Gibson on Gibson, the fleeting nature of futurism and “Transmetropolitan”
From a post about Second Life on William Gibson’s blog:
“The thing that’s going to be quaint about “cyberspace” (that already is, really) is the inherent assumption that it’s a realm unto itself; that it’s in any way elsewhere or other.
Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.”
I think this is why I was sort of lukewarm on some of Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, which is almost universally acclaimed as brilliant. He’s right. “Cyberspace” as imagined by Gibson, the 90s TV series “VR5″ and movie “Hackers,” even Max Headroom does now almost seem quaint.
We’re not far enough away from it to see it as skull-splittingly on point or just slightly off in a way that is weird and wonderful like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. We’re just far enough away from it to see these ideas about Cyberspace, the Internet and how it would work, this sort of futurism as weird and sort of harmless but not particularly exciting. It probably did seem terribly exciting in the 1980s — but Gibson’s dead on about futurism having a shorter shelf life these days.
When you live in a world that uses up the future this fast, can you possible produce near-future sci-fi fast enough?
I think about Warren Ellis’ political sci-fi comic series Transmetropolitan sometimes, and the way in which it presaged a journalistic environment that is increasingly a reality - the print product becoming less and less important, reporters producing content primarily for the Internet using sound, pictures and video they gather themselves. People subscribing to “feeds” in order to get the news and entertainment they want. The more fantastic bits of the series’ world have yet to develop (people downloading themselves into microscopic computer viruses, smokers taking “trait” pills that keep them safe from cancer) but the world itself seems to be coming true all around us. I rarely do anything in my capacity as a journalist now without thinking about the Internet, multimedia, what I’d do with it if it was a blog post rather than a news story, what bloggers who don’t have my constraints might do with it, etc. We’re terrifyingly close to realizing the strangest dreams of science fiction writers every five or ten year.
Of course, good writers will continue to surprise and shock us in ways we can’t possibly see coming. Ellis himself is releasing his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, this year. Next year we’ll see his second. I keep wishing that HBO would pick up Transmet as a television series and do it right. Maybe if Preacher is a success there, they will. There does seem to be an awful lot of sci-fi on the pop culture landscape all of a sudden.
