Why Sci-Fi Writers Are Almost Always Wrong (W.Gibson)

[jerome]

C'est une interview de William Gibson en anglais à lire ici.


I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened — it’s terrible. We’re almost always wrong. Our reputation for being right relies on some human capacity to marvel at the times when, yay, you got it right! Arthur Clarke predicted communications satellites and things like that. Those are marvelous — it’s great when someone gets it right, but almost always it’s wrong.

If you’ve read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have, at one time or another in my life, you can’t help but realize how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I’ve gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction. I knew that about science fiction. It just goes with the territory.

In a sense, if you’re not getting it wrong really a lot when you’re creating imaginary futures, then you’re just not doing it enough. You’re not creating enough imaginary futures. Because if you create enough of them, you’d better get it wrong — a lot.

[Lensman]

Au regard de la taille et de la complexité des données à traiter, si les auteurs de SF avaient assez souvent raison, ce serait extrêmement bizarre !!!

Oncle Joe