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I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

William Gibson

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William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
Think
Thinking
Predictive
Capacity
Fiction
Least
Science
Important
Thing

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There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.
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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.
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Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.
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Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
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Things aren't different. Things are things.
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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.
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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.
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The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed.
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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.
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I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.
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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.
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I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
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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.
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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.
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I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.
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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.
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Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
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