Indeed, technology now advances so quickly that by the time the trees are chopped down for a sci-fi book to be printed, its futuristic visions are already passé. By 2007, on the occasion of his modernist novel Spook Country, Gibson told The New York Times Magazine, "Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios." In other words, everything he was writing about was already happening. Then the present caught up with the future, which Gibson acknowledged when he set his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition in a present-day wasteland of corporate brands and mass-market advertising. The best sci-fi writers are society’s palm readers, inventing along the way much of the nomenclature that we now associate with online existence-for example, "cyberpunk," popularized by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), or "avatar" to refer to one’s virtual body representation, in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). The Fuller Memorandum By Charles Stross Ace Hardcover, 2010 320 pp.
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