Chris’s Reviews > Distrust That Particular Flavor > Status Update

'The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or touch.'

'history...is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries'

'If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don’t mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.'

'A fashionably dressed man in Floral Street, outside Paul Smith, was the first headset-equipped cellphone user I ever mistook for a talkative madman'

Gibson fails to predict the great firewall: 'Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo out of straying local hands going to allow access to the geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is becoming? More important, will denial of such access, in the coming century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the dumbest of policemen?'

'Singapore is curiously, indeed gratifyingly devoid of certain aspects of creativity. I say gratifyingly because I soon found myself taking a rather desperate satisfaction in any evidence that such a very tightly run ship would lack innovative élan', Wired, 1993

On collective media, 'the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system capable of surviving the death of the individual - perhaps even of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema.'

'This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work' Dead man sings, Forbes, 1998

'all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation'

"... imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the author might think, about the day in which they're written. Orwell knew it, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, and I knew it, writing Neuromancer, my first novel, which was published in 1984"