I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
Interpretation
The present often mirrors the uncertainties of the future, causing anxiety.
William Gibson's quote reflects on the idea that the challenges and fears people face in the present moment can often feel extraordinarily similar to what they anticipate facing in the future. It suggests that rather than looking forward, the current state of life is already filled with enough complexity and fear that it can be daunting enough on its own.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming fear and anxiety.
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.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
It is impossible for us, who live in the latter ages of the world, to make observations in criticism, morality, or in any art or science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us but to represent the common sense of mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights.
Terrorism fuels itself from all kinds of illicit trafficking: drugs, weapons, human beings.
While we wait for life, life passes
The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
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