The Cyberpunk Gets Real

William Gibson is known by many as a prolific author of a particular science fiction called "cyberpunk." He presciently coined the term "cyberspace" well before the internet age.
More recently a nonfiction volume called Distrust that Particular Flavor hit the shelves, a compendium of Gibson's speeches, essays, magazine articles and other commissioned pieces. Gibson riffs about technology, world cultures, and civilization's march into modernity with titles such as "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" (about modern Singapore) and "Modern Boys and Mobile Girls" (about the peculiar techno-philia of the Japanese).
In "Time Machine Cuba" Gibson provides his take on doomsday. He came of age during the Cold War, and his fear of global calamity was stoked by a lineage of cautionary science fiction going back to HG Wells' The Time Machine.
HG Wells feared the potential for unwise leaders to abuse technology and to destroy us. Early on he recognized the terrible potential of warfare from the air, by Zeppelins laying waste to whole cities, and later validated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. HG Wells wrote his own epitaph "I told you so. You damned fools."
Along with the rest of the world Gibson breathlessly watched events unfold during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The experience changed his attitude towards doomsday.
Regarding Wells' epitaph Gibson writes:
"I suspect that I began to distrust that particular flavor of italics when the world didn't end in October of 1962. My anxiety, and the world's, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on..."
Around the same time William Gibson was reading the Beat literature, and his worldview probably was becoming more nuanced, less earnest. He continues:
"And it may also have dawned on me, that history...is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretations and further discoveries."
I suppose that every age has its prevailing anxieties about doomsday. Heaven knows I frequently parcel out my personal thoughts to the spectors of climate change, fossil fuels depletion, global financial meltdown, ecological collapse.
Maybe I should follow Gibson's cue and remove the italics.
I like it when accomplished authors of fiction occasionally exit their creative trance states to lay bare their feelings. Kurt Vonnegut did it with his book Palm Sunday. I have to think it is good for them, too. At least it must feel good returning to the creative trance state.