Project Katrina

In almost 400 posts here I have not written a single thing that wasn’t directly related to Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, New Orleans, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Well I just had to mention this interview of William Gibson in Rolling Stone.

In his most recent novel, Spook Country, the story is set in the present. Kind of different for Mr. Gibson. Well we now know why. He doesn’t have to write about the future anymore because he believes the present is so much more unlikely.

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.

Ouch. And he even left out our federal government allowed a major city to drown and now more then two years later not a whole lot has been done to improve the situation. I guess we ought to be worried when reality becomes more scary then fiction.