The Paris Review has at long-last run its amazing interview with William Gibson on the Web. I’ve read a lot of interviews with Gibson and even conducted some, and this is one of the finer ones. I love his writing practice (“start with a sentence; don’t have a shopping list of things”), but I think if I revised manuscripts as I went along I would never, ever finish. Here he is on the future:
It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.
My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.
Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson
(via IO9)