Audio By Carbonatix
Sci-fi author William Gibson has a reputation as a prognosticator of the future. His debut novel Neuromancer portrayed the Internet’s takeover of everyday life a decade and a half before it happened, establishing the gritty cyberpunk genre and influencing creators from Billy Idol to the Wachowskis. When it comes to his supposed predictive abilities, though, Gibson is skeptical. “When you historically look at science fiction, most of it’s about how they got it wrong,” he says.
But even if his imaginary futures never come true, few science-fiction authors have shown the kind of willingness to engage with the issues of the present that Gibson has. In his latest work, The Peripheral, he extrapolates our hyperconnected present to two futures in which drone-war veterans struggle with combat trauma and remote-control bodies let people interact without ever leaving the house. Put together, it’s a tale that says as much about the world we live in as what may be coming.
“Whatever anxieties I have about technology aren’t new,” says Gibson. “My anxieties with any emergent technology are, what’s the worst thing anybody could do with that, and who’s going to do it first? And that would have been as useful any time in the last thousand years as it is now.”
Gibson will read from and sign The Peripheral at the Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue, starting at 7 p.m. tonight. For more information, go to tatteredcover.com.
Mon., Nov. 3, 7 p.m., 2014
