Friday, October 31, 2014

the end of atemporality?

Atemporal no more, Bill? After three novels set in the present William Gibson returns to the Future with a capital "F"  with his new novel The Peripheral. Two different futures, in fact -  one quite near and another further ahead.

William Gibson interviewed by Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy, the Los Angeles Times's book blog, 

This is a surprising turnabout given that the Future was a concept he had decreed kaput, finito, all done with, only a few years ago.  Indeed he'd pretty much derided futurism and the cult of the New as passé and uncool -  only for the old-fashioned, those not nimble enough to keep up *.

Yet he himself was -perhaps still is - a neophiliac, a novelty-junkie, judging by this bit from Kellogg's interview:


Anything, everything feeds his imagination. He used to buy magazines in volume, hundreds of dollars at a time. "I needed to optimize novelty aggregation," he says. "Magazines, as a technology, were built and really intended to aggregate novelty." He'd flip through them while writing, looking for "hits of novelty" he could re-imagine and incorporate.
Now he's got Twitter. "Twitter now provides that in an almost lethal purity," he says. "This thing that used to leak out of a pipette one drop at a time has become a fire hose."

* As in these tweets: 


Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the ‘now’ factor, by latest things

Less creative people believe in ’originality’ and ‘innovation’, two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts

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