A Slow-Motion Apocalypse

 

science fiction novelist William Gibson

I was reading an old ( 2019) New Yorker and came across an article about William Gibson.  Since I had tried to read his novel Neuromancer many years ago, unsuccessfully, I was curious.

The interview was long and at times so technical sci-fi that I skipped parts of it, but his remarks about our future and present problems did catch my attention.  I am going to cut and paste a few paragraphs here,  being careful to bleep out his many f-bombs and other profanities.

…Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”

…Two years ago, in December of 2017, I e-mailed Gibson to ask if he’d consent to being profiled, since his new novel was to be published that spring. He replied, explaining that the election of Donald Trump had forced him to delay the book. “I’ve had to get an extension,” he wrote. Extrapolating from current events, he had already written into his novel “a nuclear crisis involving Syria, Russia, nato, and Turkey”:But then Trump started bleeping with N Korea, here, so how scary can my scenario be? He keeps topping me, but I think I can handle it in rewrite. And if there’s a nuclear war, at least I won’t have to turn in the manuscript! . . .

…“With each set of three books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the bleepedness quotient of the day,” he explained. “I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how bleeped and how far out the present actually is.” He squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. “It isn’t an intellectual process, and it’s not prescient—it’s about what I can bring myself to believe.”

…In writing “The Peripheral,” he’d been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad bleep” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing and scared the bleep out of me or sort of how I’d always figured things are?”

…After “The Peripheral,” he wasn’t expecting to have to revise the world’s F.Q. “Then I saw Trump coming down that escalator to announce his candidacy,” he said. “All of my scenario modules went ‘beep-beep-beep—super-bleeped, super-bleeped,’ like that. I told myself, Nah, it can’t happen. But then, when Britain voted yes on the Brexit referendum, I thought, Holy bleep—if that could happen in the U.K., the U.S. could elect Trump. Then it happened, and I was basically paralyzed in the composition of the book. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block—that’s, like, a naturally occurring thing. This was something else.”

...Gibson is not a dystopian writer; he aims to see change in a flat, even light. “Every so often—and I bet a lot of people do this but don’t mention it—I have an experience unique in my life, of going, ‘This is so bad—could this possibly be real?’ ” he said, laughing. “Because it really looks very dire. If we were merely looking at the possible collapse of democracy in the United States of America—that’s pretty bleeped. But if we’re looking at the collapse of democracy in the United States of America within the context of our failure to do anything that means bleep about global warming over the next decade . . . I don’t know.” Perched, eagle-like, on his barstool, he swept his hand across the bar. “I’m, like, off the edge of the table.”

Enough!  I'm not sure why I'm posting about this, except that it resonates with my own worries about the future of the world.