CHAPTER 1 . . . PHILLIP E. WEGNER

WHEN IT CHANGED

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE LITERARY FIELD, CIRCA 1984

I am confident many readers will recognize that my title is taken from one of the great works of New Wave science fiction, Joanna Russ’s Nebula Award–winning short story “When It Changed” (1972), the precursor to her landmark “critical utopia” The Female Man (1975). ¹ Russ’s story focuses on the arrival of a group of aliens—men from Earth—on the planet of Whileaway, a former Earth colony where six centuries earlier all human males died off as the result of a plague and the surviving women built a flourishing society without them. At the conclusion of the story, the narrator acknowledges that this event will alter their lives irrevocably, fearing that the result will be the reinstallation of the hierarchies and oppressions they had lived without for more than a half millennium: “Men are coming to Whileaway. When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictability about the outcome.” ²

At the same time, in a far more affirmative sense, Russ’s title also could be understood as referring to her story’s publication, as well as that of the anthology in which it appeared—the Harlan Ellison–edited collection Again, Dangerous Visions , which also included Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo Award–winning antiwar novella The Word for World Is Forest , the latter a direct influence on the original Star Wars franchise and James Cameron’s Avatar . ³ These works had a profound effect on the field of science fiction, inaugurating a vibrant new wave of feminist and militant utopian science fiction. In terms of the practice of science fiction, then, 1972 should also be understood as one of those years when things changed.

In this essay, I focus on another year of equally significant literary and cultural transformation. The year 1984 has long been of singular importance in the history of science fiction, largely because it was chosen by George Orwell as the fictional setting for his grim masterpiece, the anti-utopian dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). ⁴ However, 1984 also proved to be of great significance within the genre, as it witnessed the publication of three novels—Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand , William Gibson’s Neuromancer , and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore —which, as I suggest here, at once mark the past, present, and future of the practice of science fiction and notions of the literary more generally.

The year 1984 was one of extraordinary ferment and change in cultural production writ larger, so much so that in an earlier essay on Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) I advance the claim that 1984 stands to postmodernism as 1922 does to modernism. ⁵ Not surprisingly, a number of the works released in that year—Martin Amis’s satirical novel Money , Michael Radford’s film Nineteen Eighty-Four , Ridley Scott’s legendary Apple Macintosh commercial, and Nam June Paik’s experimental multimedia broadcast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell —directly take up and respond to themes and concerns in Orwell’s fiction, all working to show, as the final title card of Scott’s commercial declares, “Why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’” Among other significant texts appearing that year were J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun ; Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot ; Thomas Bernhard’s Holzfällen ; Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac ; Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus ; Don DeLillo’s White Noise ; Anita Desai’s In Custody ; Marguerite Duras’s L’amant ; Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine ; Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being ; David Lodge’s Small World: An Academic Romance ; Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni ; Rudy Rucker’s Master of Space and Time ; and Madath Thekkepaattu Vasudevan Nair’s Randamoozham . The year saw the publication of debut novels by Iain Banks (The Wasp Factory ), Sandra Cisneros (The House of Mango Street ), Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October ), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine ), Keri Hulme (The Bone People ), Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City ), and Neal Stephenson (The Big U ); and the release of such influential films as James Cameron’s The Terminator ; the Coen brothers’ directorial debut, Blood Simple ; Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club ; Brian De Palma’s Body Double ; Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense ; Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise ; Robert Mark Kamen’s The Karate Kid ; David Lynch’s Dune ; Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap ; John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet ; and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas . In 1984, the second and third volumes of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking Histoire de la sexualité were published, as was the expanded English-language edition of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . Philip Johnson’s iconic AT&T Building in New York City (whose open pediment crown one critic recently suggests “may be the single most important architectural detail of the last fifty years” ⁶ ) and PPG Place in Pittsburgh were completed that year. Michael Azerrad, using a phrase that recalls Harry Levin’s celebrated characterization of the modernist year 1922, notes that for punk music 1984 “yielded a spate of bona fide classics: the Meat Puppets’ Meat Puppets II , Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade , the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime , the Replacements’ Let It Be , and Black Flag’s lesser but no less influential My War . It was an annus mirabilis for indie”; and Billboard magazine similarly names 1984 “pop music’s best year ever.” ⁷

