Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the dual nature of being a science writer; it involves both imaginative dreaming and grounded realism.
William Gibson highlights the role of science writers in envisioning new ideas and concepts (dreaming), while also acknowledging the necessity of realism in their work. This reflects the balance between creativity and practicality within the field of science communication, suggesting that writers must engage their imagination while remaining anchored in factual reality.
In practice
In a seminar about science communication, one might use this quote to illustrate the balance needed between creativity and factual reporting.
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 don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
Many, and some of the most pressing, of our terrestrial problems can be solved only by going into space. Long before it was a vanishing commodity, the wilderness as the preservation of the world was proclaimed by Thoreau. In the new wilderness of the Solar System may lie the future preservation of mankind.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,_x000D_ _x000D_ First strip off all her equipage of Pride,_x000D_ _x000D_ Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,_x000D_ _x000D_ Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,_x000D_ _x000D_ Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain_x000D_ _x000D_ Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.
It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science ... simply because it deals with quantities... As the complete theory of almost every other science involves the use of calculus, so we cannot have a true theory of Economics without its aid.
It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.
I love science fiction. There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that.
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