Okay, before I say anything else, I bet that when a lot of you saw "William Gibson" in this episode title you probably thought that
we were going to be getting into some cyberpunk. And I promise you that we will....eventually. Heck at some point
we'll probably do a whole series just on the Sprawl trilogy, but today is not a day for cyberpunk. But rather,
It's a day for what had to happen for cyberpunk to come to exist.
Today, I want to talk about the revolution in science fiction that William Gibson kicked off in the 80's.
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To understand the impact of William Gibson,
you have to understand a little bit about history and a little bit about the imaginary future.
Because William Gibson had a great project. Something that, at least in later years,
he would explicitly say he hoped to do with his writing his goal was to rewrite how science fiction understood itself.
It's important to remember where science fiction was in the late 70's and early 80's
because where science fiction was...was Star Wars.
Star Wars burst onto the scene in
1977 and all of a sudden people realized you could make bank with science fiction.
Massive amounts of funding for publishing and film development flowed into the sci-fi world...
but only for sci-fi that felt like Star Wars. A flood of
half-baked space operas and schlocky galactic adventures hit the shelves, all of it much like Star Wars --
itself a throwback to the early days of Pulp science-fiction and cheap television serials like Flash Gordon -- and,
perhaps most importantly, all of it was made for easy commercial consumption.
This post Star Wars flood totally eschewed the
radically experimental New Wave sci-fi of the 60s and the 70s.
Stuff that tried to push the bounds of what science fiction could do. With their new wave writing, authors like JG Ballard, Philip K Dick,
Samuel Delaney and eve,n as I'm sure we'll cover in another episode, William
Burroughs, had worked to show that science fiction could explore avant-garde ideas and break
established literary forms. The new wave of science fiction movement was wild and
transgressive and often in-your-face.
It asked more of its reader than most of the sci-fi that had come before it and it made few concessions to -
shall we say - good taste.
It was the total opposite of this Star Wars-y flood which inundated the market as the 70s came to a close.
And though the new wave was quickly buried by that flood,
it wasn't forgotten by a generation of authors fighting to hold back that tide. A
generation whose most notable writer was probably William Gibson. This generation would take the
stylistic lessons and the big ideas of the New Wave and present them in a way that could appeal to the masses without
compromise, without pulling away from the grit that made New Wave works so meaningful; all the more so in a world of glossy,
sanitized space fantasies totally disconnected from the lives most people were living.
And here's where Gibson comes back into our story with his idea of Future History.
He said,
"Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction up the timeline rather than back.
But you can't draw
imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own. The less you think of your map of the past
Imaginary or contingent, the more conventionally you tend to stride forward into your imaginary future." It is that
conventionality that Gibson
wanted to fight against. He looked at a number of science fiction authors - some of them older famous, authors, many of them newer hack
sci-fi writers - and saw them as having an unexamined view of the history they were building from. They treated the past as something
simple; something that they understood completely and could just project a line out from to create a future that was simply an extension of that
certain past or - as Gibson put it - "Confident men."
They knew exactly where they were coming from, exactly
where they were and exactly where they were going and they were largely wrong on all three accounts.
The problem with this confidence was that it didn't allow for exploration.
When everything is already known, very few questions are left to be asked and to Gibson that's what sci-fi did best-
Ask questions. And if it was going to continue doing that old archetypes would have to be pulled down.
Stories couldn't simply be about the democratic,
freedom loving good guys fighting against fascism and oppressive order. You had to get more granular
To dig in where the details weren't so clear because in the 50s, and even into the 60s, if you were a science fiction author
in the United States
it was pretty easy to believe that you had a solid grasp on the world:the Allies had defeated Hitler,
America emerged as the dominant world power,
Democracy and the capitalism would lead us to the stars. But to their mind, there would still always be a
Totalitarian villain out there to oppose the democratic good guys' the same
Fascist villains with a new name and face. If it wasn't the Nazis, it was the Soviet regime,
And so it would continue to be even hundreds of years from now in the 50s
It was easy to see the world as simple and so to write simple futures.
But as Gibson said, "By the 80s the future was starting to lose resolution.
You could no longer overlook the cracks in American democracy."
Poverty, Crime,
Multinational corporations acting above the law,
privatization of security, wealth inequality, and most of all the loss of absolute hegemony, the
possibility that other cultures might define the future (the Japanese
specifically in Gibson's case)...all of this stuff had to be addressed these cracks left the world feeling uncertain and
Alienating and so presented us with futures full of questions, then there was the other great unknown the other major tilting factor-
Technology.
Computers and personal computer ownership were clearly the future; technological progress was really starting to speed up
How would that play into all of those issues
I listed before? Would it heal them would it exacerbate them further?
Or would it just make them play out on a wider scale? This was the Gibsonian Project; to reintroduce
uncertainty into our future histories, to force science fiction to once again ask
questions about where we're going to have it serve as a lens through which we can view possible
extrapolations of our present and ask is that what we really want. To help us
course-correct and to steer us away from a future we might otherwise
Unknowingly stumble into to help us see the ramifications of today's technology and today's decisions and to do all of that
with style.
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There's this one episode where he talks about how science fiction explores history through the use of time travel and
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