The 30's dreamed white-marble and slipstream chrome,
immortal crystal and burnished bronze,
but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback Continuum pulps
have fallen on London in the dead of night,
screaming.
[Opening Theme]
The Gernsback Continuum is William Gibson's first great story of alienation.
Named after Hugo Gernsback,
the fellow who the Hugo Awards are named after and
an individual who will certainly be getting his own episode someday,
The Gernsback Continuum is about a photographer who is hired to photograph the crumbling remains of
that 30's art-deco "World of the Future" architecture that was once so common in America.
You know, those UFO-like gas stations that you sometimes still find on empty stretches of highway,
or those
older movie theaters
which are neon and
extraneous flanges and
spires rising towards space.
But as he starts photographing these relics of a nearly forgotten past,
he starts to see these great
12 engine planes
and 20ty laned highways
elements of an America that never was.
He sees people with flying cars and food pills,
Shining cities
ten-thousand feet tall.
He sees the future
as we imagined it in the 30's,
the future Hugo Gernsback showed us
in amazing stories.
And visions of this unrealized future are driving him mad
or maybe he's already mad,
not even he knows.
And that's sort of the point.
Not that he's going mad, but that this future he is seeing is itself
inherently mad.
At least it is in the world we live in today.
There was this point in the 20's and the 30's when
that shining ray gun gothic future almost
seemed possible,
almost seemed like something that we as a species were just
on the cusp of grasping.
But in the 80's with holes in the ozone layer,
smog covering L.A.,
a Cold War going on,
that ray gun future seemed ludicrous,
almost maddening in its absurdity.
As Gipson puts it:
"The future had come to America first
but had finally past it by."
And yet, that is where so much of science fiction still lives
stuck in that streamline modern future
The Gernsback Continuum
has always struck me as being about Gibson
seeing the sci fi world of of the late 70's and being driven mad
wondering if he was the only one who saw what he saw in the world around him,
thy only one demanding that Science Fiction leave those maddeningly fantastical shining cities
and come back home to real America
where things weren't so clean
or simple or pristine.
And here is where we get back to that radical alienation that we talked about before
Not only is the character in Gibson's story isolated,
alone,
choosing to break off from fashionable hip society,
but they are also isolated and alienated
from the strange world that they are beginning to see,
there's no place for them to belong in the present, but
there's place for them in this
idealized sterile future either.
Which brings us to one of William Gibson's most interesting concepts,
one that permutates and defines a lot of his later work,
the idea of Semiotic Ghosts.
Let's just parse that phrase,
semiotics in this case
is the study of symbols
specifically how symbols impart meaning to our consciousness
often semiotics is talked about in the context of language.
For example,
when I say the word "TREE"
if you share my language
then you will picture a tree in your head.
Now the word 'tree'
really has absolutely nothing to do with the actual object itself,
after all plenty of other languages have completely different words for 'tree,'
and people who speak those languages have the same reaction to those completely different words.
There's nothing about the word 'tree'
that inherently makes it any better at describing trees than 'blurb,'
'fimble,' or literally any other sound that we can make up.
And yet that word tree
makes English speakers instantly think
of an actual tree.
How do we do that?
How do we take a symbol and make it mean more in our brain?
But the science of semiotics
goes beyond just spoken or written language,
semiotics incorporates anything that serves as a symbol to us.
And it is this that William is talking about when he refers to Semiotic Ghosts.
Semiotic ghosts
are symbols that linger in the collective subconscious
they are ideas that were diffused
through our society once upon a time
and now for most people serve as some small piece of how we understand the world.
This is a web of pop culture, urban legends, religious beliefs, myths, and stories.
But in Gibson's view, sometimes, one of these symbols will come to the floor
we'll be collectively haunted by one of these semiotic ghosts ; )
to the point that it's no longer just
part of the background noise of how we understand the world but
something that has become real to us.
The Gernsback Continuum raises this question:
Why do so many alien abductees describe their captors as grey men with large heads?
They all appear to to have seen the same thing
because they are all drawing from that same cultural symbol for aliens
that has been piped into our mass unconscious.
And it's not that they are lying about what they think they saw,
to them the thing they witnessed was very real.
In a very sense
that shared cultural symbol is manifesting itself in our reality,
And our protagonist in The Gernsback Continuum
is encountering that same thing with the 1930's art-deco vision of the future.
This idea that through the meaning making process we collectively make symbols real
is essential for Gibson as he goes on to immagine Cyber Space
the idea that the virtual can be as real as reality is essential to his vision of the Internet.
And though we don't have troads and we don't fly through Cyberspace on the giant
virtual sharks he envisioned,
alas,
it turns out that Gibson was still right
Our virtual lives, to many of us, are as real as our real lives
and the online space is as real,
or at least certainly as present as the world we walk around in.
On top of that, and just as important to Gibson's later work
we are forming new shared symbols constantly.
Pop stars,
celebrities,
art-- be it songs, or novels, or
something we haven't even invented yet,
all of these things can serve as symbols for us
they can create meaning.
And any of them can slowly become a new semiotic ghost.
The protagonist in this book happens to get swept up in the semiotic ghost of Hugo Gernsback
at a time when most of the world had left those symbols behind.
But we are forming and forgetting new semiotic ghosts
all the time.
And that idea is gonna play a huge part in Gibson's Bridge trilogy.
But perhaps more than anything,
these semiotic ghosts
serve as an answer for Gibson,
these ghosts are something we reach out to
and cling to to create meaning in a world where
meaning is increasingly obscured by scale and technology.
These ghosts are almost a defense mechanism.
When we become so alienated
so left behind by the society we inhabit
We turn instead to these symbols and lach on
making meaning from them.
In many ways you could say our subcultures and our political identities today are grapes
at meaning.
That they are just some of our modern semiotic ghosts.
At least that's the idea he's toying with in The Gernsback Continuum.
But that's not the only exploration of modern alienation that Gibson will present us.
He'll show us another take on isolation next time
as we talk about
The Belonging Kind.
[End Theme]