MITCH R. MURRAY AND MATHIAS NILGES

INTRODUCTION

PERIODIZING GIBSON

On the cusp of the new millennium, The Guardian considered William Gibson “in terms of concrete influence probably the most important novelist of the past two decades.” ¹ Gibson’s groundbreaking 1984 debut novel Neuromancer , for instance, was a tremendous global success. It sold close to eight million copies, received numerous awards, was translated into dozens of languages, and was adapted (among other media) into films, a graphic novel, a radio play, and an opera. A major film adaptation, directed by Tim Miller, was announced in late 2017, underscoring the continued significance and renewed importance of Gibson’s early work in the context of our current return to a brand of “cyberpunk 2.0.” ² Yet as Tim Adams notes, ten years passed before the New York Times mentioned Neuromancer . ³ There exists a notable temporal lag between the rise in popularity and influence of Gibson’s work and its critical reception. Despite his rapidly growing global influence, mainstream commentary has registered the significance of Gibson’s work with substantial delay. Literary and cultural criticism lags further behind. To date, there exists no collection of essays tracing the wide-ranging influence and cultural importance of Gibson’s work. In the volume of the Cambridge American Literature in Transition series dedicated to the 2000 to 2010 decade (the same decade in which Gibson made the dramatic shift from cyberpunk to a new kind of realism in Pattern Recognition , widely known as the first novel to directly address the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011), for example, Gibson garners only two passing mentions. ⁴ William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture aims to address this long-standing and in many ways baffling problem: Gibson is one of the most well-known and globally influential North American authors in recent decades, yet his work remains underexamined and its reach and significance underappreciated. Together, the essays we gather here highlight the scale of Gibson’s work by trading in localized readings of select works for large-scale explorations of the implications and significance of Gibson’s work for the development of recent literature and culture and for literary and cultural criticism.

Before we turn to an outline of and introduction to this volume’s critical project, it is useful to survey the notable breadth and richness of Gibson’s creative output to illustrate the immensely productive archive it provides for critical interrogation. Born on March 17, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina, Gibson moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1968, relocating later to the West Coast. In 1977, he graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in English literature. Although Gibson is most well known as a novelist, he began his career writing short fiction. In 1977, he published his first short story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” which emerged out of his undergraduate work. Although Gibson has remained a prolific writer of short fiction in his career, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the publication of what arguably became his most significant series of short stories. These stories, which were collected in the volume Burning Chrome (1986), remain relatively underexamined yet significant insofar as they establish Gibson’s voice as one of the key authors of the cyberpunk genre (including Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Masamune Shirow, and Bruce Sterling, among others). Neuromancer —the first volume in his Sprawl trilogy, which also includes Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—was soon established as one of the ur-texts of cyberpunk. Several essays in this volume return to this formative stage in Gibson’s work and outline how his early short stories lay the groundwork for developing his stylistic and formal constants and some of the foundations of cyberpunk in general. Most of Gibson’s short stories remain uncollected and have been published in a wide variety of venues. No doubt, some editing work remains to be done to make this crucial and understudied facet of Gibson’s work more accessible to readers. Gibson is also a prolific essayist and writer of nonfiction, contributing frequently to publications like the New York Times and Wired . Some of this work has been collected in the volume Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012). As Kylie Korsnack shows in her contribution to this book, Gibson’s nonfiction not only provides us with an invaluable resource for contextualizing and understanding his larger oeuvre, but much of it remains underappreciated as a source of striking ideas and critiques of our historical present.

