[fasbiner]

I think it's more precise to paraphrase that he, William Gibson cannot imagine the past as it was. He is interested in fashion, surfaces, narrative, velocity, and futurism as such. But there's a reason he emerged in California with its active obliteration of history and not say, Switzerland.

The Swiss would find it absurd to imagine that their past is inaccessible when they have all the written records, the buildings, the family letters and a rich progressive regional literature that would be of little interest to the outside world.

They would've found it hard to imagine the impersonal (and predictive) dystopian cyberpunk since they have a degree of effective devolutionary democracy unimaginable to most americans. But as it turns out, California and east asia seem to be more representative of the future.

[wjrb]

I think I'm misunderstanding you; Gibson doesn't live in California.

I took the quote as Gibson believing that nobody at all can imagine the past as it was, objectively, but only their own personal past, colored as it is by all of the moments that they have lived since that (past) moment.

[fasbiner]

Traveling to california and then becoming a (faux) draft dodger and participating in the summer of love were pivotal experiences in his life and core influences, I'm not sure why his zip code would be relevant to that.

I think we simply disagree: I think plenty of people can capture the past of other places and times as it was and imagine it fairly faithfully with sufficient lack of emotional bias, while nobody has ever written a memoir without a clear agenda.