The Gernsback Continuum

IN PROGRESS

Gibson, William. "The Gernsback Continuum." Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1987. Pp. 23-35. Reprinted fairly frequently[1], available on line as a pdf, possibly not legally.

From the Wikipedia entry:

Assigned to photograph 1930s period futuristic American architecture [...], an American photographer begins to enter the worlds of his subject with increasing vividness. [... An]'American Streamlined Moderne', a "kind of alternate America...A 1980 that never happened, an architecture of broken dreams", [...] 'Raygun Gothic', [...] a utopian 'continuum' of flying wings and air cars, multi-lane highways, giant zeppelins and Aryan inhabitants [...]. His US agent [...] attributes this to what he calls 'semiotic ghosts', the remnants of mass culture in the collective unconscious [...]. In references to the architecture of Nazi Germany, the Hitler Youth and period sci-fi like Flash Gordon, Fritz Lang and H. G. Wells, the modernist vistas of the 'golden age' are contextualized in period political visions as the protagonist clings to a familiar and preferred postmodern present. [....][2]

Covered briefly in a review of Burning Chrome in Tangent, possibly by the author of the Wikipedia entry.[3]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 18May19