Review of William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture

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William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture is divided into three sections: “Gibson and Literary History,” “Gibson and the Question of Medium,” and “Gibson and the Problem of the Present.” Each section has strengths, particularly in putting Gibson’s work into context with cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, steampunk, and other genres Gibson foments and subverts.

In the “Gibson and Literary History” section, Phillip E. Wegner opens the volume with a view of SF when Neuromancer  was published, along with, Wegner notes, Samuel Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (all 1984). Taken together, Wegner argues, these texts “mark the past, present, and future of the practice of science fiction and the notions of the literary more generally” (22). In “When it Changed: Science Fiction and the Literary Field, Circa 1984,” Wegner successfully places Gibson, Delaney, and Robinson’s novels in the context of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the cultural landscape of Reagan-era popular and literary culture, including film, indie and pop music, architecture, and cultural criticism. Wegner’s essay provides a useful opening for the volume in question as it firmly places Neuromancer along-side such touchstones as Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) and Michel Foucault’s second and third volumes of Histoire de la sexualité (1984). As well, Wegner interestingly locates Neuromancer as an experimental, albeit realist novel, in the tradition of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

The second essay in the collection, “No Future but the Alternative: Or, Temporal Leveling in the Work of William Gibson” by Kylie Korsnack, likewise sets a key tone for the book by examining Gibson’s use of time-travel and disembodiment in the first work in the Jackpot Trilogy, The Peripheral (2014), as well as in the graphic novel Archangel (2017) and the displacement in time experienced by Cayce Pollard in the first work in the Blue Ant Trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2005). Korsnack effectively navigates the complex play of time and history in these works to show that “readers find themselves occupying multiple temporalities simultaneously” (61). This fractured temporality demonstrates, in both the Blue Ant and Jackpot trilogies, how characters like Cayce in Pattern Recognition and Flynne in The Peripheral find “themselves split between body and mind” while living, not just in some future, as in the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, but in the ever-confusing now (63). The “ever-confusing now” is an apt description of Gibson’s approach to modern life, as Korsnack’s essay demonstrates in full.

The third essay, “The Shelf Lives of Futures: Williams Gibson’s Short Fiction and the Temporality of Genre” by Nilges, is a highly useful inspection of Gibson’s short stories, starting with “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” published in 1977, that connects Gibson’s turn to realism in the Blue Ant Trilogy, or, as Wegner argues, a turn that never occurred as Gibson has always written realistic fiction about nows that have not yet been. Nilges further argues effectively that, in 1981’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” “past futures continue to haunt and influence the present. . . . [A problem] that is crucial not only for writers of science fiction but for our ability to engage with and imagine alternatives to the problems of our present” (73). Nilges thus proposes that in Gibson’s short fiction, and one can surely argue his novels as well, the future is never not really present, albeit, as Gibson has said, not equally distributed.

The fourth and final chapter in the first section of the collection, Takayuki Tatsumi’s “The Difference Engine in a Post-Enlightenment Context: Franklin, Emerson, and Gibson and Sterling,” reads the novel through the end of the Cold War, situating The Difference Engine (1990) alongside Robert Zemeckis’s film Back to the Future 3 (1990) and Steven Spielberg’s film of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1993). This essay connects the end of the Cold War to the end of “territorial clear-cut binary opposition to temporal chaotic inconsistency” (83). Further, Tatsumi argues that The Difference Engine owes a great deal of its construction to Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the writings of Franklin and Emerson. This reviewer would have liked a more nuanced reading of the novel in this essay, however.

Part Two of the collection opens with Andrew M. Butler’s “‘A New Rose Hotel is a New Rose Hotel is a New Rose Hotel’: Nonplaces in William Gibson’s Screen Adaptations.” Butler’s essay is a welcome one—not enough is made in the criticism of Gibson’s adaptions of “New Rose Hotel” and “Johnnie Mnemonic” and an original, unproduced script for Alien 3, or his successful scripts for The X-Files. Butler builds from his argument in Sherryl Vint and Graham Murphy’s Beyond Cyberpunk (2010) to say that cyberspace in Gibson’s screenplays is an “outopia or non-place” like the Los Angeles of Ripley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). For Butler, Gibson’s adaptions and original pieces work because they place their protagonists “in cities and other nonplaces they can no longer read or navigate, overwhelmed by the semiotics and forms of representation at odds with their identities, relationships, and histories” (107). One can extrapolate this analysis to much of Gibson’s work, especially the Blue Ant and Jackpot trilogies.

