William Gibson Quotes About Science Fiction

Quotes about: Science Fiction

• One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy

  William Gibson

  Crazy, Teenager, Data

• When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

  "The cyberpunk arrives at the present" by Adam Dunn, www.cnn.com. February 4, 2003.

• I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Lazy, Fiction

• I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.

  William Gibson

  Thinking, Giving, Fiction

  "William Gibson on Twitter, Antique Watches and Internet Obsessions". Interview with Geeta Dayal, www.wired.com. September 14, 2012.

• I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

  William Gibson

  Thinking, People, Important

  "William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong". Interview with Geeta Dayal, www.wired.com. September 13, 2012.

• In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

  William Gibson

  Memories, Childhood, Looks

  Source: craphound.com

• It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Belief, Kind

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.

  William Gibson

  Thinking, Imagine, Science Fiction

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

• When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I've found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it.

  William Gibson

  Children, Fiction, Information

• I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.

  William Gibson

  Thinking, Degrees, Fiction

  Interview with Eric Holstein and Raoul Abdaloff, www.actusf.com. March 2008.

• I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

  William Gibson

  Thinking, Important, Fiction

  "William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong". Interview with Geeta Dayal, www.wired.com. September 13, 2012.

• The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.

  William Gibson

  People, Way, Culture

  Interview with Zack Handlen, www.avclub.com. September 7, 2010.

• A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

  William Gibson

  Careers, Two, Labels

• I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.

  William Gibson

  Strong, America, Lists

  Interview with Zack Handlen, www.avclub.com. September 7, 2010.

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