William Gibson, one of science fiction's most visionary and distinctive voices, maintains that he and his fellow writers don't possess some mystical ability to peer into the future.

"We're almost always wrong," said Gibson in a phone interview with Wired. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome" and expanded on the concept in his 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer.

Part 2: William Gibson on the Temptation of Twitter, Antique Watches

Part 3: William Gibson on Punk Rock, Memes and 'Gangnam Style'

In that book, which quickly became a classic, inspiring pop culture and science fiction for decades to come, Gibson predicted that the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace would be "experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation" in a global network of "unthinkable complexity."

Yet Gibson says he simply got lucky with his prescient depiction of a digital world. "The thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn't actually like the internet at all!" said the writer, who has since penned numerous critically acclaimed novels, including Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Sterling, 1990), Pattern Recognition (2003) and Zero History (2010).

Gibson's most recent book, a collection of nonfiction called Distrust That Particular Flavor, was published this year; he is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled The Peripheral.

In this Wired interview, which will be published over the next three days, Gibson discusses a dizzying range of subjects, including antique watches, comic books, punk rock, fortune tellers, internet memes and the long-running plans for a Neuromancer movie.

Wired: Do you think the category "science fiction" is useful anymore? Your last few books, like the Blue Ant trilogy, qualify as science fiction, but they're set in a feasible approximation of present-day reality.

William Gibson: Each of them is set in the year before the year in which it was published. I think of them as speculative novels, of the very recent past, rather than speculative novels of the future. They have the bones and viscera of genre SF, but they aren't quite that. That was the result of a very deliberate program of mine. Well, I don't think it was that deliberate when it began, but it defined itself for me over those three books.

By the end of All Tomorrow's Parties, which was my sixth novel, I was starting to be haunted by a feeling that the world itself was so weird and so rich in cognitive dissonance, for me, that I had lost the capacity to measure just how weird it was.

Without a sense of how weird the present is – how potentially weird the present is – it became impossible for me to judge how much weirder I should try to make an imagined future. And so those last three books were – whatever else they were – were me building myself a new yardstick for the weirdness of the decade we've gone through while I was writing those books. And to judge by the book I'm writing now, for my purposes, I was successful because I now find myself able to extrapolate from this weirdness into another level of imaginary weirdness entirely....

>'I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.' — William Gibson

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened – it's terrible. We're almost always wrong. Our reputation for being right relies on some human capacity to marvel at the times when, yay, you got it right! Arthur Clarke predicted communications satellites and things like that. Those are marvelous – it's great when someone gets it right, but almost always it's wrong.

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have, at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realize how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction. I knew that about science fiction. It just goes with the territory.

In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures. Because if you create enough of them, you'd better get it wrong – a lot.

'Science Fiction Writers Aren't Fortune Tellers. Fortune Tellers Are Fakes.' —————————————————————————-

Wired: And yet people always talk about how prophetic Neuromancer was and how your books are so accurate in so many ways, in their predictive capacity.

Gibson: No, they do, but that's part of this cultural thing we do as a culture, that we do with prediction. Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. Fortune tellers are either deluded or charlatans. You can find science fiction writers who are deluded or science fiction writers who are charlatans – I can think of several of each in the history of the field. Every once in a while, somebody extends their imagination down the line, far enough with a sufficient lack of prejudice, to imagine something that then actually happens. When it happens, it's great, but it's not magic. All the language we have for describing what science fiction writers and futurists of other stripes do is nakedly a language of magic.

I'm having a week where some well-intentioned person on the internet describes me as "oracular." As soon as one of the words with a magic connotation is attached – I know this from ongoing experience – as soon as someone says "oracular," it's like, boom! It's all over the place; it's endlessly repeated. It's probably not bad for business. But then I wind up spending a lot of time disabusing people of the idea that I have some sort of magic insight.... You can also find, if you wanted to Google through all the William Gibson pieces on the net, you can find tons of pieces, where people go on and on about how often I've gotten it wrong. Where are the cellphones? And neural nets? Why is the bandwidth of everything microscopic in Neuromancer? I could write technological critique of Neuromancer myself that I think could probably convince people that I haven't gotten it right.

Because the thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn't actually like the internet at all! It's something; I didn't get it right but I said there was going to be something. I somehow managed to convey a feeling of something. Curiously, that put me out ahead of the field in that regard. It wasn't that other people were getting it wrong; it was just that relatively few people in the early 1980s, relatively few people who were writing science fiction were paying attention to that stuff. That wasn't what they were writing about.

>'I was very lucky – ridiculously lucky in the timing of my interests with a science fiction novel about the digital.'

