8 ms·

The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson (1981)

91 points by pmoriarty 6y ago

ghaff 6y ago
Although Gibson's Sprawl stories and novels are probably better known, this is actually my favorite Gibson short.
steve_gh 6y ago
A brilliant bit of writing. My favourite WG short story
pavlov 6y ago
> "The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels." A leading figure of this design movement was French-born Raymond Loewy: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-designer-who-made-mid-century-america-look-clean-and-stylish-180972270/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-desig... Gibson writes that "most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers", but this is not the case with Loewy. He had an interesting life and career, and his autobiography "Never Leave Well Enough Alone" is a great read. Sadly it seems to be out of print in English.
egypturnash 6y ago
When this came out, it was a repudiation of the caricatured ideals of the early SF of the 1930s - stuff that was fifty-one years old at the time. This was the dream of the future everyone had, once. This story is thirty-nine years old now. Gibson's Neuromancer is only three years younger, and it feels as laughably innocent to our future-dwelling eyes as anything he was making fun of in this story. Time makes fools of us all.
- varjag 6y ago
  I dunno, it was grim then and it still is. We did end up in substantially better future, all things considered.
  - helios_invictus 6y ago
    Did we?
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      Unless you figure you'd be privileged enough to live in Freeside, I'd say so.
      - jerf 6y ago
        I'd say give us another 5-20 years before saying we dodged it.
        mcv 6y ago
        It might still be headed our way. Corporations might have a friendlier face, but that's mostly so we'll happily trust them with our data.
    - varjag 6y ago
      I mean, one major character there is a World War 3 veteran who had been turned into a computer drone.
    - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
      Cyberpunk is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed, yet.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    '80s cyberpunk is still grim, but I think what they failed to capture is the dissonant tone of our modern dystopia. Classic cyberpunk was all dark sprawling streets and neon-lit seedy underbellies, led by shadowy faceless corporate execs of austere zaibatsu. Whereas the malefactors of great wealth in our present did not forget the average consumer and instead manipulates our emotions with cutting-edge marketing, algorithmic analysis of our deepest desires, and use of primary colors and comfy fonts. The copy is nonthreatening or hip language. The reality is grim, but the appearance isn't. More Brave New World and less 1984. More Disney, filtered through Banksy. I think most Gibson cyberpunk failed to capture the banality of the future, because they were fixated on the romantic cowboy-gangster hackers outlaws who lived on the fringes. Among the big names, Neal Stephenson did a great job of it with Snow Crash and The Diamond Age because he remembered that the megacorps had to sell to someone at the end of the day, and had to have shiny customer-facing dross.
tannerbrockwell 6y ago
In the same vein, the possibilities of the Sonora Aero Club: "One hundred years later, a house in Houston, Texas, caught on fire. In the aftermath, a fire inspector instructed the family to get rid of some of the old, miraculously unscathed junk in the attic. The family complied, and everything was soon landfill-bound. Among that debris: the 12 illustrated scrapbooks of one Charles August Albert Dellschau, German immigrant, supposed former Sonora Aero Club member. Created between 1908 and 1921, during Dellschau's retirement, the pages document his recollections of the machines, meetings, and men of the erstwhile Club."[1] [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/charles-a-a-dellschau-dreams-of-flying-the-amazing-story-of-an-airship-club-that-might-never-have-existed/274170/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/charl...
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Or like a particular Texas gun club, in Planetary. https://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2017/07/planetary-18-warren-ellis-john-cassaday.html https://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2017/07/planetary-18-warren-...
- karaterobot 6y ago
  Thanks for the link, that was interesting!
lasagnaphil 6y ago
This reminds me of the concept of hauntology [1] [2] - the return of elements of the past as symbolic ghosts, haunting our current world. It's strange since this concept was introduced in philosophy by Derrida in the 90s, and further studied by cultural theorists such as Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher - but Gibson seems to nail this phenomenon in his short story a decade earlier. And this phenomenon is perhaps most exacerbated today, as we are experiencing a gradual but terminal decline of former capitalist empires, but nobody can imagine a new revolutionary path out (as Mark Fisher would say, "the slow cancellation of the future") Ghostly ideologies from the past (communism, fascism) are quickly recycled on the Internet for their nostalgic sign value, but as it is quickly consumed and commoditized it fails to offer a solution for the problems of our current world. And more people are listening to music [3] that admittedly makes them feel "nostalgic for a past that does not exist". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave
- Stierlitz 6y ago
  @lasagnaphil .. Some very interesting points there. I wonder the reason for down-voting the text into a faded shade of grey?
  - lasagnaphil 6y ago
    Ah, thank you for the unfading. Sometimes comments that seem to be vaguely political gets downvoted kinda fast in this site. But nevertheless, I was just trying to connect the theme of this short story to a well-known phenomenon of "retrograde nostalgia" that is not just a symptom of political right but also to the political left. In that regard I view Gibson and this story as quite a visionary, predicting the cultural sentiments that would define the neoliberal era, before Derrida and Fisher. And also, there are many literature papers on the connection between the Gernsback Continuum and hauntology on the Internet - I've read a good piece before but the PDF link is kinda broken at the moment and cannot find it anymore.
jgon 6y ago
It was turned into a pretty good short film as well if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh5QHtGmXn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh5QHtGmXn4
- robocat 6y ago
  Interesting - starts at 0:55 if you want to skip classification etc. Very appropriate given this para in the story: “There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.”

