Ask Sci-Fi Legend William Gibson Where the Heck He Thinks the World Is Going

Arich blowhard running for United States President . Tech - bro execshoping to splinter off into their own anything - go fiefdoms . So much shout over gigabyte web pipes that ’s receive quicker , dumber , and shivery . The present feels like it ’s running along the plotline of a William Gibson skill - fable novel . So let ’s ask the man who wrote the future to judge and make sensation of today .

Gibson is well known as the visionary author who coined the condition “ net ” and wrote iconic works like Neuromancer , The Difference Engine , and Zero chronicle . As shown inhis new comic - book serial Archangel , he ’s always demonstrated an weird knack for how technical advance change human behavior and fractures extant culture into odd new strata . His writing predicted the world telecasting , Internet subcultures , and digital - protection drudge panics that we all take for granted today . In Gibson ’s most recent novelThe Peripheral , an elite oligarch jolt uses advanced quantum calculation to reach back across spacetime andmanipulate the life of steady folksstruggling to get by in a close - hereafter filled with cheap 3-D - printed everything . That ’s belike not happening in 2016 , but it for sure experience like it could .

From 4 - 5 p.m. Eastern time , the honor - win author has agree to answer your interrogation about the formidable latitude between his science - fabrication work and the profoundly divided earth we ’re living in … and just about anything else you require to ask him .

illustration by Jim Cooke