than Any Other Nation In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries. They Were This Feudal Place, Locked In The Past, But Then They Bought The Whole Industrial Revolution Kit From England, Blew Their Cultural Brains Out With It, Became The First Industrialized Asian Nation, Tried To Take Over Their Side Of The World, Got Nuked By The United States For Their Trouble, And Discovered Steve Mcqueen! Their Take On Iconic Menswear Emerges From That Matrix.

I Can See Television Much More Easily Than I Can See Features, Because The Economy And Politics Of Making Big, Big Features Seems To Me To Be Narrowing Even From What It Was.

I'm Very Primitive In Terms Of Economics. The Kind Of New Business In Which Stock Gets More Valuable Because The Company Grows, But There Must Be Limits To Growth. But If Publishing Is Expanding To Fill That Retail Space, It Seems Like There May Be A Necessary And Unpleasant Correction Waiting Down The Road. How Many Books To People Want?

I Loved The Limey [movie]! It's So Violent! And Yet It's So Exquisitely Romanticized In A Sort Of Japanese Way, It's A Samurai Film. Coming Out Of That, I Was Really Deeply Conflicted, Because A Friend Who Had Seen It Said, It's Beautiful, But It's Not About Anything. It's One Micron Thick.

To The Very Limited Extent That I Have A Political Consciousness, To Some Extent I'm A Lazy, Apolitical Sort Of Guy That Just Flits Around.

People Who Feel Safer With A Gun Than With Guaranteed Medical Insurance Don't Yet Have A Fully Adult Concept Of Scary.

Somehow I Think That If Toronto Had Been Forced To Wait A Decade [from 80th], It Would Be A Better Looking City.

I've Been Through The Whole Western World, And It Seems To Me That There's More Retail Floor Space Devoted To The Sale Of Books Than Food! There's More Retail Floor Space Devoted To The Sale Of Books Than There's Been In The Entire History Of Humanity! It's Grotesque!

I Was Once Really Close To Sitting Down And Having A Conversation With A Shadowy Young Woman Who Is Reputed Have Become A Millionaire By Investing In Beanie Babies. She Was Someone That A Couple People Claimed To Know, She Seemed To Exist, But She Remained Shadowy.

I Grew Up In Southwestern Virginia. I Was Born In South Carolina, But Only Because My Parents Had A Vacation Cabin Or Something There On The Beach. I Was Like A Summer Baby. But I Did Grow Up In The South. I Grew Up In Serious, Serious Appalachia, In A Very Small Town.

Three In The Morning. Making Yourself A Cup Of Coffee In The Dark, Using A Flashlight When You Pour The Boiling Water.

Friday, August 04, 2006 Monument Posted 8:31 Am Silver Nitrous Girls Pointed Into Occult Winds Of Porn And Destiny.

It Doesn't Matter How Fast Your Modem Is If You're Being Shelled By Ethnic Separatists.

I Only Go To Japan When There's Someone Who Can Afford To Bring Me There, And Consequently I May Never Go Again!

I Knew Where The Magnets Were, Behind The Gyprock, And The Magnets Were Very Powerful. I Think They Had To Be Powerful For Me, Otherwise The Reader Wouldn't Have A Reciprocal Experience. But I Was Very Careful To Bury Them Deeply, Deeply In The Plaster And Paint Over Them. I Didn't Want Anybody To Directly Access Them, And That's Gradually Changed For Me.

I 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.

If You Make Something, It's An Artifact. It's Something That Somebody Or Some Corporate Entity Has Caused To Come Into Being. A Great Many Human Beings Have Thought About Each Of The Artifacts That Surround Us. Different Degrees Of Intelligence And Attention Have Been Brought To Bear On Anything.

[the Currency Of Being Celebrity] Used To Be Only The Elect Had Any Manna In The Information Society And Everyone Else Was A Consumer.

I've Always Been Interested In People Who Aren't From Anywhere In Particular. I Think It's All Melting. This Has Been True For As Long As I Can Remember In My Adult Life.

I Suppose I Do The Japanese Because I Just Don't Know China. Chinese Popular Culture Has Never Evoked That Instant Of, "whoah! What's That?" That I Have With Japanese Popular Culture.

You Must Learn To Overcome Your Very Natural And Appropriate Revulsion For Your Own Work.

Magazines In The Traditional Sense Were Aggregators Of Novelty. A Good Magazine Was A Lot Of Novelty, Stuff You've Never Heard Of Before, Clearly Aggregated By People Who Have Been Able To Travel Further And Dig Deeper Than You Have Been Able To Do. And That Used To Be Really An Important Source Of Stuff For Me. And Now It Is Less Important Because The Internet Has Eaten It All Up. But My Twitter Feed As An Aggregator Of Novelty Is Like... I Don't Know What I Would Do If It Became Any More Powerful, I Would Have To Start Reining It In Somehow.