After the Sprawl trilogy and Burning Chrome established him as one of the “godfathers” of cyberpunk and one of the key voices in the rejuvenation and innovation of science fiction in the 1980s, Gibson transitioned into a particularly productive period. During the 1990s, Gibson published a second trilogy, the Bridge trilogy, consisting of the novels Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). In addition, Gibson collaborated with fellow science fiction writer Bruce Sterling to publish The Difference Engine (1990). Bafflingly enough, some of these 1990s works are often understood as Gibson’s least interesting output. Yet as Takayuki Tatsumi, a foremost critic of cyberpunk’s transnational flows between the United States and Japan, illustrates in his chapter, The Difference Engine ’s alternate history—particularly its constant movement between Western Enlightenment and the development of Western and American modern social and political structures on one hand and the rise of Japanese modernity on the other—enables Gibson and Sterling to develop their particularly rich version of steampunk, which deploys the same speculative blend of the historical and the political that characterizes cyberpunk. Strikingly reconfiguring steampunk into another innovation on the level of cyberpunk, Tatsumi gives us a new way of understanding this apparent outlier among Gibson’s works as “hardcore cyberpunk in the disguise of steampunk.” In fact, the 1990s may be considered among the most formally and medially experimental periods in Gibson’s career. Given that Gibson, as the essays in this book together show, was fundamentally dedicated to formal and generic innovation based on interrogating the relationship between historical change and generic conventions, this is a significant statement.

In addition to charting new generic territory in steampunk, in the 1990s Gibson also branched out into screenwriting. He adapted his short story “Johnny Mnemonic” into a screenplay of the same title in 1995, and he wrote two episodes of the TV show The X-Files : “Kill Switch” and “First Person Shooter,” which aired in 1995 and 2000, respectively. Andrew M. Butler’s chapter sets into play these underexamined screenplays as key moments in Gibson’s rich and evolving artistic project. Gibson struggled to replicate his success as a science fiction author in his screenwriting. Nonetheless, Butler shows, Gibson’s work as a screenwriter marks a significant stage in his development as a writer on par with his stories and novels. Butler reads Gibson’s scripts in Marc Augé’s terms as attempts to represent “the nonplaces of supermodernity” and thus “the ongoing alienation of the individual in the world (non)place of late capitalism” that continues to subtend his fiction. Because these scripts demand a struggle with different cultural mediums such as film and television, we must also understand this aspect of Gibson’s work as central to his later attention to the artistic and political differences between mediums.

On December 9, 1992, in a performance titled “The Transmission,” author, musician, actor, illusionist, and free-market advocate Penn Jillette read portions of a poem that stands at the center of the multimedia artwork Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992), produced collaboratively by Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. Agrippa consists of a 300-line poem by Gibson, stored on a 3.5-inch floppy disk, held inside an artist’s book created by Ashbaugh. ⁵ The disk with the poem is programmed to automatically encrypt itself after a single use. The pages of the artist’s book are chemically treated to cause a gradual (and ultimately complete) fading after the book’s first exposure to light. Although Agrippa remains one of Gibson’s least frequently studied works, it is notable in its attention to precisely those questions that his writing explores in his larger body of work. Agrippa asks, for instance, how we should understand the relation between those artistic media that are brought into connection and possibly seamlessly intertwined in the digital era. For instance, what is the status of the text, writing, and literature in the digital era, and where do traditionally established boundaries that separate mediums end in this new historical context? In other words, Agrippa highlights that Gibson’s work, in addition to striving to innovate science fiction, is fundamentally wedded to his attempt to probe the historically changing status and function of art in general and of literature and writing in particular. This self-reflexive component of his work, we would argue, lends it notable complexity and richness and makes it particularly salient for critical inquiry and as a form of critique in its own right: Gibson’s work, this volume seeks to illustrate, contains a critical archive of the historical—which is to say social, political, and material—development of literature and culture after the 1970s.

