Andy Griffith Overdrive

Jesse Walker | September 20, 2007

The always-interesting Joel Garreau profiles William Gibson. An excerpt:

Thoughts turn to the future of Washington. Could Gibson have predicted that in 2007, two leading candidates for the presidency would be a white woman and a black man?

That's the problem with his game, he says. "If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world -- particularly badly in Africa -- they might have said, 'Not bad. A little toasty. That's kind of interesting.'

"But I'd say -- 'But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and everything else we've been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic results.' And they'd say, 'You've already got this thing you call AIDS. Let's not --'

"And I'd say, 'But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.' Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security."

And as the guards drag him out: "But wait! The protagonist of the book lives in Minnesota, has a job managing a Denny's, never spends so much as a paragraph thinking about AIDS or climate change or terrorism, and spends all his free time watching old TV shows...on a portable computer."