Movies Have Gotten Dull, The Way Network Television Got Dull. And Television, If We Can Still Even Call It That, Is Still Really Exciting And Riveting And People Are Totally Into It. I Am Always Meeting People Who Have These Favorite Shows That They Are Completely Wired Too And Not Only Have I Never Seen It But I Don't Even Know How To Find It.

The Present Tense Made Him Nervous.

All My Life I've Encountered People Who Were Obsessed With One Particular Class Of Object Or Experience, Who Were Constantly Pursuing That Thing. Since I Was A Little Kid, I Hadn't Afforded Myself The Opportunity, I Guess, To Have A Hobby.

The Future Has Already Arrived. It's Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet.

I Don't Have To Write About The Future. For Most People, The Present Is Enough Like The Future To Be Pretty Scary.

The Street Has Its Own Use For Things.

Fiction Is An Illusion Wrought With Many Small, Conventionally Symbolic Marks, Triggering Visions In The Minds Of Others

His Eyes Were Eggs Of Unstable Crystal, Vibrating With A Frequency Whose Name Was Rain And The Sound Of Trains, Suddenly Sprouting A Humming Forest Of Hair-fine Glass Spines.

The Sky Above The Port Was The Color Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Station.

I Do Not Think An Enormous Permanent Underclass Is A Very Good Thing To Have If You're Attempting To Operate Something That At Least Pretends Sometimes To Be A Democracy.

I'm Interested In People Who Become Culturally Fluent. And When I Meet Young People I'm Often Amazed They Don't Quite Seem To Have A Sense Of Where They're From. They're Like The Citizens Of The Airport.

One Of The Liberating Effects Of Science Fiction When I Was A Teenager Was Precisely Its Ability To Tune Me Into All Sorts Of Strange Data And Make Me Realize That I Wasn’t As Totally Isolated In Perceiving The World As Being Monstrous And Crazy

Before You Diagnose Yourself With Depression Or Low Self-esteem, First Make Sure That You Are Not, In Fact, Just Surrounded By Assholes.

A Lot Of The Buildings [in Toronto] Around Yonge And Bloor Is The Architectural Equivalent Of Kipper Ties And 8" Collar Points. It's Ghastly And No Amount Of Street-level Retail Glitz Can Lift It.

Things Aren't Different. Things Are Things.

Different Things

I Don't Much Live My Life As If I Was Living In A Raymond Chandler Novel, Which Is Probably A Good Thing.

I Like The Idea Of People Who've Had Some Success In One Form Secretly Wanting To Be Something Else; I Have Some Of That Myself. I Look For It In Other People Who've Established Themselves In Some Particular Art Form, And Then You Find Out That They Really Would Like To Design Running Shoes, Or Edit Literary Magazines Or Something.

Personally I Like To Imagine Something The Size Of A Baby Hippo, The Color Of A Week-old Boiled Potato, That Lives By Itself, In The Dark, In A Double-wide On The Outskirts Of Topeka. It's Covered With Eyes And It Sweats Constantly. The Sweat Runs Into Those Eyes And Makes Them Sting. It Has No Mouth, No Genitals, And Can Only Express Its Mute Extremes Of Murderous Rage And Infantile Desire By Changing The Channels On A Universal Remote. Or By Voting In Presidential Elections.

The Most Common Human Act That Writing A Novel Resembles Is Lying. The Working Novelist Lies Daily, Very Complexly, And At Great Length.

Novels Set In Imaginary Futures Are Necessarily About The Moment In Which They Are Written.

I Don't Think About The Real Future Very Much.

There's Violence In My Culture [from America's South].

I Think That I've Always Written About Things That Are Very Personal, But Initially, I Coded Everything.

If I Were In Severely Straitened Socio-economic Circumstances And Had To Move To The U.s., I'd Probably Opt For Athens, Ga, Or Lawrence, Ks. As Boho Guys Usually Do, Live Cheap In The Left Bank Of Kansas.

I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity.

If I Meet Someone And Discover That They're An Absolute, Very Earnest Nationalist, It's Unlikely That I'm Going To Get Much Closer To Them. I Don't Understand Them. It Doesn't Matter Where They're From, I Just Don't Get It. I'm A Multi-national Kind Of Guy.

It's Impossible To Move, To Live, To Operate At Any Level Without Leaving Traces, Bits, Seemingly Meaningless Fragments Of Personal Information.

When I Was A Child, Science Fiction Was The First Source I've Found For Information. Science Fiction Was A Very Very Low Cultural Stream In Those Days. It Was Completly Below The Radar And No One Bothered To Censurate It.

I Think That Technologies Are Morally Neutral Until We Apply Them. It's Only When We Use Them For Good Or For Evil That They Become Good Or Evil.

