Nearly four decades ago, William Gibson published a short story called Burning Chrome in Omni magazine, and with it, he birthed cyberpunk. (It also coined the term cyberspace in its third sentence.) The story prefigured Neuromancer, Gibsons first novel and most enduring achievement. Burning Chrome taught its readers how to think about the colorless nonspace between our screens. In this weeks issue of The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman the ideas editor of the magazines website spends a lot of time with the author for a profile, and he elegantly lays out the roots of his fiction in a long, textured piece.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Rothman finds that, for Gibson, writing plausible futures begins with a deep engagement with the present. His trilogies he tends to write novels in threes are all responding to the world he finds himself living in.

With each set of three books, Ive commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day, he explained. I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is. He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. It isnt an intellectual process, and its not prescientits about what I can bring myself to believe.

Some other fascinating details: Gibson loves techwear, the functional, futuristic, quasi-military clothing you see everywhere from Tokyo to San Francisco. He and his wife, Deborah, have a large cat named Biggles. He has some real expertise in watches.

Whats most striking about Rothmans profile, though, is the way it delineates Gibsons ongoing attachment to (and relationship with) the zeitgeist. I found it particularly instructive when Rothman detailed a realization Gibson had about the internet about how cyberspace has begun to change the physical world. Heres Rothman:

In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward no service zones of disconnectivity had become our There. Checking his Vancouver bank balance from an A.T.M. in Los Angeles struck him suddenly as spooky. It didnt matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape.

Everything, in other words, has become a search term a portal through which you can access, immediately and nearly everywhere, the sum total of human knowledge on any subject. The meditation ends with Gibson telling Rothman hed learned about the planes hitting the World Trade Center from a forum he frequented.

Theres no question that we live in a version of Gibsons richly imagined cyberscapes: our present has been incontrovertibly influenced by the stories hes been telling us for the last forty-odd years. But at the same time, theres also no question that things feel like theyre accelerating to a conclusion thats still hard to make out.

Near the end of the piece, Rothman, Gibson, and one of his friends, the author Jack Womack, go out for dinner at a bistro in Manhattan and think about the state of play across the globe.

What I find most unsettling, Gibson said, is that the few times that Ive tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I cant. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstratedI try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. Its a really grim feeling. He paused. Ive been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And Ive started to think that maybe I wont be able to.

Womack nodded. My daughters sixteen and a half, he said. Sixty years from now, shell be in her mid-seventies. I have absolutely no idea what the physical world will be like then. What the changes will be.

Its totally new, Gibson said. A genuinely new thing.

And it does seem that way. It does all seem new; living in the here and now feels like nothing Ive ever felt outside of science fiction. But thats temporary. In the future, well know how we should have felt about this particular present.

Go read the piece over at The New Yorkers website, or, if youre feeling analog, pick up a physical copy of this weeks issue at your nearest newsstand.

See the article here:

Go read this New Yorker profile of William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk - The Verge