![]() 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”. The first website was almost a decade away, and no one he knew had a personal computer. 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. 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”. ![]() 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. ![]() It sounds like a satire of the present but it was written, in earnest, in 1967. 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. Science fiction writers are made to seem prescient by confirmation bias: with time, almost any imagined future can be said to have come true. ![]()
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