The World of Tomorrow

William Gibson is undoubtedly one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. His bibliography is impressive both for its quality and for its profound effect on the genre as a whole. While Neuromancer may not have actually created cyberpunk, it certainly remains the sub-genre's most recognizable and enduring exemplar. Hell, I can't even look at neon lights and urban sprawl without having flashbacks of blind ninjas, shady tech dealers, rogue AIs, and the Rastafarian navy. If you don't get the references then just read the book already.

Aside from its role in transforming an entire genre by raising its literary and narrative standards, Neuromancer has also been praised for its semi-prescient depiction of the near future; at least, what the near future looked like in the early 1980s. The internet was new and exciting, computers were becoming affordable for regular people, cultures were beginning to mix in novel ways, hybrid musical genres full of synthesizers and sampled tracks were taking over the mainstream, and the late-Cold War political landscape was shifting too fast for most people to follow. Gibson, in classic sci-fi fashion, extrapolated these trends to envision a world of endless urban sprawl, hybridized humans and technology, and a sort of ultra capitalistic free-for-all global economy. Some of his predictions were so prescient as to feel commonplace (the erosion of national identities in the face of a global economy, the incredible availability of cheap technology, internet scammers), while others look decidedly quaint or naive in hindsight (physically connecting yourself to the internet, extensive habitation of outer space, computers that can pass Turing tests). Rather than truly predicting the future, Neuromancer gives us a startling glimpse of what I like to call a "past future"; a future as envisioned by people in the past.

 I think by now we're all pretty comfortable with the idea of past futures. Anyone familiar with post-war North American culture has seen countless depictions of "The World of Tomorrow, Today" that became one of the defining images of early Cold War World Fairs, American theme parks, and even Saturday morning cartoons (leaving The Jetsons aside, it's a particularly common theme on The Simpsons, for example). The innocent belief that modern technology would solve all our problems within a few decades became so common between the mid-1950s and the early-1970s that we have yet to fully expunge it from our collective cultural consciousness. The difference between then and now is that we have become disillusioned enough with our parents` and grandparents` hopeful vision for a perfect future that we can half-joke about being promised hovercrafts and robot butlers that have yet to materialize. The technology-worshiping optimism of past generations has given way to a realization that perfection is for Hollywood, and that technology creates just as many social problems as it solves. While Gibson`s characters are not so starry-eyed as to believe they can achieve some kind of technological paradise, they retain a basic optimism about the potentially limitless freedom for creation and reinvention that technology could possibly provide. So, while it`s not a blindly optimistic depiction of the `wonders of technology`, Neuromancer still appears overly positive and confident to our cynical, post-millennium sensibilities.

What strikes me most about the hopefulness of Gibson's past future is that he intended it to be far more gritty and realistic than earlier futures that science fiction authors had imagined. In a collection of short stories entitled Burning Chrome, Gibson turned his critical eye towards the romantically optimistic past future predicted by many of his predecessors. "The Gernsback Continuum", first published in 1981, follows a photojournalist as he attempts to capture images of self-consciously "futuristic" buildings from the 1930s and 40s. The nostalgia for a simpler, more hopeful, era is suffocating as he photographs run-down monuments to an imagined future, many of which "featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm (p. 28)." The protagonist spends so much time trying to capture the forgotten beauty of these buildings that he starts physically slipping in and out of the future envisioned by earlier generations of sci-fi authors. He sees perfect people in white togas driving silver bullet cars, cities built of gold, crystal roads, all the gleaming perfection of a fantasy world made of marble and mercury. His visions, though they lose some substance, never fully disappear, but neither do they supplant the real world of the modern "human near-dystopia" of early 1980s Los Angeles (p. 36). Instead, the narrator is left with the ability to catch glimpses of a past future full of promise and hope, always hiding just behind a thin veil of smog and flaking paint.

"The Gernsback Continuum" is Gibson at his least subtle, but his narrative never loses his trademark complexity and contradictory emotions. He lampoons earlier sci-fi writers for their naivety in predicting a future populated with blonde demi-gods and burnished ziggurats, while simultaneously yearning for the kind of world in which these fantasies are believable. Reality has fallen short of this dream, but Gibson tells us that having dreams is still a crucial part of being human. However, he also feels that our cynicism is justified, maybe even inevitable, in a world where "the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming." The promise of accessible high-technology has created a place where "everyone had a car - no wings for it- and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal (p. 28)." Rather than usher in an era of peace and prosperity, the fruits of the 20th-century obsession with technological progress have become the very agents of our misery. It's no wonder, then, that Gibson is critical of a past future that looked so much brighter than our own.

Despite his rejection of the Gernsback past future, Gibson still retains an incredible amount of faith in the power of technology to transform our lives for the better. Neuromancer is never either wholly positive or negative in its depiction of a new future. Instead, it depicts a future in which freedom is near complete, and creativity unchecked, allowing people to be or do just about anything, for good or ill.

I, for one, can't help but feel a crushing nostalgia for the cultural milieu that led to the creation of Neuromancer, much as Gibson must have felt for his own favourite past futures. It feels fresh in its grittiness, comforting in its new-found infatuation with computers, and beautiful in its palette of gray and neon. I just wonder what future generations will think our imagined futures. Will they see us as hopelessly deluded dreamers, or as overly pessimistic worriers? Whichever it is, I hope they treat us with the same dignity that Gibson affords his literary predecessors.