If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of the world today, William Gibson says, they’d have read your proposal and said, this is impossible:
This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really excellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction novels, but you can’t have them all in one novel.
Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction.
It’s correct that people, sf writers included, generally had vast failures of vision regarding computers and communications, and even when they stumbled on something which would come true (e.g., the form factor of Star Trek communicators) they didn’t think at all clearly about the implications. But as to Gibson’s other quoted points — what has he been smoking?
Improbable deaths from AIDS? Too improbable for sf? What about Earth Abides? (It was from long before 1981, but I don’t remember people ca. 1981 sneering at it.) And hell, what about period non-fiction, not speculating but predicting? Look how seriously people took earnest non-fictional policy advocacy stuff like Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb. Ehrlich famously predicted famine deaths on the order of tens of millions per year on a tortured interpretation of the facts. Speculating about some two million AIDS deaths a year is pretty tame. Some of the gory details (e.g.: originating in primates in Africa, venereal and spread most effectively by anal sex and by blood transfusions with effective screening legally delayed by years) might have been too politically incorrect or too morbid to publish in 1981, but not unpublishably improbable (compare Andromeda Strain or Hephaestus Plague). And the broad outline of 2M deaths annually from one of the four horsemen playing a bizarre little game are utterly tame even for recent-in-1981 history (Cultural Revolution, e.g.) and widely believed earnest mouthbreathing policy advocacy fabulism, much less for openly speculative fiction.
“Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences.” I don’t remember that from any 1981 speculative fiction, but ISTR by 1981 publicly funded academics were already publishing early versions of the modern talking points about how there is an enormous positive feedback in the greenhouse effect which will cause an inexorable rise in temperature catastrophe after the rise in temperature inevitably resumes. So I judge that the idea must have been only roughly 2001-the-movie levels of improbable, as opposed to e.g. Soon I Will Be Invincible levels of improbable.
As for terrorism and military response by nation states, the main failure of vision I see is that few period books anticipated how much terrorism and large-scale anarchy would be enabled by anarchotyranny. (‘Low-tech delinquents enabled as fearsome pirates by strong governments preventing their otherwise-more-capable victims from protecting themselves’ is an important aspect of, among other things, both 9/11 and African piracy.) But even if it wasn’t predicted, it wasn’t inconceivable: from foggy memory FM Busby’s Rissa Kerguelen books (1976-1980) featured a somewhat similar trope, and similar themes was in the air in non-sf fiction and in nonfictional politically-incorrect opinion.
That failure of vision aside — that is, as long as you don’t specifically limit the terrorists to the modern pattern of low-competence barbarians preying on victims who are helpless because powerful civilizations disarm them and/or force them to intermingle with the barbarians — history-changing terrorism wasn’t off limits. Heck, history-determining terrorism wasn’t off limits. Heinlein’s Friday (1982) has widespread high-competence covert violence up to and including destabilization of nations and large-scale deaths. I don’t remember that as any sort of startling exception for period sf, either.
Gibson, having lost his father young and suddenly while the family was moving around new cities for the father’s job, and then forced to move back to his old-timey town, answers the interviewer:
“….It was a hugely traumatic loss, and not just because I’d lost my father. In Wytheville, I felt I wasn’t in that modern world anymore. I had been living in a vision of the future, and then suddenly I was living in a vision of the past. ….”
I can definitely see where he gets the mojo for writing about dystopian futures that leak into the present.
Gibson must have been reading some pretty tame science fiction, to think that Sci-Fi publishers in 1981 would be astounded by today’s world.