In 2003, Gibson shocked his fans and critics alike with what was widely understood to amount to another significant generic and formal innovation: the publication of Pattern Recognition , the first novel in what came to be called either the Blue Ant trilogy or the Bigend trilogy. What shocked readers who had come to associate Gibson centrally with cyberpunk was that Pattern Recognition is a realist novel. Although readers wondered if he had abandoned cyberpunk (with whose invention he had often been credited), Gibson himself insisted this was not the case. He was still writing cyberpunk, he suggested, tongue significantly in cheek, but history had changed such that what used to look like cyberpunk now simply looked like our present. What underlies this remark is one of Gibson’s fundamental and sincere convictions to which William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture returns time and again: science fiction, if it can serve as a form of critique of and interrogation into the historical conditions of the present, must be self-reflexively attuned to the dialectical relationship between historical and generic change at every moment. What happens, Gibson’s work asks, when history renders genre conventions or established images of the future obsolete? How may science fiction answer the call to constantly innovate to maintain its vital connection to history and its critical function as an interrogation of our historical present? As several essays in this book show, Pattern Recognition and the two novels that complete this trilogy, Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010), together ask precisely these questions, and Gibson’s turn to realism should be understood as yet another crucial development in science fiction, one that marks a new stage in his work that is aimed at historicizing and exploring the historical limits of cyberpunk.

The 2010s have been marked by a further stage in this project to examine what critics are beginning to describe as, and what this book understands as, a postcyberpunk era. Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral blends some of the trademark strategies of his cyberpunk period with their reformulation during the “realist” period in a turn to examinations of multidimensional time-travel narratives. Yet Gibson anchors his time-travel narratives not in the long and often lowbrow history of time travel tales but in the crucial attention to matters of time and temporality that his work, beginning with Pattern Recognition , understands as central to our ability to historicize our present and its attendant aesthetic, political, and philosophical crises. Likewise, Agency , published in January 2020, just as we were finishing this volume, extends this most recent project. ⁶ In addition, the 2010s mark yet another stage in Gibson’s exploration of different mediums. From 2016 to 2017, he published a five-issue limited series comic book, Archangel , and in 2018–2019, his rejected Alien III screenplay (1987) was adapted into a miniseries by Dark Horse Comics. ⁷

Given the rich, innovative, and multifaceted nature of Gibson’s work, we are astounded that much editing work remains to be done to gather and make more accessible aspects of his work and critical responses to it. Of course, by pointing out the absence of a collection of critical essays dedicated to the historical significance of Gibson’s work and the general lag between his rise to global success and the beginning of a wider critical engagement, we do not mean to question the significance of the important work that some critics have been producing since the 1980s. Although several aspects of Gibson’s work remain strikingly under-explored (one may point toward the Bridge trilogy as an example), there certainly exists some notable critical work on Gibson. Yet it must be said that existing criticism on Gibson is decidedly uneven: it ranges from well-researched and intricately argued gems of science fiction criticism to approaches that struggle to transcend reverence or the desire to pinpoint what exactly his innovative creative output truly means for science fiction in particular and contemporary culture in general. A comprehensive bibliography of existing criticism on Gibson is available elsewhere and lists available critical sources and a full list of Gibson’s work. ⁸ Here, we wish to foreground some sources that we consider particularly helpful for beginning readers and scholars of William Gibson. In addition, these sources are formative for the essays we gather in this book. In some cases, we are fortunate to be able to include work by critics who revisit some of their own earlier engagements with Gibson’s work that have since become notable in their own right.

There exist two excellent book-length studies of Gibson’s life and work, which include biographical detail that many readers will find helpful: Gerald Alva Miller’s Understanding William Gibson (2016) and Gary Westfahl’s William Gibson (2013). In addition, Neil Easterbrook’s contribution to the volume Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction offers a concise and accessible overview of Gibson’s biography and works. ⁹ Given that interrogating the era of globalization is a crucial aspect of Gibson’s work, it is not surprising that some critics have examined this aspect in some detail. Notable essays in this field include Fredric Jameson’s “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” Tom Moylan’s “Global Economy, Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tension in William Gibson’s Cyberpunk Trilogy,” and Lee Konstantinou’s “The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition .” ¹⁰ Critics like Sherryl Vint and Timo Siivonen have produced important studies of how Gibson’s work offers us striking reexaminations of the relationship between the body and technology. ¹¹ A number of excellent critical essays by Lauren Berlant, Veronica Hollinger, Lisa Swanstrom, and Robert Briggs explore the relation between genre, time, memory, and history in Gibson’s work, a particular focus of recent critical approaches. ¹² Darko Suvin, Jaak Tomberg, Vint, and Phillip E. Wegner have generated some of the most notable examinations of Gibson’s generic and formal innovations and of his significance for the historical development of science fiction. ¹³ Finally, some of the earliest critical work on Gibson includes essays by critics like Easterbrook, Larry McCaffery, Claire Sponsler, and Hollinger, which examine Gibson’s significance in the context of the rise of literary and philosophical postmodernism. ¹⁴