91 points by pmoriarty 6y ago

ghaff 6y ago

Although Gibson's Sprawl stories and novels are probably better known, this is actually my favorite Gibson short.

steve_gh 6y ago

A brilliant bit of writing. My favourite WG short story

pavlov 6y ago

> "The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels." A leading figure of this design movement was French-born Raymond Loewy: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-designer-who-made-mid-century-america-look-clean-and-stylish-180972270/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-desig... Gibson writes that "most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers", but this is not the case with Loewy. He had an interesting life and career, and his autobiography "Never Leave Well Enough Alone" is a great read. Sadly it seems to be out of print in English.

egypturnash 6y ago

When this came out, it was a repudiation of the caricatured ideals of the early SF of the 1930s - stuff that was fifty-one years old at the time. This was the dream of the future everyone had, once. This story is thirty-nine years old now. Gibson's Neuromancer is only three years younger, and it feels as laughably innocent to our future-dwelling eyes as anything he was making fun of in this story. Time makes fools of us all.

varjag 6y ago
I dunno, it was grim then and it still is. We did end up in substantially better future, all things considered.
- helios_invictus 6y ago
  Did we?
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Unless you figure you'd be privileged enough to live in Freeside, I'd say so.
    - jerf 6y ago
      I'd say give us another 5-20 years before saying we dodged it.
      - mcv 6y ago
        It might still be headed our way. Corporations might have a friendlier face, but that's mostly so we'll happily trust them with our data.
  - varjag 6y ago
    I mean, one major character there is a World War 3 veteran who had been turned into a computer drone.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    Cyberpunk is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed, yet.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  '80s cyberpunk is still grim, but I think what they failed to capture is the dissonant tone of our modern dystopia. Classic cyberpunk was all dark sprawling streets and neon-lit seedy underbellies, led by shadowy faceless corporate execs of austere zaibatsu. Whereas the malefactors of great wealth in our present did not forget the average consumer and instead manipulates our emotions with cutting-edge marketing, algorithmic analysis of our deepest desires, and use of primary colors and comfy fonts. The copy is nonthreatening or hip language. The reality is grim, but the appearance isn't. More Brave New World and less 1984. More Disney, filtered through Banksy. I think most Gibson cyberpunk failed to capture the banality of the future, because they were fixated on the romantic cowboy-gangster hackers outlaws who lived on the fringes. Among the big names, Neal Stephenson did a great job of it with Snow Crash and The Diamond Age because he remembered that the megacorps had to sell to someone at the end of the day, and had to have shiny customer-facing dross.

tannerbrockwell 6y ago

In the same vein, the possibilities of the Sonora Aero Club: "One hundred years later, a house in Houston, Texas, caught on fire. In the aftermath, a fire inspector instructed the family to get rid of some of the old, miraculously unscathed junk in the attic. The family complied, and everything was soon landfill-bound. Among that debris: the 12 illustrated scrapbooks of one Charles August Albert Dellschau, German immigrant, supposed former Sonora Aero Club member. Created between 1908 and 1921, during Dellschau's retirement, the pages document his recollections of the machines, meetings, and men of the erstwhile Club."[1] [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/charles-a-a-dellschau-dreams-of-flying-the-amazing-story-of-an-airship-club-that-might-never-have-existed/274170/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/charl...

Apocryphon 6y ago
Or like a particular Texas gun club, in Planetary. https://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2017/07/planetary-18-warren-ellis-john-cassaday.html https://artbyarion.blogspot.com/2017/07/planetary-18-warren-...
karaterobot 6y ago
Thanks for the link, that was interesting!

lasagnaphil 6y ago

This reminds me of the concept of hauntology [1] [2] - the return of elements of the past as symbolic ghosts, haunting our current world. It's strange since this concept was introduced in philosophy by Derrida in the 90s, and further studied by cultural theorists such as Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher - but Gibson seems to nail this phenomenon in his short story a decade earlier. And this phenomenon is perhaps most exacerbated today, as we are experiencing a gradual but terminal decline of former capitalist empires, but nobody can imagine a new revolutionary path out (as Mark Fisher would say, "the slow cancellation of the future") Ghostly ideologies from the past (communism, fascism) are quickly recycled on the Internet for their nostalgic sign value, but as it is quickly consumed and commoditized it fails to offer a solution for the problems of our current world. And more people are listening to music [3] that admittedly makes them feel "nostalgic for a past that does not exist". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology_(music) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave

Stierlitz 6y ago
@lasagnaphil .. Some very interesting points there. I wonder the reason for down-voting the text into a faded shade of grey?
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  Ah, thank you for the unfading. Sometimes comments that seem to be vaguely political gets downvoted kinda fast in this site. But nevertheless, I was just trying to connect the theme of this short story to a well-known phenomenon of "retrograde nostalgia" that is not just a symptom of political right but also to the political left. In that regard I view Gibson and this story as quite a visionary, predicting the cultural sentiments that would define the neoliberal era, before Derrida and Fisher. And also, there are many literature papers on the connection between the Gernsback Continuum and hauntology on the Internet - I've read a good piece before but the PDF link is kinda broken at the moment and cannot find it anymore.

jgon 6y ago

It was turned into a pretty good short film as well if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh5QHtGmXn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh5QHtGmXn4

robocat 6y ago
Interesting - starts at 0:55 if you want to skip classification etc. Very appropriate given this para in the story: “There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.”