The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn Kihn Stories

Bredehoft, Thomas A. "The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn Kihn Stories." Science-Fiction Studies 22.2 (July 1995): 252-63.

Bredehoft allies with Gary Westfahl's assertion that William Gibson's Neuromancer relies on Gernsbackian paradigms while still being a futurist text. Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Neuromancer: More Secondary Sources." (Maly, 01/07/02)

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Bredehoft opens with a headnote with a quotation from Gibson in a 1986 interview saying that he thought of using for an epigraph to Neuromancer "'Watch out for worlds behind you" from "Sunday Morning" by the Velvet Underground, and moves on to Gibson's noting in that interview his mild surprise at finding in his first computer a drive mechanism: "a little piece of a Victorian engine." TAB compares that comment to the line in "The Gernsback Continuum," on "the products of futuristic 1930s designers" who would design pencil sharpeners to look "as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep: under the streamlined chrome shell, you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. ('Gernsback' 25)" (in Bredehoft, p. 252). TAB asserts that the image of worlds behind us is important for Neuromancer since that work "seems, on the surface" — like the 1930s pencil sharpeners — "something new, with a new vision of the future; the old-fashioned mechanism it conceals is sometimes difficult to discover [...] Yet Gary Westfahl has suggested that Neuromancer, the prototypical cyberpunk novel, relies [... Bredehoft, p. 252] heavily upon Gernsbackian paradigms[...]," and TAB takes seriously Westfahl's "sugestion that Neuromancer conceals a Gernsbackian machine," which is no less than "Gibson's much-discussed concept of cyberspace" (pp. 252-534). Quoting Westfahl: "The Gernsback Continuum of the story is not a dying or a dead world; it remains as a force influencing present day reality in its old artifacts and as a still-present alternate universe which continues to coexist next to reality — indeed the hero is still haunted by his vision of it as the story closes. (90)."

From Bredehoft's Abstract: His essay

examines William Gibson's concept of cyberspace, [...] in [...] Neuromancer, in the context of his Mervyn Kihn stories, "The Gernsback Continuum" and "Hippie Hat Brain Parasite." These stories deal directly with present-day survivals of the nineteen sixties and the nineteen thirties; Gibson's use of hallucinatory iconography associated with the sixties and "visionary futurism" associated with the thirties in his visual descriptions of cyberspace hints at the relevance of these stories for [...] cyberspace. Ultimately, rather than presenting cyberspace as a liberatory, utopian space, as some postmodern theorists would have it, Gibson's treatment of hallucinatory and futuristic iconographies suggests that cyberspace functions as the embodiment of past "Dreams" of the future, dreams which, Gibson hints, are at least partially responsible for the "near dystopia" of the present.[1]

Note from the body of the essay in TAB's own voice:

The Gernsback Continuum is a true continuum [...], a still-present