Author of the week: William Gibson

last updated 8 January 2015

For a science-fiction novelist, William Gibson is oddly reluctant to be called a prophet, said Mike Doherty in Salon.com. The man who coined the term “cyberspace” in a 1982 short story claims that even his most prescient visions have always been merely riffs on his own close observations of the present. Gibson’s first nonfiction book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, is a collection of essays he’s written over the years featuring just such observations. The work helped him, he says, when he became concerned about losing touch, worrying that “my yardstick of absolute quotidian weirdness was actually an ’80s yardstick.” At 63, he now feels refreshed. “If I want to write something set in a future rigorously imagined from this incomprehensibly strange and complex world we now live in, I’ve taken the measurement.”

Odd as it sounds, Gibson may have learned to see the future because he once glimpsed the past, said Jesse Hicks in TheVergeâ€‹.com. “My experience of growing up in the South in the early ’60s was one of living in a place unevenly established in the present,” says the author, who was raised in Virginia. “You could look out one window and see the 20th century, then look out another window and see the 19th.” The experience proved useful. “If you only have one eye, you don’t have depth perception. If you’re able to look at things with one eye in the 21st century and the other eye in the 20th century, or possibly even the late 19th, it provides a kind of perspective.”