[LINK] "Changing science fiction, changing the world"

[rfmcdonald]

Via io9 I came across Scholars and Rogues' Samuel Smith's essay on William Gibson.

Smith makes a simple argument:

I have been known to say that William Gibson is arguably the most important author of the past 30 years. That’s a mouthful of an assertion, especially since we’re talking about a genre writer, I know. But even if I’m wrong, I’m not off by much. The man who more or less invented Cyberpunk, then abandoned it as quickly as he defined it, did more than simply alter the direction of science fiction, he literally helped shape the computing and Internet landscape as we know it today. That’s pretty big doings for a guy who had never so much as played with a computer before he wrote his first novel.

I'm inclined to agree with Smith's twofold argument, that Gibson's writing, by imagining cyberspace, helped create cyberspace and the modern infosphere, and that Gibson's particular approach to science fiction was pioneering.

It’s sometimes worth remembering that those who architected the earliest of Europe’s great cathedrals had never been in anything quite so grand as what they dreamed of. DaVinci designed all kinds of machinery for which the world in which he lived offered no precedent whatsoever. And while MTV has evolved into something of a disappointment, in its early days it was relentlessly innovative. How did they do it? Well, the story goes that they went out of their way to hire people with no experience because they didn’t want the channel to be defined by people who knew “how it was done.” Innovation, in their view, was boosted when people didn’t realize what wasn’t possible.

We now know that a generation of computer engineers and designers, the people who literally built the Internet, envisioned the Web, dreamed the future of personal computing and gaming, many of these people had read Gibson and his imagination, unencumbered by the text-based limitations of the Commodore 64, served as an important resource as they set about crafting the electronic world in which we now live.

And:

In 1950, the state of science was such that it was relatively simple to distinguish between what was possible and what was impossible – that is, between the present and the future. But Gibson understood that the future was gaining, as it were. As the curve describing technological advance grew more and more vertical, the lag time between today and tomorrow was shrinking.

Gibson addressed this dynamic in a couple of ways. First off, he abandoned technical plausibility. You can read the Cyberspace Trilogy backward and forward as many times as you like and you’ll not find any of the standard trappings of Hard SF. This was most decidedly not your father’s Asimov. He described how cyberspace looked and his writing certainly put you in the cockpit as Case approached that mountain of black ice, but he didn’t much care if you understood the nuts and bolts of how it all worked. It was Internet sci-fi without any coding whatsoever.

Instead, Gibson devoted his attentions to cultural plausibility. You might not know how a cyberdeck worked, but you had a pretty clear sense of how the politics and the economy were set up. Black and gray markets and DIY economies emerging from the poverty of the streets? Check. Rampant urban sprawl? Check. Uber-powerful corporations that answered to no government? Check. Ultra-rich who weren’t quite human anymore? Check. Gibson made no secret about how he constructed his all-too-likely future world: he took what he saw around him and exaggerated a bit in the direction things seemed to be moving. In doing so, he blazed a path that every decent SF/SpecFic author today is following.