Home. Home Was Bama, The Sprawl, The Boston-atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program A Map To Display Frequency Of Data Exchange, Every Thousand Megabytes A Single Pixel On A Very Large Screen. Manhattan And Atlanta Burn Solid White. Then They Start To Pulse, The Rate Of Traffic Threatening To Overload Your Simulation. Your Map Is About To Go Nova. Cool It Down. Up Your Scale. Each Pixel A Million Megabytes. At A Hundred Million Megabytes Per Second, You Begin To Make Out Certain Blocks In Midtown Manhattan, Outlines Of Hundred-year-old Industrial Parks Ringing The Old Core Of Atlanta.

Canadian Cities Looked The Way American Cities Did On Television.

And, For An Instant, She Stared Directly Into Those Soft Blue Eyes And Knew, With An Instinctive Mammalian Certainty, That The Exceedingly Rich Were No Longer Even Remotely Human.

Five Hours' New York Jet Lag And Cayce Pollard Wakes In Camden Town To The Dire And Ever-circling Wolves Of Disrupted Circadian Rhythm.

The Future Is Here - It Just Has Not Been Uniformly Distributed.

I Think That I've Always Written About Things That Are Very Personal, But Initially, I Coded Everything. I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There For Me. I Knew Where The Magnets Were, Behind The Gyprock, And The Magnets Were Very Powerful. I Think They Had To Be Powerful For Me, Otherwise The Reader Wouldn't Have A Reciprocal Experience.

My Dream Scenario Would Be That You Could Go Into A Bookshop, Examine Copies Of Every Book In Print That They're Able To Offer, Then For A Fee Have Them Produce In A Minute Or Two A Beautiful Finished Copy In A Dust Jacket That You Would Pay For And Take Home.

Somewhere, Deep Within Her, Surfaces A Tiny Clockwork Submarine. There Are Times When You Can Only Take The Next Step. And Then Another.

Cyberspace Is Colonising What We Used To Think Of As The Real World. I Think That Our Grandchildren Will Probably Regard The Distinction We Make Between What We Call The Real World And What They Think Of As Simply The World As The Quaintest And Most Incomprehensible Thing About Us.

I Don't Always Like Writing, But I Very Much Like Having Written.

You Needed A New Pancreas. The One We Bought For You Frees You From A Dangerous Dependency.” “thanks, But I Was Enjoying That Dependency.

The Nature Of Emergent Technology Is, As Kevin Kelly Once Said, Right Out Of Control. It's An Element Of Human Evolution That's Completely Out Of Control. It's Sort Of Driving Itself, And I Don't See It Ceasing To Do That.

I Think Science Fiction Gives Us A Wonderful Toolkit To Disassemble And Reexamine This Kind Of Incomprehensible, Constantly Changing Present That We Live In, That We Often Live In Quite Uncomfortably.

When You Want To Know How Things Really Work, Study Them When They're Coming Apart.

I Would Like To Design What People Generally Call Streetwear. I'd Like To Dress Skateboarders, Or Whatever The Older Equivalent Of Skateboarders Are. I Pay More Attention To That Stuff Than Anyone Would Ever Imagine Because I'm Watching What The Designers Do.

You Can Get In A Cab In Vancouver And The 20-year-old Driver Speaks More Knowingly Of Michael Ovitz Than Anyone In The Industry. They Just Know! And It's Perhaps Not Unhealthy.

We Are That Strange Species That Constructs Artifacts Intended To Counter The Natural Flow Of Forgetting.

The Past Is Past, The Future Unformed. There Is Only The Moment, And That Is Where He Prefers To Be.

Enlightenment Is "being," And It Grows; It's End Is Serenity.

As A Writer Of Fiction Who Deals With Technology, I Necessarily Deal With The History Of Technology And The History Of Technologically Induced Social Change. I Roam Up And Down It In A Kind Of Special Way Because I Roam Down It Into History, Which Is Invariably Itself A Speculative Affair.

The Ecological Impact Of Book Manufacture And Traditional Book Marketing - I Think That Should Really Be Considered. We Have This Industry In Which We Cut Down Trees To Make The Paper That We Then Use Enormous Amounts Of Electricity To Turn Into Books That Weigh A Great Deal And Are Then Shipped Enormous Distances To Point-of-sale Retail.

That's One Of My Favorite Things About Twitter: You Can Tweak Your Feed Into A Fabulous Novelty Engine. That's Only One Thing You Can Do With It, But It's One Of The Things I Find Most Entertaining About It.

Favorites Things

I've Always Assumed From The Beginning That I Had Relatively Few Contemporaries Among My Readership. Not That I Was Consciously Writing For A Younger Audience But That What I Was Doing Interested A Younger Audience, Or At Least Threatened Them Less.

I Don't Think Of Myself As Being Particulary A Subversive Writer, But I Like To Think That My Work Could Afford Someone Else, The Extra Degree Of Freedom That I Found When I First Found Science Fiction.

Every Shop In Every High Street In Europe Is Filled With Basically The Same Stuff. There's A Street In Every City Of The World That Has A Gap And Benneton's, And The Upscale Versions Of Those.

