E Pluribus Unum

The title of this post was the punchline of a comic strip I drew in college when I was 20. Now author William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition) shares what it feels like to have arrived here, in this future, from those days long ago

William Gibson:

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. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.