Interesting interview/article.
William Gibson on the apocalypse: “it’s been happening for at least 100 years”
For four decades, the inventor of cyberpunk has described near futures that have seemed uncannily well judged. What’s worrying about his latest novel is that it gives a credible account of the end of the world.
Science fiction writers are made to seem prescient by confirmation bias: with time, almost any imagined future can be said to have come true. Take the pulp space opera
Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, in which an inept, “babbling” protagonist called Boris Johnson goes to war against a technocratic transnational government. It sounds like a satire of the present but it was written, in earnest, in 1967.
The American speculative fiction author William Gibson has said that sci-fi writers are “almost always wrong”, but over the course of a dozen acclaimed novels, Gibson himself has proven he has a gift for describing the present in terms of where it’s headed. His fame as a writer was established by his insight that much of our future would be played out in representative space, the not-there place to which people go when they stare at a computer screen – a realm he called, in the 1982 short story “Burning Chrome”, “cyberspace”. In the age of the smartphone this may seem obvious, but that story and Gibson’s first novel,
Neuromancer, were written on a Hermes 2000 typewriter from the 1930s. The first website was almost a decade away, and no one he knew had a personal computer.
In another short story (“Johnny Mnemonic”, 1981) he described, 17 years before Google was founded, an “information economy” in which “it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information… that can be retrieved, amplified”. In 1996, 14 years before Instagram launched, he described in his novel
Idoru a future in which “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”.
Considering this record, it might be worrying to learn that Gibson’s latest novel,
Agency, is largely a credible account of a coming apocalypse. His characters call it “the Jackpot”. “It’s multi-causal, and it’s of extremely long duration,” he explains. Over many decades, climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors – “I’ve never really had the heart to make up a full list, else I’ll depress myself” – deplete the human race by 80 per cent.
The Jackpot is the mundane cataclysm of modernity itself. It is hundreds of millions of people driving to the supermarket in their SUVs, flying six times a year, and eating medicated animals for dinner. “If the Jackpot is going to happen,” Gibson says, “it’s already happening. It’s been happening for at least 100 years.”
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/william-gibson-apocalypse-it-s-been-happening-least-100-years