The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn Kihn Stories
Bredehoft, Thomas A. "The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn Kihn Stories." SFS 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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TAB 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 "The Gernsback Continuum," on "the products of futuristic 1930s designers" who would design pencil sharpeners to look "as though they'd been but 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 mechanismit concels 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).
From Bredehoft's Abstract:
This article examines William Givson's concept of cyberspace, as it is elaborated in [...] Neuromancer, in the context of his Mervyn Kihn stories, "The Gernsback Continuum" and "Hippie Hat Brain Parasite.