The year also witnessed the publication of a series of essays by literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson that brought to new prominence the notion of “postmodernism.” The most significant of these essays first appeared in the summer in the pages of New Left Review , under the title “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” ⁸ Perry Anderson points out that this essay “redrew the whole map of the postmodern at one stroke—a prodigious inaugural gesture that has commanded the field ever since.” ⁹ Near the conclusion of his essay, Jameson characterizes postmodernism—or what he now refers to as postmodernity—as involving fundamental mutations in global space:

What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralizing and depressing original new global space which is the “moment of truth” of postmodernism . . . postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy, but has genuine historical (and socio-economic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language). As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis of reality), at the same time that they can equally well be analyzed as so many attempts to distract and to divert us from that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the guise of various formal mystifications. ¹⁰

(The significance of the latter part of this statement for a discussion of Neuromancer will become evident shortly.) Such an expansion involves, Jameson maintains, “a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is, the destruction of precapitalist third world agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the advertising industry.” ¹¹ The reason Jameson does not use “globalization” to describe these spatial transformations is that this concept-term was not yet available; as Doug Henwood demonstrates, it did not rise to prominence until the mid-1990s. ¹² Jameson’s direct engagement with the notion of globalization begins in earnest with his essay, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” first presented at a conference in 1994. ¹³

Jameson claims in the original “Postmodernism” essay that as a consequence of this transformation of space, contemporary or postmodern culture is “increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic.” ¹⁴ A little earlier, he notes, “We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism proper.” ¹⁵ In the final section, Jameson moves beyond the diagnostic or denotative mode and into the performative, with a call for developing an original aesthetic practice: “the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of such new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping .” ¹⁶

Few notions in Jameson’s project have been more misunderstood than that of cognitive mapping. I argue in Periodizing Jameson (2014) that what he calls for here is not the invention of cognitive mapping per se—it already exists on the scale of the city, as demonstrated in Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), from which Jameson takes the term. I maintain that the great breakthrough of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is to begin to articulate a cognitive mapping for the emerging social and cultural scale of the nation-state, with all the political and cultural consequences that follow. ¹⁷ Rather, what Jameson demands in “Postmodernism” is a dialectical reinvention—not merely a quantitative but a qualitative change—of cognitive mapping for our original situation of globalization or postmodernity. He concludes the essay in this way:

The new political art—if it is indeed possible at all—will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is, to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. ¹⁸

Moreover, in his most recent book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), Jameson emphasizes that such a labor of cognitive mapping will always be allegorical in nature: the crucial allegorical questions concern “the relationship of the levels to one another, and whether any proper allegorical reading exists in a situation in which there is, if not a contradiction, then at least a disjunction between the anagogical (or world-political) level and the literal or domestic-political levels. Allegory thereby serves as a diagnostic instrument to reveal this disjuncture, which is itself the cause of political aimlessness and apathy.” ¹⁹

Many of the works I mentioned already were similarly marked by or even deeply involved in remaking cultural and social space—the lived and the conceived respectively, to use Henri Lefebvre’s terms—and especially that of the dominant US metropolises of New York City and Los Angeles. One of the most influential of these was McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City , which participated in a reorganization of the city’s literary establishment and a reconquest of the spaces of Lower Manhattan by the increasingly powerful class fraction known as the yuppies. (Newsweek magazine proclaimed 1984 to be “The Year of the Yuppie” in its year-end issue, graced with a cover by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau.) Jameson points out that although the yuppies do not represent anything “like a new ruling class . . . their cultural practices and values, their local ideologies, have articulated a useful dominant ideological and cultural paradigm for this stage of capital.” ²⁰ Amis’s Money similarly attests to the rise of this middle-class social fraction and their role in the reorganization of the London–New York–Los Angeles cultural and spatial axes. The transformation of LA’s film industry and the city’s spatial map are also at work in the unlikely film diptych of Cameron’s The Terminator and De Palma’s Body Double , both released on Friday, October 26, 1984, the same day as Michael Jordan’s debut in the NBA. ²¹ Conversely, two novels that look toward and educate our desire for the utopian potential in the older urban fabric of the city, especially New York City, are Kathy Acker’s first major experimental work, Blood and Guts in High School and Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand .

