"I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me
that mid-century mainstream American science fiction had often been
triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American
exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a
white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class
or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room
for antiheroes. I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been
a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so
slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given
SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was
then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal
dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners." - William Gibson
