THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM, 1981
by W. Gibson
"... a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS."
"American Streamlined Moderne."
"The Airstrem Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was."
"...a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles."
"What the public wanted was the future."
"...you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way."
"America-that-wasn't."
"People see things. Nothing's there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably."
"...in a setting of clear reality."
"They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own."
"They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American."
"They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world."
"Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts."
"...a bundle of condensed catastrophe."
"...a defining sense of the postmodern as "the disappearance of a sense of history" in the culture, a pervasive depthlessness, a "perpetual present" in which the memory of tradition is gone."
Jean-Francois Lyotard,
p. 110, Chapter 5, "The Postmodern Condition", 1979
"As we have seen, much postmodernist analysis is an attack on authority and reliability - in philosophy, narrative, and the relationship of the arts to truth."
Christopher Butler, p. 110, "Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002
"William Gibson's short story illustrates how popular culture and public life are heterogeneous; they are not stable, solid, immutable forces. Rather, our notion of public life includes bits and pieces and fragments of many alternative visions of ideal human interaction."
Dr. Andrew Wood,
"Making Sense of the Gernsback Continuum"
"This whole story is essentially a look back at the world as it was for men like Hugo Gernsback. For those who don't know, Gernsback was the founder of "Amazing Stories", a magazine devoted to stories in the now-modern gender of science fiction. It was in that era that we get all these images of a "tomorrow that never was", where everything was shiny and idealistic, a Progress Eternal that would raise human beings into an angelic state of existence. Of course, we who live in the twenty-first century know the future didn't turn out that way, but for poor Parker, he has to live with such impossibilities emerging of thin air and haunting his every step."
Alex Willging,
"The Gernsback Continuum by W. Gibson: A Burning Chrome Review"
OVERLAPPING THEMES. MOTIFS.
Technological utopianism.
Dehumanising utopia.
False perceptions.
Social duality.
Delusional phenomena as social trends.
An age full of ambivalent feelings towards technology.
A world created by intimate machines and digital media.
A disorderly world where various groups from complex cultural backgrounds must interact and struggle for control.
Anxiety and thrill of permanent transition in the near future, not the distant one.