Delany’s novel was overshadowed by the publication of a debut work in the influential New Ace Science Fiction Specials series edited by Terry Carr: Gibson’s Neuromancer . Nowhere is the triumph of postmodernism over an older modernist sensibility, with “its innovative and indeed subversive power,” more clearly evident than in the couple of Delany’s and Gibson’s novels. ²² Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand stands as the last great monument of science fiction’s extraordinarily rich and diverse period established in the 1960s and known as the New Wave, which I describe in Shockwaves of Possibility as a modernist formation within the specific institutional situation of science fiction; Neuromancer represents the first major work in the singular postmodern movement known as cyberpunk. ²³ Indeed, Veronica Hollinger claims, “Science fiction ‘officially’ became postmodern in 1984, with the publication of William Gibson’s now-classic Cyberpunk novel.” ²⁴

Delany’s novel marks an ending of another sort: although originally intended as the first book of an extended two-volume narrative, it turned out to be his final major science fiction work, at least until 2012’s quasi–science fictional Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders . Although Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand has always had its champions—Carl Freedman refers to it as “the most intellectually ambitious work in the entire range of modern science fiction,” an assessment with which I would not disagree, and Steven Shaviro offers a rich and stimulating engagement with the novel—it has largely languished among science fiction and more general readers alike, a massive achievement whose greatness is often attested to but more rarely visited. ²⁵ Gibson’s novel, on the other hand, quickly attracted an immense readership, not only among science fiction fans but, even more interestingly, among literary scholars and critics, who in the past would have rarely engaged with the genre.

As a result, cyberpunk—with its poaching from and pastiche of a wide range of styles and genres, including noir detective fiction, its affirmative portrayal of virtual reality and new informational technologies, and its low-affect “mirror shades” cool—quickly came to be recognized as a privileged symptom of postmodern cultural production more generally. Jameson testifies to the rapid rise of the work’s significance in one of the only three additions he makes to the 1991 republication of the original “Postmodernism” essay: cyberpunk, he later claims, “is fully as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself: William Gibson’s representational innovations, indeed, mark his work as an exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual or aural postmodern production.” ²⁶

Gibson’s cyberpunk contributed to a significant reorganization of not only science fiction but also the literary field more generally. The transformation to which the work will contribute is indicated only four years after its publication, in Larry McCaffery’s contribution, “The Fictions of the Present,” to the Columbia Literary History of the United States . McCaffery writes of the current moment:

Crucially, however, that “daily world” was frequently portrayed as an ambiguous construct in constant flux, a mass of information, words, and images whose “meaning” was deferred, whose very “reality” was suspect, unknowable. In short, this daily world was a shifting, fabulous entity greatly resembling the poststructuralist text, a world whose depiction required a definition of “realism” flexible enough to accommodate the claims to “realistic aims” made by writers as different as Robert Coover, Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Abish, Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Max Apple, and Leslie Silko. ²⁷

McCaffrey even uses the celebrated opening line of Neuromancer —“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”—as his essay’s epigraph. ²⁸

Like all such lists, McCaffrey’s is partly an exercise in canon formation, a performative speech act aimed to convince his readers what they should spend their time reading. Brian McHale is correct in his engagement with McCaffery’s essay to point out that “the myth of the collapse of hierarchical distinctions in postmodern culture is just that, a myth, and the institutions for the production, distribution, and consumption of high culture continue to be distinct from those for popular culture.” ²⁹ What McHale misrecognizes, or perhaps is not yet in a position to realize when he formulates his insights, is that McCaffery’s inclusion of Gibson among the celebrated writers of the later twentieth century contributes to reorganizing the larger literary field, the consequences of which we are only really coming to understand in the past 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, which privileges Jamesian psychological realism and precludes “the shoddy inauthenticity of genre fiction of all kinds” as the hallmarks of “good” or “serious” fiction. ³⁰ The transformation signaled here is illustrated in figure 1 .

This indicates an opening of the literary field that occurs on or about 1984, such that science fiction and other generic texts begin to be taken seriously by the critical establishment. This is very different, I should add, than the practice of “literary” writers drawing on the conventions and tropes of genre fiction, as was the case from modernism onward. It is one thing to say that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) uses science fictional tropes and quite another to identify it generically as science fiction, let alone value it for the latter fact, as do McCaffery, McHale, Jameson, and others in the case of Neuromancer . What is also useful about such a representation is that it can help us better grasp the differences between Gibson’s achievement in Neuromancer and that of many of the other writers associated with cyberpunk and the position of Stars in My Pocket in the literary field in its original moment. The latter is understood to share attributes of the great experimental modernist fiction of the likes of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or John Dos Passos, but it still is identified by most readers as unfolding within the generic or “paraliterary” ghetto of science fiction. ³¹ If New Wave writers like Delany, Russ, and Le Guin transform the field of science fiction, it is only because Gibson’s cyberpunk novel and others like it unleashed a revolution such that the walls of the ghetto begin to come down and these writers come to be celebrated as producers of serious literature in their own right.

