William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview

It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

What are the major challenges we face?

Let's go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag.

Is there a downside to that blended reality? Or could it represent a change for the better?

People worry about the loss of individual privacy, but that comes with a new kind of unavoidable transparency. Eventually we're going to know everything that every twenty-first-century politician has ever done. It will be very hard for politicians and governments to keep secrets. The whole thing is porous. We just haven't really figured out quite how porous it is.

How would you define the current moment? In your most recent novel, "Spook Country," the pervasive sensation is that the times are fraught.

Fraught? [Laughs] Fraught is very good. I was going to quote Fredric Jameson about living in the simultaneous apprehension of dread and ecstasy, but I've already done that today. Yep. Fraught. Period.