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By Tony Hallett, 6 August 2007 13:16

COMMENT

I'm very excited today. Making the journalist's mistake of being a fan (I think I'm allowed to on this occasion), I'm excited because today we've published what I can say with complete bias is a cracking interview with sci-fi legend William Gibson.

The man has to be among my top five favourite modern-day authors*. I won't go as far as to say he's what got me interested in technology. Or that I'm the world's biggest sci-fi nut.

But when I started reading his books years ago - I wasn't there at the beginning but first picked up Neuromancer (dodgy title, that) in the early 1990s - I was bowled over by the picture of the future he painted and the hard-boiled style. Cyber-punk had been born and other sci-fi authors I would come to like, people like Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson, were a natural progression from Gibson.

But what did he tell us? He was interviewed by our news editor, Steve Ranger, a man who has studied sci-fi classics probably more than any person should have. He wasn't going to have the wool pulled over his eyes.

We should say upfront Gibson has a new book to plug. But he was a good sport, only too happy to talk about his past and where in that past he got our future wrong.

Take mobile phones. Gibson told us: "If I were a smart 12-year-old picking up Neuromancer for the first time today, I'd get about 20 pages in and I'd think 'Ahhaa I've got it - what happened to all the cell phones? This is a high-tech future in which cellular telephony has been banned'."

And maybe unsurprisingly he finds the future a place that's harder than ever to predict. His last book, Pattern Recognition, was set in the present day. It was decent but not a classic. Could it be that I know the present better than Gibson? It's an absurd sentence to write, about any two people. But it understandably felt dated almost straight away. Nothing dates as fast as technology.

But Gibson still has faith in it. "Most societal change now is technologically driven, so there's no way to look at where the human universe is going without looking at the effect of emergent technology," he said.

I agree, I think.

He has famously been interviewed in Second Life and on that virtual world he isn't short of opinions either. (Who is?) But his comment raised an eyebrow or two in Silicon Towers.

"Very occasionally, I'll see on the street someone who looks as though they have escaped from Second Life. There are people who look all too much like Second Life avatars and I don't know if they were there before or whether I just hadn't noticed them," he said.

But I haven't done his thinking justice. Check out the full William Gibson interview here.

*For the record, after some thought, my other four are: Paul Auster, James Ellroy, Ian McEwan and Armistead Maupin. Which I've just realised is a fair mix.