Figure 1: The literary field, circa 1984. Courtesy of Phillip E. Wegner.

Also significant is McCaffrey’s unexpected characterization of Gibson’s cyberpunk fiction as “realism.” Jameson similarly notes in Postmodernism , “Under those circumstances, where a formerly futurological science fiction (such as so-called cyberpunk today) turns into mere ‘realism’ and an outright representation of the present, the possibility [the great proto–New Wave science fiction writer Philip K.] Dick offered us—an experience of our present as past and as history—is slowly excluded.” ³² What this might mean is borne out in Jameson’s essay, “A Global Neuromancer ,” published in his 2015 collection The Ancients and the Postmoderns . Here Jameson argues that the representational achievements of Gibson’s novel are twofold. On one hand, we have Gibson’s most well-known figure, that of cyberspace, which is not, Jameson maintains, a representation avant la lettre of the informational space of the world wide web, as some hasty readers assumed it to be (Gibson was largely computer illiterate at the time and composed the manuscript on a typewriter), but “an abstraction to the second degree.” ³³ Jameson further observes,

Here, on this new level, what can be imagined and mentally grasped is the new dimension of sheer relationship—what Le Corbusier began to theorize as the “trajectories” through space—now intensified to an incalculable degree. What looks here like some stereotypical postmodern lapse into visual representation is on the contrary a complex mapping of the incalculable connections—Spinoza’s rerum concatenatio —between all the multiple powers and vectors of the real world, that is, the underlying and invisible one, that we cannot see with our normal bodily senses. It is a totality, but a totality in constant movement, evolution, and metamorphosis. ³⁴

Jameson further argues that “this unrepresentable totality, which until now only science fiction has uniquely possessed the representational means to designate, is that of finance capital itself, as it constitutes one of the most original dimensions of late capitalism (or of globalization or of postmodernity, depending on the focus you wish to bring).” ³⁵ He significantly concludes this section of the essay in this way:

My argument has been that in the face of the impasses of modernism, which proved unable to handle the new incommensurabilities of that greatly enlarged and as it were post-anthropomorphic totality which is late or third-stage capitalism, science fiction, and in particular this historically inventive novel of Gibson, offered 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. This is the sense in which 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. ³⁶

Three things are worth stressing in the argument being advanced here. First, I suggest that what Jameson calls postrealism should be understood more precisely in McCaffrey’s terms as something beyond a restrained program era definition of realism: in the new realities of postmodernity, science fiction may prove to be the most effective realism available, an argument Jameson further advances in the concluding chapter of The Antinomies of Realism (2013). Second, it is significant that Jameson refers to Gibson’s global aesthetic not as a full realization of cognitive mapping, as we might assume, but as a symptom of transformations then under way. The Althusserian notion of the symptom is the privileged diagnostic operation of Jameson’s Postmodernism , a way of registering what is most original and characteristic of the condition of postmodernity or globalization—and as in the medical procedures from which this figure is derived, one must be exceedingly careful not to come to too rapid a diagnosis based on too limited a set of such symptoms (i.e., if you have a cough, you must have cancer).

Finally, although this may sound like the essay’s climax, Jameson does not end here but immediately takes up that other great innovation in Gibson’s novel, “simstim”: the technologically mediated capacity to project one’s consciousness into someone else’s body. For Jameson, simstim stands in the novel as a figure for the symptomatic bodily experience in postmodernity: “another testimony to our unreal life in Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, our life among what Jean Baudrillard calls simulations (a term significantly preserved in the very term simstim). Here then we have a second and different type of abstraction from the real; and indeed what is essential is to see that in Gibson these two abstractions are dialectically related.” ³⁷ In his essay’s penultimate paragraph, Jameson queries,

Global versus local? This is indeed the form expressed by the twin presence and opposition between the exploration of cyberspace and the utilization of simstim; but it projects this rather glib contemporary formulation as what it is, namely a contradiction rather than a simple alternation or even a choice of perspectives. The limits of our thinking, of our capacities for cognitive mapping, of our possibilities of imagining and representing, these “our real conditions of existence” are then dramatized by the poverty of the formula as well as by the richness of Gibson’s novel. The two poles are two dialectically linked dimensions which structure our daily lives in this society, and confirm the paradoxical proposition that we are both too abstract and too concrete all at once. ³⁸

