I’m really interested in science fiction as a predictor of technologies. As Paul Saffo remarked in his (highly recommended) Long Now speech, science fiction starts “meme bombs” in the minds of teenagers. These bombs detonate when they’re in a position to do something about them – usually when they are going through a midlife crisis soon after they reach 40.

If you Google on the term “science faction” you’ll find a rich sampling of material that refers to this (meme bombs that is, not midlife crises).

So when the opportunity came to put a question to William Gibson – the originator of a science fiction genre called ‘cyber-punk’ – I was interested to know his views on the extent to which science fiction is an indicator of the future. His response (in part) was as follows:

“I don’t actually see science fiction influencing the future much now […] Science fiction was a big part of the culture of our future in the previous century but the previous century was a century where we actually believed we had a future. We took it for granted that we had a future and in the 21st century we can’t take it for granted in the same way that we have a future.”

Gibson then goes on to talk about how if he went into a publishers office in 1981 – the year he started writing – and proposed a novel based on the destabilisation of Earths weather systems, AIDs, terrorists flying planes into buildings in New York and the USA invading the wrong country – they would have said “too much!”

He makes the point that actually the world is much more complex than this, and

“…we don’t have the luxury of dreaming of a Star Trek future because we have too much ‘how do we get there from here’ going on to make that realistically possible. You can still do that kind of science fiction but it require far too much wishful thinking to convince me.”

You can download the entire William Gibson interview here.

(As an aside he says a similar comment in this Rolling Stone interview)