Sci-Fi Genius William Gibson's Trump-Free Alternate Reality
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
There are many alternate futures. But what if there were also ... alternate pasts? That's the premise of William Gibson's latest novel, Agency. Gibson is the pioneering science fiction writer who coined the word "cyberspace" and whose 1984 debut novel, The Neuromancer, is the book that inspired The Matrix. In, Agency, the second novel in Gibson's Peripheral trilogy, we've arrived back in 2017, at a fork of the past, called a "stub," in which Trump was never elected and Brexit never happened. In this universe, an app-whisperer named Verity Jane is testing a beta super-AI named Eunice, and crisis communication expert named Wilf Netherton has teamed up with a cop named Ainsley Lowbeer to try to avert nuclear war. In other words, it's a novel that looks unflinchingly at the importance of choice and the complex decision trees that could precipitate, or prevent, the end of the world as we know it. Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery sat down for a conversation with William Gibson at Public Works in San Francisco last January to talk about his new book. They discuss how politics has influenced his writing, how he uses his imagination to predict future realities, and how the real-life climate crisis intersects with his fictional imaginings of the end times.
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's James West here the executive producer of the Mother Jones podcast with another Friday special bonus edition of the show. |
| 0:10.0 | I want you to take a moment, close your eyes, and imagine an alternate future, one in which |
| 0:16.7 | Trump was never elected in 2016, in which Brexit never happened. |
| 0:21.8 | Can you do that? Can you imagine that? Our guest today has |
| 0:27.2 | imagined that exact future. He's spent his very famous career imagining |
| 0:31.5 | different kinds of alternate futures for his readers. |
| 0:34.4 | William Gibson is the pioneering science fiction writer whose debut 1984 novel |
| 0:39.4 | The Neuromancer inspired The Matrix. And it turns out that he's a big Mother Jones fan. He |
| 0:45.4 | retweets our work all the time. In this chat with Mother Jones's editor-in-chief |
| 0:50.0 | Clara Jeffrey on stage at Public Works in San Francisco a little over a month ago. |
| 0:55.0 | Gibson talks about the 2016 election, how politics influences his writing, |
| 1:00.0 | what he thinks about climate change and when the world will end, |
| 1:02.8 | how he predicted a pandemic like the coronavirus, |
| 1:05.7 | and his new book, Agency. |
| 1:08.4 | I'll let Clara take it from here. Why don't I run my distilled non-spolar version of the book as I understand it. I'm so glad that so many people in this |
| 1:26.9 | audience have read the peripheral that will help us a lot. But in the new book the agency there, there's the post-apocalyptic feature of 2136 that many of you are familiar with from the peripheral. |
| 1:40.0 | And in which some kind of calamity called the jackpot |
| 1:43.4 | has killed off 80% of the human population |
| 1:46.6 | and most animals. |
| 1:48.4 | It's run by, or at least London is run by, |
| 1:51.2 | a hereditary oligarchy called the klept, which is essentially the descendants of the oligarchs who populate London now. |
| 1:59.0 | Some of them have figured out a way to infiltrate past computer technology and thereby colonize and generally |
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