Here's a great interview with William Gibson, who is on the road promoting the paperback of his brilliant novel of apophenia run wild, Pattern Recognition (see my review, too).
"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."
And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction – anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future – is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."
(via Futurismic)
