FLUXEUROPA: WILLIAM GIBSON

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WILLIAM GIBSON'S DYSTOPIA

THE Canadian science-fiction writer, William Gibson, was not only a leading founder of the 'cyberpunk' genre, but is credited with coining the term 'cyberspace' before the Internet really existed. As such he is also regarded as a guru of futurology.

His claim to fame began with the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer, in 1984. As in Blade Runner, or the Judge Dredd cartoon strip, Gibson depicts a gritty, dystopic future combining hi-tech gadgetry and a reversion to primitivism.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the concept, cyberpunk deals with the man-machine interface (cyber) and the subversive use of the system's technology by marginalised outsiders (punk).

The only Gibson novel I've so far actually read myself is Virtual Light (1993), though I take this to be indicative of the genre. While other science fiction writers imagined post-apocalyptic dystopias, Gibson's dystopia results from an insidious drift. It's where we are now only more so.

Multinational corporations dominate a polluted world; old states break up into smaller regions; an underclass wracked by drugs, crime and disease depends on synthetics while a rich but embattled super-class defends itself with private police forces; lawyers and litigation proliferate; crime is systematically commercially exploited (never mind a lawyer: ring my agent); and, in a world where cultural history has stopped, the past is constantly recycled through the screening of old films. If this sounds all too familiar it's because Gibson is a very funny satirist, writing as much about the present as predicting the future...

Virtual Light reads like a sci-fi Raymond Chandler novel, but with early modernist/postmodernist tricks of fracture and leaving things unexplained. I thought the ending was insufficiently climatic, but I enjoyed the book as a whole and certainly intend to read the others.

Besides his futurist novels, he collaborated with Bruce Sterling in writing The Difference Engine (1991), an alternative history of a steam-computer Victorian England.

Rik - 16 January 1996

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burning Chrome 1986
Neuromancere 1984
Count Zero 1986
Mona Lisa Overdrive 1988
The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling) 1991
Virtual Light 1993
Idoru 1996