[deletia.]

priestessofnothing:

“In your first novel, Neuromancer, you paint a very internal, hermetic vision of the future, which was at odds with the grand, “space opera” version of science fiction. That is the future we’re getting, though. With the US space program being downsized and unmanned—the narratives of our future seem to be far less “out there” than they are earth-bound, and increasingly internal.

I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F—it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well. When I wrote Neuromancer, I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense I intended Neuromancer, among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

As I was writing it (…) —my guide was to just do the opposite to what I assumed traditional science fiction would do. I stuck with that, thereafter, and eventually brought it back to the present. I think I’m actually still doing the same thing.

How do you think younger people today think about the future? Do they think about the future at all? Is there a disappointment among those who once thought in a big way about the future?

I’m not going all Sex Pistols, shouting No Future!—I’m suggesting that we’re becoming more like Europeans, who have always retrofitted their ruins, who’ve always known that everyone lives in someone else’s future and someone else’s past. It’s the American aspect of futurism that, as I understand it, was for a very long time to assume that there was more space over the next rise where you could go and build an entirely new future. That was America’s experience as a growing country. If things didn’t work out, you moved West. There was a seemingly infinite amount of unsettled land that we had. People supposedly moved West out of their inevitable discontent with how things were going where they happened to be living.

Whether or not that was historically true I don’t know, but we carried that idea into our vision of the future, and it acquired its capital F around the beginning of the 20th century and held onto it until maybe sometime in the ’70s. It was still very capital F in the ’60s. At some point the blush went off it a bit, and we’ve been entertaining a different sort of future since then.”