William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity's future was that it wasn't going to have one at all. We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: "Hey, look — you do have a future. It's kind of harsh, but here it is." I wasn't going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

You're talking about nuclear devastation. But couldn't global warming accomplish pretty much the same thing?

Global warming is very different. It's not "don't push the button." It's "quit doing internal combustion — the shit you have been doing for the past 400 years is coming back to bite you on the ass, big time."

In the past ten years, we've seen incredible advances in nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Does any of it amaze you?

My assumption has always been that at some point we would lock on to a literally exponential increase in human knowledge. That was my best guess, somewhere back in the Seventies. There hasn't been anything that made me sit back and say, "Golly, I would never have imagined that." The aspects of recent history that have caused me to do that have been, in every case, manifestations of retrograde human stupidity.

How do you mean?

It's been an extraordinarily painful decade or so. I just never in my wildest dreams could have imagined that it could get as fucked up as this guy [George Bush]. It still amazes me how dumb so much of our species can manage to be. But that's kind of like being amazed at life.

Does any of it scare you? A new synthetic life form or nanobot running amok?

That could happen. It could all go to gray goo. But it just isn't in my nature to buy a lot of canned food and move to Alaska and try to escape the gray goo.

The world of ultracool techno gadgets you envisioned pretty much came true. Does it make you feel satisfied to look at, say, an iPod Nano now?

I just take it for granted. When I was envisioning the future, one of the things I was sure of was that consumer technology would look really cool. I just knew these postindustrial artifacts would be stunningly slick — they would have to be in order to compete with the other guy's postindustrial artifacts.

The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn't move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!

When you coined the word "cyberspace," did you envision that the term might be your lasting legacy?

Not at all. I thought the book would be despised to the extent that it wasn't ignored. Now, on a good day, my career seems so utterly unlikely that I wonder if I'm not about to snap out of a DMT blackout and discover that I'm not actually a famous writer of William Gibson novels but that I'm working at a used-book shop that smells of cat pee and drinking beer out of a cracked coffee mug.