Be Here Now

"'I found the material of the actual 21st century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary 21st century could ever have been,' [William Gibson] writes. 'And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted.'
     Gibson gets plenty of opportunities to use that same toolkit throughout Distrust That Particular Flavor, a smattering of articles for magazines such as Wired, Rolling Stone and Time, as well as introductions for other people’s books and more texts for talks. With the oldest selections here dating to the late 1980s, the book also charts a part of Gibson’s career that he has been somewhat reluctant to acknowledge, having been 'uncharacteristically strict' with himself about deviating from his mission as a writer of fiction. As Gibson explains in the introduction, these assignments represented a form of transgression, of 'doing something I secretly felt I probably shouldn’t quite be doing.'"
— Jason Anderson, The Globe and Mail
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