With this gloss on Gibson’s oeuvre and some of the most valuable critical engagements with it in mind, allow us to emphasize the goals, scope, and interventions of this volume. We understand Gibson’s long career, spanning from the height of postmodernism to the contemporary, as not just central to some key developments in recent science fiction and its subgenres but also as a privileged microcosm in which to develop and test the kinds of literary and cultural criticism that help us grasp the unfolding present of globalization or full postmodernity. Gibson’s works, we maintain, not only attempt to narrativize the ungraspable totality of a contemporary history still in process, they also offer models of thought and criticism adequate to this historical development—a claim further borne out in the chapters that follow by their diversity of approaches, from digital humanities and critical finance studies, game studies and media archaeology, to the ontological turn. With this wide array of approaches—necessitated by the expansiveness and internal heterogeneity of Gibson’s corpus—we have organized this book according to three overarching questions or problematics: Gibson and literary history, Gibson and the question of medium, and the problem of the present. To be up front about it, these categorizations are porous and somewhat artificial. Many of the contributions to this collection could have appeared under two or all three sections. To engage with an author such as Gibson, who is deliberate in his treatment of these questions and many more besides, as well as the historicity of his own oeuvre, demands such porousness, “as though you could not say one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system.” ¹⁵ We hope, then, to give our readers some indication of our contributors’ major themes and interests while inviting them to proliferate the connections among them and, in the spirit of this collection, produce their own recapitulations of Gibson’s rich contribution to recent literature and culture.

Bringing together a wide range of critical accounts of Gibson’s significance and making legible the large-scale influence of his writings on contemporary literature and culture, this book argues that a fuller exploration of this author’s work can yield compelling models for practicing literary and cultural criticism today. Indeed, Maria Alberto and Elizabeth Swanstrom show provocatively that Gibson’s fiction, through its parallel relation with science fiction studies and through specific tropes and strategies like cyberpunk’s elision of the distinctions between human and computer that characterized mid-century science fiction, gave critics new vocabularies and problematics that presaged the kind of cultural critique that came to define what we now call the digital humanities. For Alberto and Swanstrom, Gibson’s work offers an opportunity to cross digital humanities’ most pressing disciplinary divide: between the computationally literate and the sociopolitically astute. Moreover, they signal a claim central to this collection as a whole: namely, that Gibson’s fiction is especially amenable to enabling such intra-and interdisciplinary jumps.

We begin the work toward such an interdisciplinary project of literary criticism when we consider some key tendencies in contemporary criticism, at least two of which take on especial importance here and underwrite to some degree all the chapters to follow: periodizing “the contemporary” and the “genre turn.” Let us begin with the latter. In recent years, literature and criticism alike (it is perhaps now cliché to note) have been undergoing a “genre turn,” which Andrew Hoberek suggests is one of the key developments in the Anglo-American literary field since 1999. Literature of this so-called post-postmodern period, Hoberek notes, might be located “in the embrace of the long-neglected storehouse of genre models built up over the years when experimentalism and realism were understood, to varying degrees, to constitute the literary.” ¹⁶ Gibson’s modulations of science fiction and other genres (steampunk, detective, time travel, the “geopolitical novel” ¹⁷ ) would seem to put him well ahead of the curve. One might reasonably expect that Gibson would find a good fit among contemporary critics’ revitalization of genre theory. But still, the absence of a full engagement with his oeuvre indicates a rather conservative and nostalgic vision of literature and literary criticism in the present. In conversation with Adams, Gibson recalls the allure of science fiction around the time of his writing Neuromancer : “The best thing about science fiction was always its lack of legitimacy. It was like, ‘Fuck it, I’ve run away and joined the circus.’ You couldn’t, for example, if things got tight, go and teach at Harvard like ‘real’ novelists.” ¹⁸ Although things have somewhat changed in this regard—and for the better, we would argue—Gibson implies here that our thinking about science fiction, about genre, and about what literature is and does is still largely molded by the institutional biases and power relations within which most academic labor is performed in North America.

