Politics has jacked itself up to my level of weirdness

The future is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

Professional author and amateur futurist William Gibson ruminates a bit, on the occasion of the publication of his new novel (set in the recent past) called Spook Country:

"Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness," Gibson acknowledges. "I can work with this," he says, thinking of recent turns of events. "I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That's what makes it work. It's interesting. I'd like to see it get less interesting. But I don't know that it necessarily will."

[...]

"If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world -- particularly badly in Africa -- they might have said, 'Not bad. A little toasty. That's kind of interesting.'

"But I'd say -- ' But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and everything else we've been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic results.' And they'd say, 'You've already got this thing you call AIDS. Let's not --'

"And I'd say, ' But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.' Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security."

"Through the Looking Glass": William Gibson, interviewed in The Washington Post (September 6, 2007)