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description, As Science Writers, But There Are Bad Dreams As Well As Good Dreams. We're Dreamers, You See, But We're Also Realists, Of A Sort.

We See In Order To Move; We Move In Order To See.

A Graphic Representation Of Data Abstracted From The Banks Of Every Computer In The Human System. Unthinkable Complexity. Lines Of Light Ranged In The Nonspace Of The Mind, Clusters And Constellations Of Data. Like City Lights, Receding.

Lost, So Small Amid That Dark, Hands Grown Cold, Body Image Fading Down Corridors Of Television Sky.

There's An Idea Called "gray Man", In The Security Business, That I Find Interesting. They Teach People To Dress Unobtrusively. Chinos Instead Of Combat Pants, And If You Really Need The Extra Pockets, A Better Design Conceals Them. They Assume, Actually, That The Bad Guys Will Shoot All The Guys Wearing Combat Pants First, Just To Be Sure.

In Effect, I Grew Up In A Sort Of Timewarp, A Place Where Times Are Scrambled Up. There Are Elements Of My Childhood That Look To Me Now, In Memory More Like The 1940s Or The 1950s Than The 1960s. Jack [womack] Says That That Made Us Science Fiction Writers, Because We Grew Up Experiencing A Kind Of Time Travel.

Time Moves In One Direction, Memory In Another.

I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting. I Actually Tend To Suspect That In Real Life, There Have Always Been Very Strong Female Characters, But At Certain Stages Of Society, They've Been Asked To Cool It.

"cyberspace Is Everting." It's Interpenetrating Our Everyday Reality To The Point That On-line Is Our Normal Waking State.

Television Has - Particularly At The Hbo Level In The United States - Become A Completely New Genre. Something Like Deadwood Or The Wire Is A Whole New Thing - There Was No Equivalent To That Medium Before. It's Like A New Way Of Telling Stories.

Maybe I've Been A Small Part Of The Democratisation Of Celebrity, Because I've Been Fascinated By It, And When It Started To Happen To Me To The Very Limited Extent That It Happens To Writers In North America, I Was Exposed To People Who Had The Disease Of Celebrity. People Who Had Raging, Raging, Life-threatening Celebrity, People Who Would Be In Danger If They Were Left Alone On The Street Without Their Minders. It's A Great Anthropological Privilege To Be There.

I Probably Had Something To Do With Being Southern. For Some Reason, Over The Last Few Years I've Been Much More Conscious Of That. It's Probably Because My Friend Jack Womack Has A Thesis That He And I Write The Way We Do Because We're Southern And We Experienced The Very Tail End Of The Premeditated South.

I Don't Think We Know Yet What Broadcast Television Did To Us, Although It Obviously Did Lots. I Don't Think We're Far Enough Away From It Yet To Really Get A Handle On It. We Get These Things, I Think They Start Changing Us Right Away, We Don't Notice We're Changing. Our Perception Of The Whole Thing Shifts, And Then We're In The New Way Of Doing Things, And We Take It For Granted.

I Had A List Of Things That Science Fiction, Particularly American Science Fiction, To Me Seemed To Do With Tedious Regularity. One Was To Not Have Strong Female Protagonists. One Was To Envision The Future, Whatever It Was, As America.

I Think I'd Probably Tell You That It's Easier To Desire And Pursue The Attention Of Tens Of Millions Of Total Strangers Than It Is To Accept The Love And Loyalty Of The People Closest To Us.

I'm Happiest With People Who've Gotten Furthest From Traditional Ideas Of Nationalism.

She Knows, Now, Absolutely, Hearing The White Noise That Is London, That Damien's Theory Of Jet Lag Is Correct: That Her Mortal Soul Is Leagues Behind Her, Being Reeled In On Some Ghostly Umbilical Down The Vanished Wake Of The Plane That Brought Her Here, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Feet Above The Atlantic. Souls Can't Move That Quickly, And Are Left Behind, And Must Be Awaited, Upon Arrival, Like Lost Luggage.

My Problem Is That All Things Are Increasingly Interesting To Me

Some People Dote On Contemplating Disasters.

I Guess Twitter Is The First Thing That Has Been Attractive To Me As Social Media. I Never Felt The Least Draw To Facebook Or Myspace. I've Been Involved Anonymously In Some Tiny Listservs, Mainly In My Ceaseless Quest For Random Novelty, And Sometimes While Doing Something That More Closely Resembles Research.

I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity. Its Record For Being Accurately Predictive Is Really, Really Poor! If You Look At The Whole History Of Science Fiction, What People Have Said Is Going To Happen, What Writers Have Said Is Going To Happen, And What Actually Happened - It's Terrible.

I Watch For Emergent Technologies And Pay Attention To What People Say They'll Be Good For, Then See What We Actually Use Them For. It Never Occurred To Me That A Tiny Telephone With A Wireless Transceiver Would Do Whatever It Is That It's Done To Us.