Maria Alberto and Elizabeth Swanstrom’s “William Gibson, Science Fiction, and the Evolution of the Digital Humanities” explores this exciting development in textual and non-textual analysis, examining how Gibson’s work foments explorations of the digital, particularly, they write, “conversations his work has prompted regarding embodiment, cognition, gender, race, and so on” (121). What the digital humanities bring to studies of Gibson’s work, Alberto and Swanstrom argue, is how, e.g., his linguistic choices and innovations have impacted SF and SF studies, as they demonstrate through lexical dispersion plots. Such data mining is useful for showing how Gibson’s work “was of special interest to science fiction scholars thinking about these issues” (126). Alberto and Swanstrom readily admit that they are not “formally trained in computational linguistics,” but their findings are strongly suggestive that further explorations of Gibson’s semantic impact on SF will be profitable (128).

Next up is Roger Whitson’s “Time Critique and the Textures of Alternate History: Media Archaeology in The Difference Engine and The Peripheral”; Whitson argues that “Gibson’s media archaeology shows that computing fundamentally transforms our experience of alternate history by illustrating the links between the human social imagination and the infrastructure of branching processes found in networked computational logic” (135). In other words, Whitson says that by examining the plays with history in The Difference Engine and The Peripheral (and, one should add, its sequel Agency [2020]), one can see just how history and imaginative narratives unfold. Further, Whitson argues that the “interlacing of platform and governance—where what was once on the periphery becomes central, utopia becomes dystopia, future becomes past, alternative history becomes our history” to suggest that forms and contents merge (141). E.g., Gibson and Sterling’s play with Babbage’s Analytical Engine and Gibson’s play with the quantum server in Shanghai that creates “stubs” in history raise ontological questions about the experience of mediated reality. Whitson’s analysis is a highpoint in section two of the collection.

Sherryl Vint opens section three of the collection with “Too Big to Fail: The Blue Ant Trilogy and Our Productized Future.” Vint’s work here connects to Wegner’s opening chapter through Gibson’s apparent turn from SF to realism and argues that this turn shows that Gibson is “nostalgic for the power of art to resist capitalism’s infiltration of social and political life, now at such a point of saturation that commodity relations have replaced all social ties” (154). Vint’s argument is successful in demonstrating this saturation through Cayce Pollard, Hubertus Bigend, and other characters who, in the particular case of Bigend, work “actively to co-opt any social or creative activity that is not oriented toward market profitability and redirect it to that end” (154). Vint’s essay is especially strong in her connection of late capitalist advertising and Gibson’s characters’ attempts to recover an ever-receding, stable reality as they seek to “escape the commoditized society of the spectacle” (158). This essay is a highlight of the collection.

Amy J. Elias reads the first novel in Gibson’s apparent “return” to SF in “Realist Ontology in William Gibson’s The Peripheral.” The Jackpot Trilogy continued in Agency and will apparently conclude in The Jackpot (Gibson’s working title for the forthcoming novel), but Elias’s interest lies in the questions raised in The Peripheral about how we experience reality through “Hugh Everett III’s 1957 many-worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics (which claims that there are many parallel, noninteracting worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own …)” (168). As a scholar deeply interested in the application of Everett’s interpretation in contemporary SF, this chapter’s analysis is highly useful; yet beyond the personal, Elias’s work cogently places The Peripheral at the center of Gibson’s interest from his earliest fiction in how the ultra-rich “third-world” or colonize the past for resource extraction in their realities, separate from the rest of us poor saps.

