William Gibson: The Rolling Stone interview

The 40th Anniversary ish of Rolling Stone contains an excellent interview with William Gibson, conducted by Salon's Andrew Leonard.

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi…

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity's future was that it wasn't going to have one at all. We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: "Hey, look – you do have a future. It's kind of harsh, but here it is." I wasn't going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Link

See also:
William Gibson's Spook Country
Original proposal for William Gibson's Spook Country
William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present