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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.

This is strange on so many levels...sort of pathetic that these are the plot ideas the grandfather of cyberpunk fiction is dreaming up...

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> But then it struck Gibson that he could save his manuscript by creating a future world in the year 2136 — a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election. "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either. Because all of the drivers of the stress we feel today — minus one — would still be very much be present."

I don't see this as a pathetic premise.

>I don't see this as a pathetic premise.

You might agree with the politics of it which could be clouding your vision (I'm not intending that as anyway critical). Sometimes it's helpful to view it from another angle:

Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....

Would you think that was somehow a profound idea? Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work? Wouldn't that come across as hysterical and insulting to the future?

The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.

You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read, a problem which the radio clip obviously didn't remedy. Although in fairness to NPR, it's just radio, it's not exactly the New York Times Book Review.

> The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.

Agency, and its' predecessor The Peripheral, are set both in (a version of, or more precisely multiple versions of) the present day or the very near future, and in the future. There's no way to not take the present day into account. But the politics of Gibson's future are not reminiscent of "MSNBC vs Fox News," if that makes you feel any better.

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with what you are writing about.

>You're not well informed about the book and that makes your comments pretty painful to read

I accept that. But I'm commenting on the article that OP linked which quoted Gibson.

You’re commenting on the plot of a book you haven’t read.

He is working with what was provided. Both of you are correct.

Maybe, but SciFi has always been great at discussing what happens at the time of writing.

> Imagine if back in 2015 I told you my big book idea was set in 2200 and was about a group of renegade patriots who traveled back in time to stop Obama getting elected because 80% of the population had been killed in the FEMA camps he set up....

Isn't that a Harry Turtledove novel, or am I thinking of some other mil-SF writer? It's also similar to the plot of the original Deus Ex game.

> shoehorning politics into my work?

Tom Clancy sold a hundred million novels.

You missed the part where he wrote the bit about the Clinton timeline being written prior to her election. He then had an alternate timeline by accident, and tried to come up with a reason for why his 2017 is different.

And if you’d, oh, I dunno, read the book instead of judging it by its cover you’d understand that the Clinton world is still barreling toward apocalypse because Gibson isn’t a hack and the point is not “if only democrats would save us” but rather “our whole system is built on corruption and will destroy us.”

So your comments make zero sense. Your critique is aimed at an abstract idea of what you think a book should be and has no relation to the text itself.

Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a sci-fi political spy thriller taking place in a very intensified war on terror, with a backstory that Gore was elected president. The alternate history backstory was intended by MacLeod to show that the paranoid milieu and the security state could take place under any president. The difference is that he didn't have an in-universe explanation for the divergence, the sci-fi in the story didn't deal with it.

The future world premise was in his previous book - The Peripheral. With the same characters. So I wonder why the article said he created this future world just to "fix" his story's timeline.

Yeah I thought that was very odd as well; the intersection of the two stubs seemed inevitable. Not like a last minute correction at all. I think the article must be taking him wildly out of context. At the same time, we have this:

"After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either"

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I can only interpret it as: he was writing it as a somewhat happy world, then thought he would need to revise to make it less happy, and then realized that it should never have been happy at all. Which just seems odd, given his style.

That being said, he did discuss a lot of revision due to current events in this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi...

Anyways the whole article is hard to follow, I love me some NPR but this misquote was rough: Gibson is quoted as referring to "an uploaded healing consciousness" whereas if you listen to the audio it is clearly "an uploaded human consciousness", which makes _much_ more sense.

That's the entire point he is trying to express. It's like you just stop reading after the first sentence.

> Or would it strike you as pathetic attempt of me shoehorning politics into my work?

We're talking about William Fucking Gibson here. Next you'll tell me you hate it when Ursula Leguin 'shoehorned politics' into her work.

It's true that Gibson's work is compelling because like all great cyberpunk writers, it grafts real world social, cultural, and political considerations in with his futuristic technology. That said, good world-building doesn't mean the author himself might not have naive or problematic politics. J.K. Rowling's expressed views on Twitter have been an ongoing source of controversy. Or perhaps more relevant, Ray Bradbury in his old age became a staunch supporter of George Bush and the wars waged by his administration:

https://www.salon.com/control/2001/08/29/bradbury_2/

https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&pg=PT192&lpg=...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080521050300/http://anthony.gn...

Sure. Shitty politics in fiction still flies.