That is, Neuromancer fails in its attempts at realizing an aesthetic of cognitive mapping precisely because of its inability to construct the mediating links between these poles, the global and the local/bodily. Keep in mind that in Jameson’s 1984 formulation, cognitive mapping is all about the constructions of these kinds of mediations. Jameson notes that at the basis of Althusser’s formula for ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” we find at work a reformulation of

an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology, which is still not without value for us. The existential—the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted—is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which as Lacan reminds us is never positioned in or actualized by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called “le sujet supposé savoir”, “the subject supposed to know”, a subject-place of knowledge. ³⁹

Jameson goes on to point out, however, that the Lacanian system on which Althusser draws in developing his formula “is three-fold and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions, the Imaginary and the Real, respectively . . . what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.” ⁴⁰ The Symbolic is the mediation that ties together these other two poles: neither the embodied phenomenological subject nor the evacuated place of the subject is supposed to know, the Symbolic in this formulation is another name for the languages and other collective realities we produce and share. Indeed, elsewhere Jameson reminds us that one of the “other basic philosophical underpinnings” of his formulation of the practice of cognitive mapping is Georg Lukács’s notion of collective standpoint epistemology, “according to which ‘mapping’ or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the dominated rather than the dominating classes.” ⁴¹

It is precisely in its representation of these collective dimensions of contemporary existence—specifically in terms of work and urban space— where Gibson’s vision slips into ideology in Althusser’s specific sense of formulating imaginary resolutions to real contradictions. Jameson suggests that in the novel’s “heist plot”—a plan to break into the highly secure orbiting palazzo of the unthinkably wealthy and corrupt Tessier-Ashpool clan and free the artificial intelligence they control, enabling it to achieve its full autonomy—we might find “a distorted expression of the utopian impulse insofar as it realizes a fantasy of non-alienated collective work.” ⁴² However, the narrative labor undertaken in the novel more readily exemplifies what Jameson identifies in his earlier essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979) as a stirring up of utopian desires only to recontain them “by the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony.” ⁴³ Neuromancer projects its utopian vision of labor as deeply preferable to the one it could perhaps still imagine in 1984 to be the dominant: “The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.” ⁴⁴ The collective in which the protagonist Case works is decidedly without the deadening day-to-day monotony of those employed by the classic postwar corporations; but then, it is also a life without the securities such employment made available—lifetime employment, housing, high wages, guaranteed recreation time, and health insurance. Case’s labor is already fully contingent and flexible—freelance and temporary. In an earlier critical reconsideration of the limits of Neuromancer ’s utopianism, Tom Moylan notes:

Three categories of workers can be identified in this flexible economy: a declining number of skilled industrial workers who hold relatively high paying and secure jobs in large corporate structures and who are still protected by union contracts; a growing number of minimum-wage, part-time workers who are hired as needed and fired with short notice and who have no union protection and consequently no job security; and a smaller, but growing, number of skilled professional-managerial-technical workers who individually contract with corporations (and governments) for limited term, relatively high-paid tasks. It is in this last category that the protagonists (and indeed many of the readers) of Gibson’s cyberpunk world can be found—albeit at the lower end of that sectors’ pay scale. ⁴⁵

Moving ahead three decades, it becomes even more evident that the romance of Case’s labor might best be represented today by the adjunct university instructor, or one of those 15,000 employees now trumpeted at the end of any blockbuster film. ⁴⁶ The price of failure in such an environment (again one not unlike the contemporary university) is also made clear early on: “Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism . . . Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.” ⁴⁷ The utopia of Neuromancer thus turns out to be that of what had in 1984 only just been named post-Fordism, what Yanis Varoufakis later calls the “reign of the Global Minotaur,” or what William Davies more recently periodizes as “combative neo-liberalism: 1979–1989.” ⁴⁸

Similarly, the novel’s imaginary of the collective “meat” spaces of the contemporary city are made apparent in this description of Case’s subway journey across BAMA (Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan Axis, known more informally as the Sprawl):

The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel’s ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. ⁴⁹

A little later Gibson writes of Case’s journey on another train journey across “a blasted industrial landscape:”

The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete.