The Simpson's In Piccadilly Has Been Turned Into The Largest Bookstore In All Of Europe! How Can They Fill It? All Of These Purpose-built Borders And Chapters And Every New Mall That Goes Up Has A Giant Chain Bookstore With A Purpose-built Author Reading Space, Whoah, What's Gong On There.

I've Become Convinced That Nostalgia Is A Fundamentally Unhealthy Modality. When You See It, It's Usually Attached To Something Else That's Really, Seriously Bad. I Don't Traffic In Nostalgia. We're Becoming A Global Culture.

I'd Always Maintained That Much Of The Anarchy And Craziness Of The Early Internet Had A Lot To Do With The Fact That Governments Just Hadn't Realised It Was There.

Addictions [...] Started Out Like Magical Pets, Pocket Monsters. They Did Extraordinary Tricks, Showed You Things You Hadn't Seen, Were Fun. But Came, Through Some Gradual Dire Alchemy, To Make Decisions For You. Eventually, They Were Making Your Most Crucial Life-decisions. And They Were [...] Less Intelligent Than Goldfish.

A Nation,” He Heard Himself Say, “consists Of Its Laws. A Nation Does Not Consist Of Its Situation At A Given Time. If An Individual’s Morals Are Situational, That Individual Is Without Morals. If A Nation’s Laws Are Situational, That Nation Has No Laws, And Soon Isn’t A Nation.

A Snappy Label And A Manifesto Would Have Been Two Of The Very Last Things On My Own Career Want List. That Label Enabled Mainstream Science Fiction To Safely Assimilate Our Dissident Influence, Such As It Was. Cyberpunk Could Then Be Embraced And Given Prizes And Patted On The Head, And Genre Science Fiction Could Continue Unchanged.

The Future's Here Already. It's Just Unevenly Distributed.

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.

It 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.

You Know What Your Trouble Is? You're The Kind Who Always Reads The Handbook. Anything People Build, Any Kind Of Technology, It's Going To Have Some Specific Purpose. It's For Doing Something That Somebody Already Understands. But If It's New Technology, It'll Open Areas Nobody's Ever Thought Of Before. You Read The Manual, Man, And You Won't Play Around With It, Not The Same Way. And You Get All Funny When Somebody Else Uses It To Do Something You Never Thought Of.

I Have Always Been Intensely Uncomfortable With The Idea Of A Science Fiction Writer As Prophet. Not That There Haven't Been Science Fiction Writers Who Think Of Themselves As Having Some Sort Of Prophetic Role, But When I Think Of That, I Always Think Of H.g. Wells - He Would Think Of What Was Going To Happen, And He Would Imagine How It Would Happen, And Then He Would Create A Fiction To Illustrate The Idea That He'd Had. And No Part Of My Process Has Ever Resembled That At All.

Science Fiction

I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting.

[i've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation], And Eventually You Find Yourself In The Room With The Radiant Being Around Whom All This Is Revolving. It's Very Bizarre, And It's Quasi-religious, Or Possibly Genuinely Religious. Spooky. It's A Spooky And Interesting Thing.

If There's A Movie Of Neuromancer, What I Really Want The Special Effects Guys To Do Is Make You See, From Case's Point Of View, The Little Acid Giggies: The Little Lines And Trails Coming Off Of Things.

For Me, The Melancholy Of The Late Xxth Century Is Walking Late At Night By The Mont Blanc Pen Store And Seeing These Things Always Strike Me As Simulacra Of Luxury Items. They Seem Like Fakes.

Time Is Money, But Also Money Is Money.

When I Was First Writing About Japan, It Was At The Peak Of The Bubble. Bubble Popped, But They Kept On Going. Japanese Street Style Feeds American Iconics Back Into America In Somewhat The Way English Rock Once Fed American Blues Back Into America.

The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things.

To Present A Whole World That Doesn’t Exist And Make It Seem Real, We Have To More Or Less Pretend We’re Polymaths. That’s Just The Act Of All Good Writing.

I Realized That Everyone In Western Society, In Some Weird Way, Believes That They've Had The Experience Of Producing Feature Films.

Damien Is A Friend. Their Boy-girl Lego Doesn't Click, He Would Say.

There Are Bits Of The Literal Future Right Here, Right Now, If You Know How To Look For Them.

All The Speed He Took, All The Turns He'd Taken And The Corners He'd Cut In Night City, And Still He'd See The Matrix In His Sleep, Bright Lattices Of Logic Unfolding Across That Colorless Void.

I Assume That - Because You Can Get Degrees In Journalism From Very Reputable Universities - I Assume That People Can Be Trained To Be Journalists. I've Never Been Entirely Certain That Anyone Can Be Trained To Be A Novelist In The Same Way.

He'd Been Numb A Long Time, Years. All His Nights Down Ninsei, His Nights With Linda, Numb In Bed And Numb At The Cold Sweating Center Of Every Drug Deal. But Now He'd Found This Warm Thing, This Chip Of Murder. Meat, Some Part Of Him Said. It's The Meat Talking, Ignore It.