In a clarifying account of the genre turn, Jeremy Rosen argues it is most properly understood as an “embrace [of] the genres of genre fiction, not genre fiction as such.” ¹⁹ Authors such as Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel, Cormac McCarthy, and Colson Whitehead “deploy such genres in ways that are marked as literary, both in their internal features and in the manner in which they are marketed and received in the literary field. Thus, certain works using these genres are marked as high-status while the bulk of popular production utilizing them gains no status boost whatsoever.” ²⁰ Rosen helpfully foregrounds the fact that the recent raiding of the genre storehouse in the literary field does not amount to the disappearance of distinction nor of literary regimes of value (and certainly not the end of their classed underpinnings). In short, the genre turn can be understood as yet another iteration of literary canonization. Carl Freedman, writing in 2000, just before Gibson made his leap to a more mainstream-able kind of realism, explains: “if science fiction has rarely been a privileged genre, this means that the literary powers-that-be have not wished science fiction to function within the social prestige that literature in the stronger sense enjoys.” Science fiction’s relatively rare inclusion among the ranks of great literature “results from a wholesale generic dismissal of a kind organic to canonization as a practice.” ²¹ In other words, the genre turn is as much a product of a literary criticism that perceives itself as losing its grip on its most prized object—the literary as such—as it might be any genuine interest in the affordances of genre fiction. Gibson is nothing if not a master literary stylist, and it is perhaps his strong footing in both “literary” genre fiction and straight-up science fiction that can account for some of the ambiguity with which his oeuvre is approached, even as his work puts pressure on the structural integrity of this division.

Meanwhile, science fiction and the field of science fiction studies also risk the institutional and disciplinary codifications that would reinstate and fortify the immutability of oppositions like genre/literature. Gibson often laments his identification with cyberpunk because it has enabled readers and critics to distance his work from science fiction as such, prizing it instead as a literary/genre blend while allowing what he considers science fiction’s most regressive tendencies to go unchallenged. “That label [cyberpunk] enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged,” with commitments to what Gibson saw as a “triumphalist, militaristic . . . folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.” ²² In criticism, genre and literary fiction may no longer be seen as determinate others, ²³ but they are nonetheless in danger of sliding (back) into reified niches of specialized knowledge with their agenda and concerns. As Wegner explains: “Science fiction studies often undertakes the quest for legitimacy under the aegis of a sociological or popular culture studies inclusiveness that flies in the face of conservative disciplinary retrenchments such as those of the new formalists or surface readers.” ²⁴ To adapt Gibson’s words, the best part of science fiction studies was always its lack of legitimacy. But you couldn’t, if things got tight, go teach science fiction at Harvard like a “real” literary critic. Wegner goes on, cautioning, “in disciplining, reifying, and isolating science fiction studies in this way we risk, as other once vibrant interdisciplinary projects such as film and American studies seem at times to have done, reinforcing the walls of our ghetto in the larger academic field.” ²⁵ Wegner’s contribution here likewise establishes Gibson’s historical significance for the development of science fiction, and he makes strides toward a claim central to this collection’s understanding of the current recomposition of the literary field, of which the genre turn is symptomatic: namely, with Neuromancer , Gibson fundamentally rewrote the rules not only of science fiction but also of the Anglo-American literary field more broadly speaking. Gibson’s work is an early indicator of what Wegner argues “we are only really coming to understand in the last decade or so: the crack up of what Mark McGurl identifies as the program era in American literature, the moment of the hegemony of a ‘literary’ writing style largely defined by MFA programs.”

