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When I look back at all the books of fiction that I’ve read, there’s a few that absolutely stand out as being totally congruent with me personally and my developing worldview. Of course, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is right at the top of the list.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Neal Stephensen’s Snow Crash stand out dog-eared and above the boxes and shelves countless Bruce Sterling, Phillip K. Dick’s, Isaac Asimov, Verner Vinge, Carl Sagan, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson novels.

But I still remember reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a junior in high school in 1987 and thinking, “This is cool. This is a world I could live in! This world will exist one day.”

This is the book that really started it all for me. Why I do what I do. Sure, a snowball effect. But a tremendous connection was made in my personality that I didn’t know existed.

This is the book that led to a ‘couple hundred other books being read…and I believe this book led to the Web as we know it. Minimally, we owe the Matrix movies to William!

“They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.” - Neuromancer

Neuromancer went on to win all three major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award. I didn’t know then how much recognition it would receive. I just knew that my love for technology how it impacts human social behavior OK someday in the not to distant future. That this guy Bruce Sterling was not a writer of fiction…he was a seer…a social economist…a person with a gift to follow trajectory within the human spirit and paint a vivid photo of where we’re all headed.

So it was with some dismay that I caught this quote from William Gibson (thanks Bruno Giussani, you have the best del.iciou.us feed on the planet right now IMHO):

“The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.”

Should we be troubled by this? Is there a new class of science fiction writers ready to take this task up? What’s next? Should we be scared that when our best science fiction writer gives up we’re in trouble? Is this DOOMSDAY? hahahaHA!