а как дышал, как дышал
15:05 | 07-12-2011 | Internet, Lifeform, Literature | No Comments
очередное интервью Нила Стивенсона:
Asked to join in a conversation about the future of computing grounded, in part, in that sense that many of us are living in a world he envisioned, Mr. Stephenson, 52, responded with the e-mail equivalent of a sigh.
Politely, but with a suggestion of weariness, he wrote: “Thanks for thinking of me, but this is actually just about my least favorite interview topic of all time. I’m not sure why.”
He added, “It seems reasonable, but I just can’t find the joy in talking about how I allegedly ‘foretold’ stuff.” He then agreed to the interview anyway, to coincide with a trip to New York.
Over lunch at the Omni Berkshire Place hotel in Manhattan, he explained his reticence about taking credit for clairvoyance. For one thing, he said, it isn’t really true. “The way the Internet developed, in my mind, is completely different from the Metaverse in ‘Snow Crash,’ ” he said. “I can talk all day long about how wrong I got it. But there are a lot of people who feel as though that was an accurate prediction.”
эх.
зато дальше:
He described his reputation as a seer in terms resembling what psychologists call the focusing illusion — too much attention to some aspects of a thing and too little to others. Science fiction writers are “shotgunning ideas” through their works [emphasis mine], he said, and people tend to recall the pellets that hit the target. “The perception of goodness is just selective,” he said.
поэтому так он мне и близок.