The Vancouver Insitute sponsored a lecture with William Gibson last night. I’ve seen Gibson speak a few times, and he’s always an interesting guy.

He read an introduction to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine that he had written but had rejected by his publisher. Gibson calls this the first work of modern science fiction, published in 1895. It was preceded by both Frankenstein (1831) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The former is considered, by many, to be Victorian or Gothic in nature, and thus not modern. I didn’t get a chance to ask Gibson why he didn’t reference the latter.

No matter. The night was interesting.

I never fail to be impressed by how prominently the Cuban missile crisis figures in the minds of the generation before mine. Gibson drew a clear line from the cautionary tales of man’s self-destruction in The Time Machine and that event. “History,” he says, “is itself a work of speculative fiction.” We learn badly as badly from history as we do from its reluctant partner, fiction.

“Time moves in one direction, memory another,” and our digital world is extending the reach of the latter almost infinitely. The farther we look back, the less recorded history there is. It’s hard to imagine a world where the stone mason was a vehicle of mass communications, but such a time did exist. The revolution of the printing press is well documented, but the impact of newer technologies is still being established. Photograph—the precise recording of visual memory—is not even 200 years old (barely a blip relative to the 500 years of the printing press.) The motion picture is younger still, and with the addition of sound a veritable newborn.

“When we turn on a radio in a New York Hotel”, says Gibson, _”and hear Elvis sing Heartbreak Hotel we fail to be aware of the amazing fact that a dead man is singing.” It is a recent thing in our world, a function of the now omnipresent rewind button or our lives.

Gibson is correct when he says “I sometimes think the first pixels were bits of ochre clay”. The specific words may change, but ultimately we’re just communicating using the best technology we have. Over time tools are refined, revised, renamed and repurposed but the fundamentals remain the same.

In the Internet era—the all digital era—the earth’s materials are no longer applied to itself in form of markings: they are, instead, fabricated into silicon wafers which form the electrically powered heart of a world which is both fundamentally different and the same.

The tools exist to create an almost permanent and complete long memory, but I’m not sure we as people are ready for it. When history was sparse but vivid (as in the days of The Time Machine) humans failed completely to learn from its errors: I don’t think much will change in a world where history seems to be more complete but also more vague.

It’s interesting that Gibson (along with Bruce Sterling) appears to be uncertain of the future of science fiction, or speculative fiction if you prefer. The Time Machine served as both a warning and an inspiration to its readers. I’d like to see a return to more thoughtful speculation.

Recommend reading at the end of the night was Halting State by Charles Stross. I’ve got it reserved at the Vancouver Public Library where twelve people are ahead of me in line. I can’t wait.

Posted by skooter at 8:05 PM This entry is filed under Vancouver.
This entry is tagged: William Gibson