William Gibson Has a Theory About Our Cultural Obsession With Dystopias

By Abraham Riesman Vulture (devouring culture)

All week long, Vulture is exploring how dystopias have been imagined in popular culture.

Few authors have crafted more vividly realized future worlds than William Gibson. In timeless classics such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, he dreamed up environments filled with fantastical technology and innovative social arrangements. Those works are often held as seminal works of modern dystopian literature, but in his latest outing, Gibson explores the past, too.