All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers' existence during the time the fiction was written. Therefore science fiction has rarely predicted with any accuracy, save through coincidence or extremely will-informed suppositions a la Verne or Wells, the specifics of the future that ensues, post-publication. (Where do you park your atomic-powered lawnmower?) Sometimes, however - who can say how the spark catches fire, how the fish manages to live on land - it turns out to exactly, mysteriously, capture the spirit. In Neuromancer Gibson first apprehended, as no one else had, what I believe shall prove to be the shape of things to come; he saw the writing on the wall, the blood in the sky, the warning in the entrails. Saw the mind beneath the mirror-shades, as it were, and what that mind would be capable, or incapable, of thinking. Saw the substance disguised in style. What if someone, in the spring of 1914, had stood in the center of Berlin, foresaw in a vision the philosophies and worldviews capable of provoking the events for which the twentieth century would be most remembered, and then went off and wrote it all down? Now let's be Heisenbergian and ask: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?

• literature
• existence
• time
• science fiction
• future
• writing
• worldview
• prophecy