The Gernsback Continuum

"The Gernsback Continuum"
Short story by William Gibson
Country	Canada
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction, cyberpunk
Publication
Published in	Universe 11, Burning Chrome
Publication type	Anthology
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Publication date	1981
Chronology
Johnny Mnemonic   Hinterlands

"The Gernsback Continuum" is a 1981 science fiction short story by American-Canadian author William Gibson, originally published in the anthology Universe 11 edited by Terry Carr. It was later reprinted in Gibson's collection Burning Chrome, and in Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling. With some similarity to Gibson's later appraisal of Singapore for Wired magazine in Disneyland with the Death Penalty, as much essay as fiction, it depicts the encounters of an American photographer with the period futuristic architecture of the American Atomic Age and Art Deco when he is assigned to document it for British publishers Barris-Watford, and the gradual incursion of its retro-futuristic hallucinations into his world. "Gernsback" in the title alludes to Hugo Gernsback, the pioneer of early 20th century American pulp magazine science fiction.

Plot summary

In 1980, an American photographer is assigned by London-based publishing house Barris-Watford to document 1930s–1950s architectural achievements. His contacts are Cohen and Dialta Downes, who describes the buildings and designs as, "a kind of alternate America...A 1980 that never happened, an architecture of broken dreams," or what Cohen calls "Raygun Gothic." As he photographs the various buildings for Cohen and Downes, the photographer begins to hallucinate dreamlike designs from that era, including flying cars, giant zeppelins, impossibly wide multi-lane highways and various other fantastic technologies which lead him to question reality as the scenes of the period spill into his own continuum.

The photographer contacts Merv Kihn, a journalist and conspiracy theorist who specializes in paranormal phenomena. Kihn attributes the photographer's visions to what he calls "semiotic ghosts," the remnants of pop culture in the collective unconscious, and advises immersion in a diet of present-day (1980s) decay, such as pornography, violent television programs and depressing newspapers. The photographer is greatly disturbed by these increasing visions, which he disparagingly compares to old Buck Rogers serials, Nazi Germany and Hitler Youth propaganda. The saccharine and squeaky-clean aesthetics of his visions cause him to long for his familiar and preferred postmodern present, filled with pollution, gas shortages and disastrous foreign wars. Things reach a head when the photographer drives to Tucson, Arizona and sees the normally small city as a vast and idealized metropolis, inhabited by physically perfect, blonde-haired, blue-eyed American citizens, whose haughty yet innocent demeanors push him over the edge. He desperately contacts Kihn again who reassures him to continue forcing his mind out of the unpleasant visions by immersing himself in the bleak realities of their own present time.

Having completed the photographs for the job, and overwhelmed by too many similarities between Los Angeles and his hallucinations, Barris-Watford's hired photographer retreats to San Francisco and books a plane to New York, the nightmare visions gradually fading away as he consumes the current disasters of global news. He rushes to a newsstand and buys whatever print he can detailing the familiar horrors of his own timeline. As he leaves, the attendant watching television news tells him that the world scene "could be worse." The photographer replies, "Or even worse, it could be perfect." The photographer leaves with his magazines.

Critical reception

In a review of Burning Chrome for Tangent magazine, Nader Elhefnawy observes Gibson's disposal of the idealised futures of the 1930s, comparing his critique to that of Moorcock and Pynchon:

Continuum is very much about a central tenet of cyberpunk, that this world is one where "the capital F future isn't going to arise," as Gibson later put it... because, here, at least, that vision of the future is insanity. Gibson's treatment of this theme is softer than, for instance, Michael Moorcock's or Thomas Pynchon's, but then his story is firmly set in the southwestern United States in the disenchantment following the oil embargo and Vietnam, rather than Nazi Germany... Twenty-six years later, we still live in a world where a great many pretend to know "nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel" or defeat in foreign wars – which may be another reason to think Michael Moorcock has a point when he says this kind of critique is becoming more rather than less relevant.

Bruce Sterling declared:

'The Gernsback Continuum' shows [Gibson] consciously drawing a bead on the shambling figure of the SF tradition. It's a devastating refutation of 'scientifiction' in its guise as narrow technolatry.

Thomas Bredehoft, writing on Gibson's treatment of cyberpunk, cyberspace and the recurrence of agent Kihn in the author's fiction, suggests that the media and dystopian realities in which Kihn urges Gibson's character escape the idealism of his visions are symptomatic and in part caused by the worlds he photographs.

The media are as deeply infused with the "Gernsback Continuum" as the narrator's visions are, because the products of thirties futurism are still with us. In fact, the very pieces of real-life architecture on which the narrator focuses his camera are described in much the same terms as Kihn's "semiotic ghosts".

He draws parallels between Gibson's descriptions of 1930s futuristic design, the author's encounters with computer technology, and the cosmeticism of a vision of technology infused throughout Gibson's work and particularly in Neuromancer. Comparing the language of drug narratives, Gernsback's worlds of the future and cyberspace, he suggests a cyberpunk born of the dual influences of the golden age of the 1930s and 40s and the New Wave, arguing that the futurist utopianism derided in the likes of Gernsback is in fact one feature of a 'Gibsonian' cyberspace itself.

Cobbling these disparate influences together into the construct of cyberspace might be interpreted as a brash act of postmodern bricolage, but interpreters of Gibson's conception of and visualization of cyberspace need to acknowledge both of these very real influences on the structure of cyberspace, idealistic dreams which Gibson himself has treated with, at best, equivocal praise... Cyberspace functions as the embodiment of the past's utopian dreams; entering cyberspace, then, is entering a dream of the past.

Peio Aguirre has compared The Gernsback Continuum to the concept of hauntology by Jacques Derrida

Adaptations

"The Gernsback Continuum" was adapted during 1993 as Tomorrow Calling, a short TV film by Tim Leandro for Film4 Productions. Originally shown on Channel 4, the film was also presented at the British Film Festival, October 4–10, 1996.

See also

• Atompunk
• Dieselpunk
• Futurism
• Hauntology
• Retrofuturism
• Raygun Gothic
• Future Shock

External links

• "The Gernsback Continuum" at the William Gibson Aleph
• Burning Chrome and The Gernsback Continuum reviewed at Tangent magazine, 2007
• The Gernsback Continuum in full archived from American Heritage.com
• Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum by Andrew Ross, in Critical Inquiry Vol.17, No.2, 1991
• The Gernsback Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn Kihn Stories; T. A Bredehoft in Science Fiction Studies Vol.22, No.66, 1995