Weird.

[brooksmoses]

Way back when I was much younger, I happened across a short-story -- "The Gernsback Continuum" -- in the back of a random science magazine. Possibly Science 89, which changed its name each year, and is not to be confused with the respected journal Science; in any case, some unheralded science magazine that had reprinted it.

On some level, that short story affected quite a lot of how I've thought about science fiction. I had the cultural pieces of art-deco Gernsbackian scientifiction, and as a barely-teenaged boy I found it quite fascinating. Flying wings with 12 engines? Scores of tiny one-person cars hovering over ten-lane highways? Streamlined cities with streams of flying taxis? It was all about the sense of wonder, and I found it wondrous, but I didn't actually know much of it. And so this story looms large in my conceptions of that whole genre -- perhaps larger in memory than in reality; I found an online copy just now, and even discounting the really bad editing that's probably to be expected in unauthorized online versions, I don't know that it quite lives up to my recollections. But, even so, it introduced the idea to me that there were other people who thought that 12-engine flying wings with onboard ballrooms were really neat, despite the impossibility.

Anyhow, I just randomly discovered that it was written by William Gibson.

I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I suspect you may have missed the point of "The Gernsback Continuum", which to be fair is really easy to do if you're a barely-teenaged boy reading SF for sense-of-wonder. Basically, it's a meditation on the poisoned chalice of pre-WW2 modernism, and points out rather obviously that the vision of the 12-engine flying wings with onboard ballrooms comes with a rather disturbing shadow – the future is populated exclusively by blonde eugenically-perfected Aryan clones and everyone else has vanished from the tidy picture.

It's no coincidence that Hugo Gernsback's science fiction began catching on in the 1920s, close to the peak of the modernist movements in the arts, concurrently with the birth of fascism as a mass movement and it's weird sibling the Technocrat party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocratic_movement) in the USA.