I was very lucky – ridiculously lucky in the timing of my interests with a science fiction novel about the digital. Ridiculously lucky. When I was writing it, or actually even before, like a couple of years before, when I was writing the two short stories that Neuromancer sort of emerged from, that the world of Neuromancer emerged from – when I was writing them, they took like a week or two to write, each one. When I was writing each one, it was, "Oh please please let me get this thing published before the 20,000 other people writing exactly the same story right now get theirs published." Because I just thought it was so obvious. I thought, "This is it. This is what science fiction writers call steam engine time for this kind of story."

You know steam engine time? Humans have built little toys, steam engines, for thousands of years. The Greeks had them. Lots of different cultures. The Chinese had them. Lots of different cultures used steam to make little metal things spin around. Nobody ever did anything with it. All of a sudden someone in Europe did one out in a garden shed and the industrial revolution happened. That was steam engine time. When I was writing those first stories, I didn't even know to call the thing the digital. But it was steam engine time. It was happening.

Some guy in England was selling a computer the size of a dictionary. I didn't know – and it wouldn't have mattered to me – that the dictionary-sized computer that guy was selling was as powerful as a Casio wristwatch was going to be in a few years, but that was all I needed to know was that you could order these things in magazines and they were small. So I thought, OK, they're going to be cheap and ubiquitous, increasingly so. What are people going to do with them? It just seemed to fall together so naturally. I was kind of amazed for years after that, that there hadn't been this huge wave of science fiction writers rushing up behind me, and squashing me flat as I got out the gate with my little cyberspace thing. But actually they did; it took a while. It was very strange. It was good for me, that.

The sci-fi comic Heavy Metal helped inspire Gibson's novel Neuromancer.

William Gibson on Sci-Fi Movies, Comics and the Temptation of Twitter ———————————————————————

Wired: On Twitter recently, you talked about plans for a new novel. What can you tell us about your new novel in progress, The Peripheral?

Gibson: Even on Twitter I said too much; Twitter is the only medium that's ever tempted me to violate my deep, instinctive fear of discussing work in progress. I can't really get into it any more than I did there. Although, I'm on the record on Twitter as having said that parts of it, at least, are not only set in an imaginary future, but at least two imaginary futures. Any readers who are longing for Gibsonian imaginary future stuff, I'm pretty sure there's going to be something there for them.

Wired: Have you read any good comics recently? You once said that Neuromancer was partly inspired by French comics you read.

Gibson: It was inspired by me flipping through the English-language edition of Heavy Metal at the corner store, and usually not buying it. But it was the look of it. I had kind of, some people would say a really impoverished life with comics as a form. I was really into them when I was a kid, as all kids were then. And I was really into them in my early teens, but that was interrupted by various changes in my life in my early teens, and because of that, I completely missed the Marvel revolution. I just never had that as part of my life. So I didn't come back to college until the R. Crumb era of Zap, and underground comics, and I eagerly absorbed a bunch of those. After that, it's never really been part of my media diet, in the way that I'm sure they would be now, if I had been born 10 or 20 years later.

It's unusual for me to read comics or graphic novels. When I do I enjoy them, but when I do it's often because the person who did it is someone I met, or a friend of a friend, and that hasn't happened lately. I kind of lived for a long time surrounded with them – my daughter got really, really into the indie comics scene and still is to some extent, but I've always suspected that one of the reasons she did it is because it was something I didn't know anything about. I can see that, that would be good. Because otherwise, she likes prose fiction, but if she tells me about prose fiction, I'm all, well, "You should read this." You need something to be your own exclusive area of expertise. Of defining self, I think.

__Wired:__What do you think about the trend of sci-fi classics being repackaged into mainstream Hollywood movies? Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein is getting a new action treatment, for instance. David Cronenberg's cult film Videodrome is getting an action-y remake.

Gibson: Really! Videodrome is getting an action-y remake?

Wired: Yes, and it's not getting remade by Cronenberg.

Gibson: Well ... [laughs] I pay less attention to big Hollywood movies right now than I once did, it'd be fair to say. I suspect that the reason I do that is that the business of making those big movies has become increasingly conservative and risk-averse. And that conservatism and risk-averseness is why you're seeing remakes of films that were successful in their first release, or subsequently, as with Videodrome, acquired a cult following. Those strike me, the accountants really, as being reasonably safe bets. That said, over the past three years or so, there have been more non-big-budget, non-remake SF movies that I've totally enjoyed and they have been in ages, really. I hope we are in a very rich period of non-big-budget, very original, interesting, entertaining SF cinema.

Wired: What were some of these movies that you enjoyed?

Gibson: Inception, although that was a big-budgeted film, Moon, Source Code. Hanna, if you want to call it a science fiction movie, which I probably would – it's close enough. I couldn't even get my full list into one tweet, not because it's too long but just because I have trouble holding it in memory. Splice was one. Anyway, those are a few.

See here for Part 2 of the Wired interview with William Gibson. Part 3 will appear on Saturday.