Part Of The Core Of My System, Is A Way Of Trying To Give The Characters More Control. If I'm Practicing Making Up What The Characters Will Do, It's Never Good. In Fact, When I Catch Myself Doing That, I Try To Get Rid Of That Section, And Try And Let Them Start Making The Decisions.

All I Knew About The Word Cyberspace When I Coined It, Was That It Seemed Like An Effective Buzzword. It Seemed Evocative And Essentially Meaningless. It Was Suggestive Of Something, But Had No Real Semantic Meaning, Even For Me, As I Saw It Emerge On The Page.

When Did It Become Necessary To Explain What's So Cool About Japan? Everyone Was Quite Obsessed With It 15 Years Ago. I Suppose It's The Only Asian Country That Developed An Imaginary Entree To Me. That's Why I Go Back.

[when] Johnny Mnemonic Was Coming Out And I Realized That All The Kids That Worked In 7-11 Knew More - Or Thought They Knew More - About Feature Film Production Than I Did. And That Was From Reading Premiere, That Was From This Change That Came From Magazines That Treat Their Readers As Players. Magazines That Purport To Sell You The Inside Experience.

I Don't Begin A Novel With A Shopping List - The Novel Becomes My Shopping List As I Write It.

It's An American Thing, But It's Particularly A Southern Thing, And Its Romanticization Is Hyper-southern. And It's Still Irresistible To Me, Even In Middle Age. There's Something That Pulls Me To That, But At The Same Time, I Have This Increasing Awareness Of How Banal It Really Is - That Evil Is Inherently Banal.

It Was Hot, The Night We Burned Chrome.

There Must Be Some Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon, Beyond Which It Is Impossible To Be More Derivative, More Removed From The Source, More Devoid Of Soul.

All We Really Have When We Pretend To Write About The Future Is The Moment In Which We Are Writing. That's Why Every Imagined Future Obsoletes Like An Ice Cream Melting On The Way Back From The Corner Store.

A Part Of That [timewrap] For Me Was Growing Up In A Culture That Violence Had Always Been A Part Of. It Wasn't An Aberration, Though I Realize That In Retrospect. I Grew Up In The Part Of The U.s. Where All Of Cormac Mccarthy's Novels Are Set And That's A Pretty Violent Place.

It Seems As Though Everyone Is Going To The Currency Of Celebrity. Everyone's Getting Their Own Account Of Whatever That Currency Is. That's Something Neat.

I Had A Lot Of Issues With The Genre, And I Probably Even Had Issues With The Whole Idea Of Genre. I Was Coming Into It With A Certain Degree Of Outsider Attitude, And I Didn't Have A Long-term Plan. But I Think The Way It's Worked Out, It's Sort Of Warped Into What I Suppose You Could Say Is My Own Genre. If People Like My Books, They Have Some Idea Of What The Next One Will Be Like.

I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There, For Me.

If Ignorance Were Enough To Make Things Not Exist, The World Would Be More Like A Lot Of People Think It Is. But It's Not. And It's Not.

Twitter Is The Only Brand Of Social Media That I Have Ever Taken To At All. I Like The Feeling Of Having My Perception Of The World Expanded Daily, 24/7, By Being Able To Monitor The Reactions Of 100-and-some People Throughout The World That I Personally Follow So I Have Some Sense Of Who They Are. There Has Never Really Been Anything Like That Before, At Least In Terms Of The Digestible 140-character Bandwidth That Twitter Is Based On. I Am Able To Wake Up, Open Twitter, And Sort Of Glance Across The Psychic State Of The Planet.

We Monitor Many Frequencies. We Listen Always. Came A Voice, Out Of The Babel Of Tongues, Speaking To Us. It Played Us A Mighty Dub.

That's Something That Tends To Happen With New Technologies Generally: The Most Interesting Applications Turn Up On A Battlefield, Or In A Gallery.

When I Start Writing A New Imaginary Future, I Have No Idea What It Is. The Characters Arrive First. They Help Me Figure Out Where They Are Living And I Get To Fill In The Gaps With That And Where We Are. So When I Get To The End Of The Process Of Composition, If I Feel That I Have Really Done My Job, I Have No Idea What I've Got - And I Then Spend Essentially The Rest Of My Life Figuring Out What It Might Mean.

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description.

I Took Punk To Be The Detonation Of Some Slow-fused Projectile Buried Deep In Society's Flank A Decade Earlier, And I Took It To Be, Somehow, A Sign.

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.

What Strikes Me About Toronto Is That Toronto's Great Misfortune Was To Have Too Much Money In The Late 70s And Early 80s, And Consequently, It Built In The Style Of Those Periods, Which Is Hideous.