Aron Pease’s “Cyberspace after Cyberpunk” dovetails with Vint’s chapter and continues the exploration of Gibson’s seeming abandonment of cyberspace for the present especially resulting from the complete commodification of the Internet by “transnational corporations” (179). And yet, Pease argues, Spook Country (2007), e. g., the concluding volume of the Blue Ant Trilogy, takes as givens such cyber inventions as GPS technology in its “locutive art” that “prompts wonder initially, but later bored familiarity” like so much of Internet culture (180). For Pease, Gibson has continued his exploration of cyberspace, but the world caught up to his initial visions because he imagined them. And thus it seems that Gibson’s later characters “disregard their devices almost as nuisances, exhibiting none of the cyberpunk’s romantic attachment to machines” (180). There is, in other words, a nostalgic desire for a world before cyberspace and yet a total need for cyberspace to find meaning in the world—as in Cayce Pollard’s quest for the creators of “the Footage” in Pattern Recognition, e.g. Finally, Pease argues that, like Elias, “the Blue Ant Trilogy thus captures the emerging space of empire that subsumes the spaces of the former colonial empires” (187). Pease finally states that this seizure explains Gibson’s move from “science fiction to the science fictionalized present,” a compelling conclusion to the chapter’s interests (194).

Finally, Christopher P. Haines concludes the volume with “‘Just a Game’: Biopolitics, Video Games, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral.” Haines argues that Gibson offers “one of the most incisive critiques of gaming and financialization” in the first novel in the Jackpot Trilogy. Further, Haines says that The Peripheral’s use of time-travel is best understood through the politics of the rich using the less fortunate, as the novel’s klepts gamify the exploitation of the lower classes and the extraction of technologies from the “stubs” that carry out research and development amidst their own destruction in the Jackpot. Haines also notes Gibson’s prose style in this novel as echoing the speed of his plots: “sentences are modular and clipped, dropping subjects or verbs, coining neologisms that collapse ideas together” (207).

Among the many reasons to appreciate the collection is the focus not just on Gibson’s three completed trilogies, but his short stories, his steampunk collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, the graphic novel Archangel, completed screen plays for The X-Files and the unproduced Alien 3, and three essays on the first work in the in-progress “Jackpot Trilogy,” The Peripheral. The second volume, Agency, published just before the collection, is mentioned only tangentially.

Novelist Malka Order’s foreword centers Gibson’s work in contemporary literature and the broader culture that it both anticipates and realizes. Order sets the stage for the collection with the statement that the “sense of upheaval and disconnection… is what makes his books so apt for the modern world” (xii). The uncanny, the unfamiliar, and the strange settings that open Gibson’s works, Order argues, dislocate characters and readers from the conventional and make his work so ripe, so overdue, Murray and Nilges rightly argue, for this collective assessment. The pair convincingly argue that one of reasons for the previous lack of a collection like this one is Gibson’s turn from the wild speculative fiction of his early short fiction and the Sprawl Trilogy to a more realist aesthetic in the Bridge and Blue Ant trilogies.

All three sections of the work succeed in large part because of the nuanced close readings of Gibson’s works and situating the novels especially within the contexts of Gibson’s cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk poetics. The collection is therefore highly recommended for Gibson scholars and science fiction critics more broadly. There is a wealth of Gibson scholarship in Extrapolation, Foundation, and Science Fiction Studies as well as other leading journals, with essays appearing each year. This new collection is a welcome addition to this criticism and should be a starting point for students and scholars working on Gibson going forward, building on Gary Westfahl’s 2013 monograph for Illinois UP’s Modern Masters of Science Fiction series and the recently published Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2019) edited by Anna MacFarland, Lars Schmeink, and Graham Murphy. Mitch Murray and Mathias Nilges have curated a much-needed assemblage of critics and responses examining Gibson’s short fiction, novels, and screenplays. This collection is an important new resource for Gibson studies and should be a touchstone for his work going forward.

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Jonathan P. Lewis is Associate Professor of English at Troy University in Troy, Alabama. He has published essays on Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and others in such journals as Extrapolation and Foundation. He teaches composition, World and American Literature, and SFF. He is currently at work on a monograph examining Hugh Everett III’s Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in contemporary SF.