Science & Tech Quote by William Gibson

Gibson’s genius has always been to make the future feel like a side-effect of the present, and this line smuggles that sensibility into a deceptively modest job description. “Dreaming in public” frames speculation as performance: science writing isn’t just reporting, it’s staging possibilities in front of an audience that will inevitably test them against lived reality. The phrase also implicates responsibility. If your dreams are public, they can shape funding priorities, public fear, policy, and hype cycles. A private fantasy can be harmless; a mass-distributed fantasy can become infrastructure.

The pivot - “but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams” - is classic Gibsonian anti-utopianism. He’s allergic to the clean, corporate “innovation” story where technology arrives like salvation. Bad dreams are the real engine of his work: surveillance that feels convenient, inequality that becomes an interface, systems that optimize for profit and call it progress. By acknowledging them, he punctures the genre’s promotional tone and recasts science writing as a kind of hazard communication.

Then comes the sly self-correction: “We’re dreamers... but we’re also realists, of a sort.” That “of a sort” matters. Gibson distrusts the posture of pure objectivity; realism here means noticing how messy humans are, how incentives warp outcomes, how futures arrive unevenly. It’s a reminder that the best speculative writing isn’t prediction, it’s pattern recognition with moral stakes - a public dream engineered to keep you awake.