m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

Via Night Shade Books: Concept Sci-fi has an interview with Walter Jon Williams up. On cyberpunk, he said:

I’d like to suggest that there were a few key concepts to cyberpunk: the idea that the future would be filled with a tangle of subcultures rather than a single monoculture; the notion that subcultures would adapt technology for their own purposes; that the subcultures would be webbed together by electronic media; and that the future would be saturated by mass media and by messages generated by large corporate entities acting exclusively and without conscience for their own profit and power.

That’s not even controversial today. That’s what the future turned into: that’s what today is all about. I had thought I was writing ‘Hardwired’ about a future that existed sixty or eighty years out, and it turned out that I was writing about the year 2008.