This is the Rocketeer. It’s been one of those very hot weeks that makes your brain feel like mush for much of the day. I’m rocketing off to Pluto for a few days to cool off but I leave you, my dear Rocketeer readers, with a short film to help pass the time until my return. This excellent British independent film is based upon William Gibson’s short story, “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981). The story is a favorite of mine for reasons I shared in a past post and which I have updated and reposted below. “Tomorrow Calling” is about eleven minutes long and both insightful and campy, a true delight!
The Gernsback Continuum: Gibson Closes a Door
(Updated from a post on 1/23/2023 in the Rocketeer.)
I collect stories. Not just any stories, I collect semiotic phantoms—bits of cultural imagery that were once part of the mass consciousness but are no longer. You can thank William Gibson for that phrase—semiotic phantom, or semiotic ghost. You can find it in the story, “The Gernsback Continuum” first published in the anthology, “Universe 11” in 1981.
“The Gernsback Continuum” is an early story for Gibson, coming out the same year as “Johnny Mnemonic.” It’s important as it marks the beginning of the cyberpunk era. For me, it also signals a switch from one reality path to another. The former— a humanist future—is replaced (or, overwritten) by a transhumanist agenda. Was this Gibson’s personal vision? Perhaps he was part of a larger movement, promoted by the news and other media, a new and darker path for the Earth’s population.
For the moment, let us assume the latter, If this is so than all of the humanist stories from the 1930’s (which promoted a bright future for humanity) must be forgotten, or replaced. Especially the speculative and science fiction stories because it is on their backs that forward-thinking, Aquarian dreams can be built.
Remember the accounts of how the original Star Trek inspired kids to become scientists when they grew up? This was one of Hugo Gernsback’s stated goals for Amazing Stories when he began it in 1926. (It’s stated in his first editorial essay in the magazine’s first issue.) This is the reason Gibson’s named his story after him.
In “The Gernsback Continuum” a photographer is hired to shoot images for a book about 1930’s Art Deco—”The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.” The deeper he gets into the assignment, the more the photographer begins to resonate with the subject. Eventually, he starts seeing into that other reality as if it were real. In this alternate world the future has progressed from the speculative ideals of the 1930’s. “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze” we are told in the narrative. And we are assured of this from, among other things, the wonderful images drawn by Frank R. Paul and Alex Raymond. It is this other reality which begins to intrude upon the photographer’s life.
He freaks out and goes to see a writer friend who tells him about “…semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own…." The imagery the photographer sees, as the writer explains it, was once part of the mass consciousness and he’s picking up on it.
The final straw comes for the photographer when he wakes to see two people from that alternate reality standing but few feet away. Before them is an alternate Tucson… “ the city….[with] zeppelin docks and mad neon spires... Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations….Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, quicksilver little darting silver things...mile long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters....”
He calls his writer friend and demands help before he goes mad. The writer tells him not to worry and gives him a secret cure: “Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Go to porn movies...I'm letting you in on a trade secret: really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts."
The photographer puts himself onto a heavy diet of mainstream media and pornography. And the other reality begins to fade. I find the final lines of the story particularly interesting. While buying his daily packet of newspaper tragedies the news seller comments, “Hell of a world we live in, huh? But it could be worse…”
Our photographer responds, “That's right...or even worse, it could be perfect.”
Chilling—he’s been completely adapted back into the “modern world.”
In Twilight Zone fashion we have just witnessed a switch track. Gone is the Airstream past. It has been replaced by a darker future without humanist dreams. Gibson tells us that the new path for humanity is a transhumanist —dystopian, and ugly. There is no longer a place for the alternate—a perfected humanity arising from idealistic dreams.
But is it really gone? I think that depends on all of us.
The Rocketeer will return next week at the regular day and time with fresh pulpy goodness!