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Comment by o-mo-ka-saaaay | Hacker News Reader

I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it. It’s like they expected God had made it so that America would be the leader in techno culture evolution. It would be endearing if it weren’t for their impotent rage response to enable fascism for their own ends.

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> I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it.

Gibson's novels predicted Asian ascendency (insomuch as you can have ascendency in a dystopia). Through a quirk of the time period in which they were written they happened to present it as emanating from Japan rather than China.

Asian superpowers feature so heavily in the genre that it's a cliche. Also Ballard was British.

...And he grew up in Shanghai, China

I see it more a reflection of the degree to which America was foundational to programming and internet culture. So in a sense America did beat them to it, even if they might eventually surpass America they are still operating in a technical culture that the US created.

J.G. Ballard was not an American. He grew up in China and spent most of his life in the UK. He has a very subtle British sensibility to a lot of his work.

Isn’t Gibson Canadian?

Nope, he fled the draft there from South Carolina*. He has been there since '67 though.
He appears in an old CBC documentary about the Yorkville neighborhood and the hippies there from then.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122

*ETA: Whoops I just realized he was born in SC, but he grew up in Virginia. So THAT'S where he fled to Toronto from.

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