One Of The Things I Have Taken For Granted, In Terms Of How Technology Works In The World, Is The People That Develop It And Get It Out There Don't Really Know What We Are Going To Do With Until We Have Really Gotten Ahold Of It And It Has Become Ubiquitous. And Then We Wind Up Doing Things That Its Inventors Never Dreamed Of And Those Things Become The Real Change Drivers. That Is Actually Where The Whole Technocracy Thing Falls Apart For Me, Because The People Who Invented It Can't Predict What We're Going To Do With It.

When I Come To A New City Is I Combine: I Say, Well, It's Like Barcelona And Edinburgh, Though I Can't Imagine What That Would Be. But Toronto, The Last Few Times I've Been Here, What Always Comes Up Is Chicago And West Berlin. It's A Big, Sprawling City Beside A Lake, Of A Certain Age And A Certain Architectural Complexity. But The High-end Retail Core Looks More Like West Germany Than The Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street Is Like K-damm. There's An Excess Of Surface Marble And Bronze: It's Germanic And As Pretentious As Pretentious Can Be.

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. That Fascinates Me, Because It Seems To Be Symbolic Of Something Going On In The Culture Itself, And I Also Have A Sort Of Innate Admiration For The Stubbornness It Requires To Actually Make Those Things Physically. It's Become Incredibly Difficult. In North America, We've Largely Forgotten How To Do It.

I Started Writing Short Fiction Very Briefly, As I Imagine Is The Case For Some Novelists.

The Prefix Cyber Is Going The Way Of The Prefix Electro.

She Walked On, Comforted By The Surf, By The One Perpetual Moment Of Beach-time, The Now-and-always Of It.

Generation X Is Dead. It Has Come To Mean Anyone Aged 13 To 55 Years Old.

The Future Is Already Upon Us, It Is Just Unevenly Distributed.

Hollis Thought He Looked Like William Burroughs, Minus The Bohemian Substrate (or Perhaps The Methadone). Like Someone Who'd Be Invited Quail Shooting With The Vice-president, Though Too Careful To Get Himself Shot.

I'm A Reluctant Writer Of Non-fiction, In Part Because I Don't Really Feel Qualified.

Language Is To The Mind More Than Light Is To The Eye.

I Wanted To Make Room For Antiheroes.

Gadgets Are Usually The Last Thing I Think About, And If There's Something New, I'll Get To The Store For The Final Shipment Of The First Generation When It's On Sale. So I Have Last Year's Stuff.

I Think With One Exception I've Never Changed An Opening Sentence After A Book Was Completed.

To The Extent That I Can Still Believe In Bohemia, Which I Think Is Very Important To Me In Some Way That I Don't Yet Really Understand, To The Extent That I Still Believe In That, I Have To Believe That There Are Viable Degrees Of Freedom Inherent If Not Realized In Interstitial Areas.

You Could Have Sex Relatively Comfortably On A Platform Of Books, But Not On A Platform Of Pda.s. Hardcover Books. Paperbacks Might Start Sliding Around. Though I.d Still Prefer Paperbacks To A Pile Of Pda.s.

The Culture Is Still There, And People Are Still Doing It. I Imagine Some People Are Doing It Very Well Indeed. As For Me, It Definitely Was My Native Literary Culture. Science Fiction Was Where I'm From, But On The Way To Now, I Went Through A Lot Of Other Territory, And I Wasn't Really That Culturally Conventional An Sf Writer When I Started.

I've Been Interested In Autism Since I've Known About It, Which Is More Or Less Since I've Been Writing.

The Box Was A Universe, A Poem, Frozen On The Boundaries Of Human Experience.

His Teeth Sang In Their Individual Sockets Like Tuning Forks, Each One Pitch-perfect And Clear As Ethanol.

I Look At [toronto] And Think Well, Perhaps My Grandchildren Will Someday Look At This Stuff With The Sort Of Appreciation I Once Held For Art Deco. Although I've Come To Find Art Deco Quite Creepy Too.

To Some Extent I'm Guilty Of Wishful Thinking. The Absence Of The Interstitial I Find Unbearable.

The Construct Of William Gibson The Writer Is Coming Down, And Become More Open. It's More Of A Glasnost - Transparency! Transparency Is What It Is.

Naps Are Essential To My Process. Not Dreams, But That State Adjacent To Sleep, The Mind On Waking.

I'm Quite Good Friends With The Putative Director, Vincenzo Natali, And I'm A Big Fan Of His Work, But Beyond That, I Don't Like To Talk About Other People's Work Work-in-progress.

I Think That One Of The Visions That Is Closest To Reality Is The Cardboard City In The Subway Station In Tokyo, Which Is Based Very Closely On A Series Of Documentary Photographs Of People Living Like That And Of The Contents Of The Boxes. Those Are Quite Haunting Because Tokyo Homeless People Reiterate The Whole Nature Of Living In Tokyo In These Cardboard Boxes, They're Only Slightly Smaller Than Tokyo Apartments, And They Have Almost As Many Consumer Goods. It's A Nightmare Of Boxes Within Boxes.

