From Rolling Stone Issue 1039, November 15, 2007 — an interview with Sci-fi Novelist William Gibson:
RS: You made your name as a science fiction writer, but in your last two novels you’ve moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?
WG: It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country.
Sigh.
Gibson is a cowardly draft dodger from the Vietnam War who ran away to Canada, where he still lives, and where he continues to bash the United States.
The beauty of writing science-fiction is that you can make shit up, or just completely ignore facts and reality — like the fact that we didn’t invade the wrong country when we attacked Afghanistan.
That’s what Bush Derangement Syndrome does to you…
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Do you think he was referring to Afghanistan?