Close attention to Gibson’s oeuvre, we maintain, gives us solid footing on a third route toward an understanding of the genre turn, one that harnesses the strengths of criticism of both “proper” literature and science fiction without making evaluative and moralizing claims about one over the other. Indeed, there have been several developments that make it increasingly difficult to dismiss the necessity of dissolving these hierarchical distinctions and polarizing critical commitments. To name just a few key instances in recent years, consider Gibson’s turn to a more hardcore science fiction with his take on the time travel subgenre (The Peripheral , Agency ); the massive popular and academic interest in N. K. Jemisin’s science fiction/fantasy the Broken Earth trilogy; the migration of “serious” authors to comics writing, including Ta-Nehisi Coates’s takeover of Black Panther and Captain America ; the increasing influence of literary science fiction authors on television writing and production, such as Charles Yu’s work on HBO’s Westworld (2016–) and FX’s Legion (2017–2019); and the turn to fantasy by major authors including Marlon James, Mohsin Hamid, and David Mitchell. Though still committed in some ways to the distinction of the literary, Hoberek nonetheless concludes that in its mixture of “postmodernism’s interest in alternative realities [and] realism’s commitment to accessibility and social impact, the genre turn opens up the possibility of a fiction capable of broadcasting visions of life not as it is, but as it might be.” ²⁶

We find in such work—both creative and critical—a vitalizing development for the kind of criticism that this collection forwards. In its most radical promises of cognitively mapping emerging post-postmodern realities and even in its most conservative reinstantiations of older literary institutions and values, today’s renewed attention to genre creates the preconditions necessary for a totalizing (if still incomplete) reckoning with Gibson’s place in the contemporary literary and critical scenes. That is, the willingness to take seriously previously maligned genres, especially speculative fictions like science fiction—whether as a liberatory potentiality or as a threat to the unsure status of proper literature—puts us today in a position to finally understand Gibson’s literary trajectory as not just a landmark in the territory of science fiction but also as a particularly important test-bed for the development of literature over the past four decades. In Postmodernism , Fredric Jameson found a vocabulary for the moment “when it all changed” by turning to Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive , and he registers his regret of not including a chapter about cyberpunk, which he named “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.” ²⁷ Since then, Gibson has been often pegged as a quintessential “postmodern” author. Yet this designation has been reified into its own style of late or has otherwise come to be a synonym to describe a novel as “globe-trotting,” “psychedelic,” “genre bending,” or whatever. In Gibson’s case, “postmodern” flattens the internal heterogeneity that has always driven his fiction forward. But his work provides a self-aware vocabulary that undercuts such a homogenizing take on his fiction. In Idoru , for instance, we meet Colin Laney who—in ways that very much presage Cayce Pollard’s allergy to brands that make her such an effective “cool hunter” in Pattern Recognition —discerns “patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in digital society. . . . Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch.” ²⁸ Laney calls these patterns of information “nodal points,” the experience of which is “like seeing things in clouds . . . Except the things you see are really there” (158). Or consider the idoru itself—a synthetic Japanese idol named Rei Toei—which literalizes what Gibson performs in narrative: “the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative” (190–91). We thus seek to surpass disciplinary divisions—both institutionalized and interiorized—and to move not toward a definitive account of Gibson’s career but toward models for a literary criticism with all the dialectical plasticity adequate to the unfurling historicity of the contemporary moment.

