Hoe zijn we De Bom vergeten?

De laatste tijd verschijnt bijna elke dag wel een nieuw interview met William Gibson, die veel moeite doet om zijn nieuw boek The Peripheral te promoten (al is hij voor Nederlandse media vooralsnog onzichtbaar.) Bij Ted snijdt hij een interessant onderwerp aan, de collectieve vergeetachtigheid over de angst voor een kernoorlog in de jaren tachtig.

You invented the term “cyberspace” back when Ronald Reagan was president — before Neuromancer came out in 1984, even before Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac. Yet you typically spend a lot of time in interviews discounting your own predictive capacity. Why? 

Well for me, all of this is a way to get a handle on the present, the present having become extremely fantastic. And from the point of view of someone back when I wrote Neuromancer, the most fantastic thing about the present time is that we’re actually still here. In the early ’80s, people who knew what their situation was with the Cold War and nuclear armament didn’t necessarily expect that we’d make it this far. We’ve kind of lost that knowledge. Once the threat was gone, it was like we disremembered it as a species. It seldom comes up anymore, which is really odd.

When I wrote Neuromancer, any scenario that wasn’t nuclear Armageddon was inherently optimistic. It was an act of optimism in the early 80s to set us up in a future science fiction story in a world in which there hadn’t been nuclear war.