Occasionally If I Look Back At Something I've Written I'll Find One Of Those That I Don't Understand, But That's A Bad Thing - The Unconscious Has Dealt Me A Bad Hand.

I Very Seldom Compose Anything In My Head Which Later Finds Its Way Into Text, Except Character Names Sometimes - I'm Often Very Much Inspired By Things That I Misunderstand.

Cyberspace. A Consensual Hallucination Experienced Daily By Billions Of Legitimate Operators, In Every Nation, By Children Being Taught Mathematical Concepts.

Secrets...are The Very Root Of Cool.

I'm Not The Only One: Witness Pokemon! They Still Keep Coming Up With This Stuff That Just Rivets Us In Unexpected Areas.

Futurists Get To A Certain Age And, As One Does, They Suddenly Recognize Their Own Mortality.

When I Began To Write Fiction That I Knew Would Be Published As Science Fiction, [and] Part Of What I Brought To It Was The Critical Knowledge That Science Fiction Was Always About The Period In Which It Was Written.

I'm Often Saddened And Dismayed To See Myself Portrayed As Either A Luddite Or As A Raving Technophile. I've Always Thought That My Job Was To Be As Anthropologically Neutral About Emerging Technologies As Possible.

We Have No Future Because Our Present Is Too Volatile. We Have Only Risk Management. The Spinning Of The Given Moment's Scenarios. Pattern Recognition.

If You’re Fifteen Or So, Today, I Suspect That You Inhabit A Sort Of Endless Digital Now, A State Of Atemporality Enabled By Our Increasingly Efficient Communal Prosthetic Memory. I Also Suspect That You Don’t Know It, Because, As Anthropologists Tell Us, One Cannot Know One’s Own Culture.

Why Shouldn't We Give Our Teachers A License To Obtain Software, All Software, Any Software, For Nothing? Does Anyone Demand A Licensing Fee, Each Time A Child Is Taught The Alphabet?

He Took A Duck In The Face At 250 Knots.

'cyberspace' As A Term Is Sort Of Over. It's Over In The Way That, After A Certain Time, People Stopped Using The Suffix '-electro' To Make Things Cool, Because Everything Was Electrical. 'electro' Was All Over The Early 20th Century, And Now It's Gone. I Think 'cyber' Is Sort Of The Same Way.

I Was Afraid To Watch 'blade Runner' In The Theater Because I Was Afraid The Movie Would Be Better Than What I Myself Had Been Able To Imagine. In A Way, I Was Right To Be Afraid, Because Even The First Few Minutes Were Better.

I Have Friends Who Go [tokyo] Frequently On Business, And It Sounds Interesting. I've Heard That They Have For The First Time Serious Drug Problems.

Upon Arriving In The Capital-f Future, We Discover It, Invariably, To Be The Lower-case Now.

His Smile Was The Nightmare In My Back Pocket.(speaking About Ronald Reagan)

This Perpetual Toggling Between Nothing Being New, Under The Sun, And Everything Having Very Recently Changed, Absolutely, Is Perhaps The Central Driving Tension Of My Work.

"authenticity" Doesn't Mean Much To Me. I Just Want "good", In The Sense Of Well-designed, Well-constructed, Long-lasting Garments. My Interest In Military Clothing Stems From That. It's Not About Macho, Playing Soldiers, Anything Militaristic. It's The Functionality, The Design-solutions, The Durability. Likewise Workwear.

I Like Living In Vancouver .it's More A Matter Of Being A Vancouver Loyalist. Harking Back To What I Said About Growing Up With The Inherent Violence In The Southern U.s., I'm Deeply Enamoured Of, And Entirely Used To Living In A Society With Gun Laws Akin To Those Of A Scandinavian Social Democracy .it's A Good Thing.

I Worry About What We'll Do In The Future, [about The Instantaneous Co-opting Of Pop Culture]. Where Is Our New Stuff Going To Come From?

The 'net Is A Waste Of Time.

The Future Is There... Looking Back At Us. Trying To Make Sense Of The Fiction We Will Have Become.

I Don't Generate A Storyline And Then Fill It Out In The Course Of Writing. The Story Actually Generates In The Course Of The Writing. It's One Of The Reasons I've Never Been Comfortable Doing Screenplays, Because In Order To Get The Contract For The Screenplay, You Have To Sit Down And Tell Them What's Going To Happen.

A Book Exists At The Intersection Of The Author's Subconscious And The Reader's Response.

The Deadliest Bullshit Is Odorless, And Transparent.

The Internet Is Part Of This Ongoing, Species-long Project We've Been Working On Since We Climbed Down Out Of The Trees In The Savanna. We've Been Working On It Without Really Knowing It.

Art Deco For Me Except In Its Most Crazed And Attenuated Forms, It's Jut A Matter Of Taste.

Trending Author

Alberto Manguel

Category