The situation we’ve been sketching, in which the genre turn’s internal tensions may be productively rethought and rearticulated, brings us to a second critical tendency with which Gibson’s work has always been centrally concerned, namely, the task of “historicizing the contemporary.” ²⁹ In what appears to be a corrective to the missing chapter on cyberpunk in Postmodernism , Jameson has argued that Neuromancer , more than any other work of science fiction, rose to the occasion of “the new incommensurabilities of that greatly enlarged and as it were post-anthropomorphic totality which is that of late or third-stage capitalism” and generated a “new and post-realistic but also post-modernistic way of giving us a picture and a sense of our individual relationships to realities that transcend our phenomenological mapping systems and our cognitive abilities to think them.” ³⁰ In this sense, “literature can serve as a registering apparatus for historical transformations we cannot otherwise empirically intuit, and in which Neuromancer stands as a precious symptom of our passage into another historical period.” ³¹ In William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture , by thoroughly examining Gibson’s career-long interrogation of genre, history, and changing notions of literariness, we show what his work can be understood to have always shown: it is not the genre turn but genre’s turning that is central to literature’s capacity to register and mediate historical change and, via narrative, make that change apprehensible by human thought. Gibson’s career full of genre turns foregrounds what we find to be a critically and politically useful way to approach his work: as a microcosm in which to track, on one hand, like the migrations of endangered species, the disappearance and historical exhaustion of genres, cultural imaginaries, and futures. On the other hand, just as important, these genres, imaginaries, and futures emerge under particular historical conditions in the context of which they allow us to respond to and, Gibson’s work shows, make sense of the world that is developing before our eyes. Gibson’s fiction, that is, instantiates a methodology for apprehending his work within its immanent progression and repetitions of (sub)genres.

In fact, Gibson’s fiction has always been strikingly aware of genre’s historical flux as a driver of artistic practice and possibility. Spook Country ’s Hollis Henry, for instance, is the lead voice of a defunct “early-nineties cult” band called The Curfew, which, in her words, “just ended. It stopped happening, at some essential level, though I never knew exactly when that happened. It became painfully apparent. So we packed it in.” ³² It is suggestive to read The Curfew as a postpunk or grunge band that, as Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction, was made inessential by the onset of what becomes increasingly and just as painfully apparent throughout the Blue Ant novels: the onset of globalization. Mathias Nilges returns to Gibson’s short fiction to show that the historical ebb and flow of genres have been methodological and formal constants from the very beginning. “The Gernsback Continuum,” for instance, outlines the historical and political stakes of cyberpunk as the necessary departure from outdated literary and epistemological forms of futurity. We find the same methodological commitment in later formal shifts, such as the one from cyberpunk to realism beginning with Pattern Recognition . By understanding Gibson’s earliest stories as methodological blueprints according to which later novels are built, we gain a deeper understanding of Gibson’s attention to the relation between history, our temporal imagination, and literary form. Focusing similarly on the tension between realism and science fiction, Sherryl Vint argues that Pattern Recognition should be read as a convergence of the two through which Gibson generates an “estranged vision of living in the present.” Through this vision, Vint shows, the Blue Ant trilogy mediates the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the temporal foreclosure resulting from what she describes as our “productized future.” But even as neoliberalism names a structure without an apparent outside, by examining the opposition between art and advertising, Vint traces a palpable sense of nostalgia in Gibson’s work: a nostalgia for the power of art to “resist capitalism’s infiltration of social and political life.” Aron Pease addresses this productized future we inhabit by routing a discussion of Gibson’s landmark literary invention (cyberspace) through Henri Lefebvre and the revolutionary “invention” of linear perspective with Brunelleschi in fifteenth-century Florence. Pease shows that space ( cyber-or otherwise) is also always a mediation of historically specific “scenes of accumulation.” If Gibson’s cyberspace was able to figure the internet as an emerging site of “prosumption” (in which consumption becomes a new kind of production). Understood as such a figure for space, Pease argues that Gibson has never really left cyberspace behind. Rather, cyberspace finds updated articulations in the Blue Ant trilogy, in the textures of the Gibsonian sentence, and in novelistic form, that key into the new realities of the global market.

