William Gibson Talks About His New Book, “Spook Country”
When I discovered my dad’s William Gibson books as a teenager, my view of reality and the possibilities to come in our technology-infused culture was forever changed. His vision of a net-connected world and the information black market it thus created spoke to me on a deep level. It has been interesting to see current culture catch up with his prophetic visions, while at the same time his books have moved backwards in time to the point where he now writes about the present. It seems a telling characteristic of our time that science fiction, once the harbinger of things to come, has now reached a point where it can only struggle to explain the character of the present, accelerating so rapidly that only the eyes of prescient futurists can make any attempt to take true stock of the changing world we now move through so rapidly. Such is the case with Gibson’s latest, “Spook Country,” an examination of America post-911 as only William Gibson could tell it.
A statement Gibson makes in the video below again reminds me that as unnatural and destructive a force humanity can appear to be, there is no escaping the fact that we are still, in fact, a force of nature. Or even, humanity is nothing more than another aspect of the force that is nature. From the viewpoint of an animal species moving through evolution, perhaps this point in human history is really not so strange. All through the fossil record we can see evidence of species mutating from one drastically different form to another, often with little clue about the changes that must have occurred in between. Perhaps it is a common, even necessary character of this evolutionary march that after a long period of slight, gradual changes, a drastic, new species-creating leap must occur to herald the arrival of the next branch in the forever expanding tree of life that traces life’s continuous march towards ever more complex forms on this bounteous planet earth. Gibson seems to say as much in the following statement from the video below, detailing his own perspective on “the singularity.”
Technology will eventually take us to a point where something will change so much that beyond that point we won’t be able to recognize any of it at all and whatever is left of us, of our species beyond that point, won’t recognize us as being the same species.
See the video below for the quote and Gibson explaining a bit of the plot and inspiration for his eagerly awaited, “Spook Country.”
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that video made me realize that i need a WAY better office chair.
i mean…. among a slew of other things that it made me realize.
like where’s the coyright boundary on collaborative fiction-writing? if there even IS such a thing. i wonder if he uses disclaimer text on his forums as fancy as his office furniture.
damn, i want that chair.