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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the challenges and mistakes in predicting the future through science fiction.
William Gibson emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the fallibility of our predictions about the future as presented in vintage science fiction. He admits to frequently misjudging the direction of technological and societal developments, yet understands this is an inherent part of the creative process in writing speculative fiction.
In practice
In a speech about the evolution of technology, I might quote this to highlight the difficulty in predicting advancements.
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.
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 don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
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.
Some of the hydrogen in your body comes from the Big Bang, and when you see a kid walking down the street with a helium balloon, you can say, 'There goes some of the primordial universe.'
No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.
We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind.
They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.
Science tells us more and more now that there is a strong connection between emotional well-being and health outcomes, and that you can proactively cultivate emotional well-being through relatively simple practices like sleep, social connection and meditation.
What we want is scientists who don't become part of the policy discussion: All they do is produce science. If someone becomes an advocate, then I won't pay as much attention to their science.
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