Generally speaking, it is good for literature to address political topics, and perhaps even take particular positions on them, but it is a bad idea for literature to address specific real people or specific real instances of those topics, if for no other reason than the specific instance is going to be yesterday's news by the time your book comes out. And addressing specific people is almost always a very petty look; even if you are superficially in the choir being preached at and cheering along in the heat of the moment, the work is almost certainly failing to touch you deeply and you probably won't remember it in a month.

(Even when taking positions, the really good stuff will still make sure than the people on the wrong side have some sort of insight applied to them and some effort to understand them on their own terms, rather than just crafting strawmen of bad people who are bad, who deserve to lose, because they are bad.)

I think if you look back at the good political work, you'll find most of them fit this pattern. I'm sure exceptions exist, but they are not common.

Then again, the Divine Comedy had real (then) still alive people in hell.

Gibson is no Alighieri but the Peripheral was still a great book.

Obama didn't set up killer FEMA camps, Trump is actively encouraging killer climate change. That's the difference. The example you're looking for is something something Heinlein/Card, where awareness of the very real role politics plays in shaping human history is compellingly cast through a conservative prism and not, like... utter nonsense.

>The notion that 120+ years in the future the world will have changed so little that its still follows the same MSNBC vs Fox News script of today borders on hubris.

I'm been watching "The Plot Against America" miniseries and realised that a similar scenario played out in the early 1800's. Imagine a SciFi writer of the time (If such a thing existed) publishing a novel where a time traveller travels back from 2020 to stop the Federalist Hamiltonian conspiracy to bring the U.S back under British rule/Democratic-Republican Jeffersonian conspiracy to enter the war on the side of France and bring the Reign of Terror to America.

It would be 100% political shoehorning of course but people would lap it up all the same.

I would read that now.

William McKinley was assassinated 120 years ago and I wouldn't bat an eye about an alternate timeline story involving that. It put Teddy Roosevelt in the office and probably had a massive effect on our current politics.

But as others have pointed out, Gibson was simply trying to salvage his existing manuscript.

But also, I'm blanking on what 2015 event you're referring to. Do you mean 2005 and Katrina?

in the actual book, Gibson's vision of the future is basically as you describe -- it's extremely weird and alien with little mapping to our current political system. meddling in past timelines is an esoteric hobby for the super-rich.

the Clinton/Trump election is mentioned offhand a handful of times through the book, the protagonists didn't have anything to do with it, and it's just not about that at all.

Gibson's novel is an extrapolation of current events mixed with science. Your proposal is an extrapolation of conspiracy theories.

It's not a pathetic premise, but tying it so closely to a current political event guarantees that it won't age well.

It's a little pathetic in that it's cribbing from the premise of Stephen King's 11/22/63.

I think that's a great premise. A lot of these "alternative history" novels assume that changing just one thing would radically alter the outcome when really they're just changing one aspect of a much larger system.

I've occasionally thought that a good alternative history novel would be one where someone went back to 1930 and assassinated Hitler, only to find that with less insane leadership in the inevitable war (less resources wasted on superweapons and the occult, stalls Russia with diplomacy, doesn't waste resources in Africa) Germany wins the war and unites all of Europe under a fascist regime.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert did that in a more fun way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfU1lYAIlWs

>>[2136 book idea]....a world in which 80 percent of the population has been wiped out by climate change, but also a world where characters time-travel to create an alternate past in which Clinton won the election.

If I was time-traveling back from the far future, I feel like the more relevant inflection point would have been to drop in on the year 2000 and create a past where Gore wins the election.

Not only would that be a more impactful long-term change that would likely have prevented the systemic failures that elevated Trump in the first place, but it would probably be easier to enact. You just need to park a handful of people outside a handful of voting precincts to say "Hey, just so you know this ballot is really badly designed. . ."

No first Black president, though. So we'd have to deal with that.

I'm pretty sure there's a limit in the book as to how far back they can go with the time-travel technology. I think it's something like 100 years but don't remember.

Eh, maybe Colin Powell beats Gore for reelection or wins in 2008.

Have you read the book, or are you relying on literally half of a sentence drawn from an abbreviated blurb summarizing a short radio clip to draw that conclusion?

Makes more sense when you see his twitter feed these days is mostly retweets of political stuff like your uncle on facebook (or... everyone on twitter).