Just as Gibson’s fiction provides new figurations and expressions of the ever-shifting contemporary, several contributors set aside the particularities of his individual works and foreground how they anticipate or provide new vocabularies for emerging disciplinary approaches to literature and culture. Amy J. Elias notes that Gibson’s time-travel fiction ratchets up his interest in ontology at precisely the same time literary and cultural criticism are swept up by movements like object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and Anthropocene studies. Yet, Elias argues, what these new methods and disciplines do at their best—even if, at their worst, they miss while Gibson himself is on the mark—is shuttle us back to the fundamental historical mutability of human sociality. What goes “often unacknowledged in theoretical discussions about realist ontology, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, and some versions of posthumanism,” Elias maintains, is the fundamental “problem of relation, for though we may be in relation to all other things in a flat ontology, we still have the ability to act according to our abilities, to enact power over others.”

Similarly, Roger Whitson argues, reading The Difference Engine and The Peripheral as case studies, that Gibson’s works have never just been “about” historical, cultural, and technological transformations. Rather, they are fundamentally tied to what is made materially allowable and historically thinkable. With the rise of computational technologies during Gibson’s lifetime, the “untold textures of history blur into various data storage techniques,” which are far from politically neutral, themselves saturated with what Walter Benjamin called “anonymous forced labor” or the barbarism subtending all documents of great culture. If in these novels media archaeology shows us how nonhuman technological actors aid the “remak[ing of] the world in line with a logic that may regard human beings with complete indifference,” Gibson and Sterling also importantly make visible that otherwise invisible maker’s mark imprinted on all technological development: the past, present, and future history of class struggle.

Christian P. Haines’s Marxist critique of The Peripheral foregrounds Gibson’s increasing interest in perhaps the preeminent medium of financialized capitalism: video games. Gibson has often spoken of his fascination with arcade games and the micro-communities that emerged around them, but today, Haines argues, gaming is not only suitable content for science fiction but a key logic through which capitalism cultivates financialized subjectivities. The Peripheral , Haines argues, “transposes the register of finance into the domain of digital games.” Far from merely depicting the contemporary moment, Haines understands this transposition as precisely what enables us to forward a critical account of the reticulations of financial speculation and risk, militarism, digital technology, and precarious labor.

Confronted, it would seem, with an epistemologically insurmountable capitalism, Kylie Korsnack’s essay traces the problem of what she calls “temporal leveling” through Gibson’s work and shows how historically specific temporal crises that make the future unavailable to thought, culture, and politics constitute one of Gibson’s central concerns. Korsnack shows that Gibson’s examination of time and futurity that mediate moments of historical transition are always bound up with provocative reflections on the status and possibility of art. In a “sustained reflection on the relationship between art, temporality, and human experience in contemporary culture,” Gibson’s fiction does more than just point to the present’s contradictions and foreclosures: it provides us with a hopeful orientation toward, a way of optimistically inhabiting, a time marked by severe crises.

Much like Gibson himself—born in South Carolina, raised in Virginia, and self-expatriated to Canada—we write this with a weird polyspatial and -temporal perspective from Canada and the US South. It is difficult, from such a perspective, to not register our own cultural, historical, and political disjunctions and continua that Gibson’s fiction has always sought to capture. To quote Malka Older’s foreword, Gibson “provides us with the relief of seeing our peripatetic modern experience represented in prose and with a kind of practice in continuing that existence more aware and more alert to the new ways we fall apart and fit together.” In dark times such as these—afflicted by the rise of neofascisms around the world, climate crisis, and capitalism’s stranglehold on our imaginative and material lives—if literary criticism is to mean anything it must, we maintain, enact a sustained critique of all the ways we fall apart. Without being too naive, just dialectical, it must also attune us to the emergence of alternative visions of contemporaneity without which there is no “now” on which possible and better futures can stand. We thus end with a final word from Charles Yu, one of the most compelling new voices in science fiction to emerge after Gibson. Reading Gibson with equal parts bewilderment and exhilaration, Yu suggests that what makes his oeuvre so monumental—when you get right down to it—is that it enacts the fundamental labor of all good fiction: worldbuilding “at the level of fundamental particles, in the language itself. Realities built word by word.” This collection and its contributors ultimately stride toward this rich, utopian possibility of language, literature, the arts, and reading itself.