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Wondering which trope pages to fit some neat ideas from William Gibson

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devouredbyrobots from Paris, city of odours Since: Feb, 2010
#1: Dec 5th 2010 at 7:00:32 PM

beware, this is tl;dr and only people who care much about Gibson and/or are anal about the proper categorizing of examples will give a rat's ass.

So anyway, I think I misfiled a trope in Seinfeld Is Unfunny but I can't really explain how without writing a few paragraphs. *hem*

In an interview this year William Gibson, the guy who wrote Neuromancer which people argue as being the first cyberpunk novel, was talking about his new book and mentioned something about the difference between science fiction foretelling the future nowadays and back when he was writing Neuromancer.

In the interview he explained how he could never write another "Neuromancer" again because the book was based on 1970's perceptions of how the future would play out in terms of the rate of technological advancement at the time. At present, however, he said that the human perception of the foreseeable future was "shrinking" due to the fact that advances in technology nowadays are much more rapid. In the 70's when he was writing his most famous sci-fi novel the gap between notable advances in technology and how human beings interact using technology were years apart. There would be significant amounts of time in between advances. Nowadays, however, the gaps between notable advances in any particular tech sector can be months or even weeks apart. This essentially causes the predictable future to become much more narrow, because it's merging with the present much more rapidly. There's less room to predict before the change one is attempting to predict either occurs or becomes something unexpected.

This accounts for why late 20th century sci-fi and very recent sci-fi has leaned more towards the "20 minutes into the future" scenario than the sort of flying cars and jetpacks fiction of the earlier half of the 20th century and before. It's also helped shove "prophetic sci-fi" into being a sort of trite and overly expected gag since so much was written about the modern day in recent history that has turned out to be laughably wrong.

I thought these observations were super neato and threw them onto the Seinfeld Is Unfunny page in the "Real Life" section thinking it fit with how "prophetic" sci-fi nowadays can't be as prophetic as it used to be, and how prophetic sci-fi in the past is often scoffed at for making silly predictions. Did I misfile this trope? I want to make sure it goes in the right place. Should it go on Gibson's page under some other trope? Does it even belong anywhere or am I just geeking and looking for a place to shove something I personally find cool?

Tzetze DUMB from a converted church in Venice, Italy Since: Jan, 2001
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