Time & Perspective Quote by William Gibson

Gibson is doing the neatest kind of genre judo here: he shrugs off the burden of prediction while quietly claiming he already won. The line pretends to be anti-futurist - no crystal ball, no grand forecasts - but the sting is that the “future” science fiction promises has, for “most people,” effectively arrived. The joke lands because it flips the reader’s expectation: the scary part isn’t some neon-drenched cyberpunk horizon, it’s the everyday now, with all its creeping instability made mundane.

The subtext is classed and political. “Most people” is doing heavy lifting, pointing toward the asymmetry Gibson’s work has always tracked: the future shows up early for the vulnerable and late as convenience for the comfortable. Surveillance, precarity, corporate power, information overload - these aren’t speculative devices so much as ambient conditions. By framing the present as “enough like the future,” he suggests that technological change doesn’t need to be dramatic to be oppressive; it just needs to be continuous, normalized, and unevenly distributed.

Context matters: Gibson, the writer who helped define cyberpunk, became famous for imagining networked life before the web became a household fact. That gives this quip an extra edge. It’s not modesty; it’s a critique of the audience’s hunger for escapist futurism. If you’re waiting for science fiction to warn you, Gibson implies, you’re already behind schedule.