I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
Interpretation
The present often mirrors the uncertainties of the future, causing anxiety.
William Gibson's quote reflects on the idea that the challenges and fears people face in the present moment can often feel extraordinarily similar to what they anticipate facing in the future. It suggests that rather than looking forward, the current state of life is already filled with enough complexity and fear that it can be daunting enough on its own.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming fear and anxiety.
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
I was sentenced to life plus 30 years by an all-White jury. What I saw in prison was wall-to-wall Black flesh in chains. Women caged in cells. But we're the terrorists. It just doesn't make sense.
That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.
I consider the difference between a system founded on _x000D_ the legislatures only, and one founded on the people, to be the true difference between a league or treaty and a constitution.
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
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