You just can't become the guy who seriously posts political shit on social media all day and spends so much time consumed by the "them bad, we good" faction war.

Have you actually read the book? Or it’s precursor “The Peripheral” which began the development of these concepts.

Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description!

It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.

There is no time travel in The Peripheral or Agency. The future folks figure out how to create a communication channel back to their past, that contact then immediately causing their past's timeline to diverge.

It's actually a brilliant device (not created by WG) because, as he has stated, all sci-fi is really speaking about the "now" of the author who wrote it, in terms of what they believe is possible or probable, whether the author does so consciously or unconsciously.

By presenting alternate timelines where certain major political events occurred differently, Gibson is able to comment on their effects on the "fuckedness quotient" of the moment.

By far, however, his most important message involves his introducing the concept of the "jackpot", which will eventually eclipse his notoriety for having introduced the term "cyberspace" a million years ago.

The jackpot is the sum total devastation we have slow-wrought upon ourselves that leads to more extreme weather and pandemics while providing cover for political groups to form kleptocracies. The term comes from the fact that those with money are always able to profit from change, and that they tend to be rewarded for their brutal competitiveness and ability to leverage any opportunity. And the bigger, the better, therefore a jackpot for them.

What he is really saying is, "The future you are heading for is ugly and is the direct result of the policies we are making right now as entire nations full of unconcerned people."

Then, if you read his work even more deeply, you'll find that what he is really saying is that we will always fuck ourselves up when we make decisions based upon any other reason than a compassionate, thinking heart. It's just that the problems caused by global heating have been brewing since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Thanks for the summary on Gibson's new work. I really needed some clarification because I couldn't really get a sense of the plot in this one (Agency). The characters don't really have an impact on anything...They do nothing in particular except move around to/from various locations, focusing on the aesthetic detail of their surroundings, more than driving the story forward (What would a new Gibson novel be without mention of Japanese denim?). I suppose since most of the characters that make up our present (stub device) are being strung along by the stub masters from the future, that they really have no idea of what's going on/ or at stake. That's understandable, but apparently in the future, stubs are created and manipulated to the whims of their admins and aren't really important, but rather as a 'hobby'. Makes the whole struggle to 'fix' our stub seem kind of pointless.

Yeah, reading The Peripheral first is essential IMO, just like watching Star Wars is necessary before The Empire Strikes Back.

And who doesn't want Otaku denim made on heirloom looms ;-)

Personally, as a software craftsman, I appreciate anyone who dedicates themself to craftsmanship. Japan seems to have a great deal of very dedicated craftspeople (NHK Online videos rule!), and Gibson is definitely a word- and idea-smith, Otaku-grade.

[[And because people need things to watch nowadays, our family personally loves NHK Online's shows 'Design Talks Plus' and 'Trails to Oishii Tokyo', as well as Grand Sumo. We find them fascinating glimpses into a very different culture, one that seems to honor craftsmanship in a way we, as Americans, find beautiful.]]

As to the characters not having 'an impact on anything', that's really how it's always been, unless you're a part of the klept. The only question is, "How you developed yourself in your lifetime to fight oppression and seek to uplift the most disadvantaged?" Because, if you don't, you're just a poorer version of the callous bastards that run the power organizations that do have an effect, effects that have, for example, facilitated global heating for short-term profit at the expense of the rest of us and our heirs.

[ETA: To see the klept in action, check out the parallel HN story about Bloomberg killing reporting on CCP officials getting wealthy in office.]

agree the premise is really quite pathetic, you have a plot where people travel 100+ years in the past to try to get .... Hillary Clinton elected??? I much better idea would be to have gotten Al Gore elected instead, I think history would have been very different in the 2000's/2010's, think no trillion+ wars in the middle east, possibly no financial crisis, no tsa or patriot act, the change for the past 2 decades would be profound and make for a much more interesting story, also prb why I haven't read Gibson since the pattern recognition trilogy.

That's not the premise of the book at all. First, there's no time travel. Secondly, the plot is set after Clinton is elected.

> "After giving that only a few hours' thought, I realized that the world in which Hillary won wouldn't be a happy world either."

It took him hours to realize a Hillary presidency wouldn't have been a utopia?

Is giving his sentence the least possible charitable reading to make a quip a good use of your time, or anyone else's?

That’s a pretty uncharitable assumption to make regarding one of the better authors of modern times.

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