Sustained futurism

(I know I keep going on about Mr. Gibson. Indulge me.)

William Gibson's fiction has aged better than most of its cyberpunk cohorts. Although Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired inhabits a similar milieu, and although it remains an enjoyable read, it hasn't aged as well. Gibson is a strong world builder who has succeeded in creating his own continüum, but more importantly his characters inhabit hard lives and have faint hope.

Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 20

The key to his success is that he focuses on the human elements, and keeps the technical elements as vague as possible, allowing the reader to focus on the human problems that remain embedded in the technological future, through the lens of our present. Gibson's fiction has been progressively moving from the far future into the near future (with a jog into an alternate past); he is most successful where he provides social commentary on real peoples' lives today: from the down-and-out to captains of industry.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 2^nd-to-last

If that's not a truism today, then I don't know what is.