https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson (b 1948)
Patrick Smith, 2014 (accessible via scribd)
Enlightenment reason is presented as an example of what he terms a ‘grand narrative’: an underlying pattern that resolves historical change into a single, totalising framework. William Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1981) effectively illustrates Lyotard’s argument in its tale of a photographer hired to catalogue the remnants of futuristic designs from the 1930s, ‘an architecture of broken dreams’ from when ‘what the public wanted was the future’ (Gibson 1988: 40–1). In the photographer’s mind, these fragments mesh not only with the technological visions of pulp science fiction but also with the Nazi architecture of the same period: ‘The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome . . . but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming’ (Gibson 1988: 41). Eventually, the photographer’s thoughts become so intermingled that he is haunted by ‘semiotic phantoms’ (Gibson 1988: 44):
They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes . . . Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose . . . It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda. (Gibson 1988: 47)
Gibson’s explicit link between fascism and technological progress decentres the grand narrative of scientific optimism by arguing that it conceals a covert totalitarianism. However, Gibson’s protagonist only drowns out his ghosts by submitting to another kind of dystopia: the ‘really bad media’ of contemporary culture (Gibson 1988: 48). (The Short Story: An Introduction, by Paul March-Russell, 2009, p. 224)