The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries. ⁵⁰

Andrew Ross notes that cyberpunk, like a more generally domesticated suburban punk scene from which it arises,

offered an image-repertoire of urban culture in postindustrial decay for white suburban youths whose lives and environs were quite removed from daily contact with the Darwinist street sensibility of “de-evolved” city life. It is perhaps no coincidence that none of the major cyberpunk writers were city-bred, although their work feeds off the phantasmatic street diet of Hobbesian lawlessness and the aesthetic of detritus that is assumed to pervade the hollowed-out core of the great metropolitan centers. This urban fantasy, however countercultural its claims and potential effects, shared the dominant, white middle-class conception of inner-city life. In this respect, the suburban romance of punk, and, subsequently, cyberpunk, fashioned a culture of alienation out of their parents’ worst fears about life on the mean streets. ⁵¹

In what could very well serve as a plot summary of Neuromancer ’s influential contemporary work of fiction, McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City , Ross goes on to point out that “All through the 1980s, this romance ran parallel with the rapid growth of gentrified Yuppie culture in the ‘abandoned’ zones of the inner cities, where the transient thrills of street culture served up an added exotic flavor for the palates of these pioneers in their newly colonized spaces.” ⁵² Given this linkage, it becomes evident how much Gibson’s novel, and cyberpunk more generally, contributes to remapping the urban landscape as it does to reconfiguring the collective spaces of work.

Delany, on the other hand, was “city-bred”: he was born and raised in Harlem, on 7th Avenue between 132nd and 133rd Streets, and he has lived the majority of his life in various parts of the city. Thus, as we might anticipate, the urban and collective imaginaries found in Stars in My Pocket are radically different than those in Neuromancer . This is especially the case in the novel’s great utopian vision of southern Velm, the home of the protagonist, the interplanetary traveling industrial diplomat Marq Dyeth. Velm is a world co-inhabited by two radically different species: the humans to which Marq belongs, and the three-sexed Evelmi. The intermingling of these different communities allows a wild proliferation of identities to develop, far beyond the binaries of male and female and straight and gay, as well as truly queer kinships:

Though I was sure he listened as intently as anyone else could possibly listen (as intently as I knew I listened to him), still, before his still face, to believe it was all faith. “I was adopted by the Dyeths when I was a baby—from some infant exchange in the north; but most of my sisters [in the novel, all citizens, regardless of biological gender, are referred to by feminine pronouns, the masculine reserved exclusively for the object of one’s desire] come from even farther south. Small Maxa was semisomed from some neuroplasm that an evelm grandmother of mine, N’yom, donated to a bioengineering experiment many, many years ago and that was just taken out of suspension about a decade and a half back—though of course most of Maxa’s chromosome sequence was taken from humans. But in the genetic sense she’s part evelm. Still, there is no egg-and-sperm relation between any of our parents and any of this generation of children, nor between any of my sisters—human or evelm—and each other.” ⁵³

Of his home and family, Marq observes late in the novel,

Perhaps the greatest generosity of my universe is that in so much it’s congruent with the worlds of others, which I suppose is finally just one with the generosity of my evelm parents, who thought my unique position among humans quite charming and were proud of it, and my human parents, who from time to time worried if, as distinct from more usually sexually oriented males, gay or straight, I might not encounter some social difficulty, say, of the same sort as I might have had in some societies had I been a nail-biter myself. But both spoke, both agreed on who I was, that I was a ripple that shored their stream, so that their universe, with all its idiosyncratic wonder, unique to my eyes, has still, always, seemed a part of mine. ⁵⁴

This combination of difference and congruity of “universes” makes the utopia of this world one of unexpected encounters. Crucially, these encounters are enabled by the very texture of the collective urban spaces themselves:

Tingling heels drying, we walked down the resilient woven flooring of the shadowy tunnel. Here and there along the arched ceiling or the curved wall, a meter-wide vent, or sometimes a three-meter-wide vent, let in light. . . .

The hollow-eyed face looked down. “This is where you come for sex?”

“And sculpture.” I nodded for him to follow me between two high vegetal shapes of plastic with a ring of taste plates at licking level. . . .

“Excuse me.” The hand on my shoulder, from weight and heat and texture, was not his. I glanced back; so did Korga. The other hand was on Korga’s shoulder. The male (human) said, mostly to me: “Could I interrupt you two long enough to take your friend to my friend . . .” He gestured with his tongue at a purple-black evelm, standing a few meters down the run, foreclaws off the ground; darting long and short tongues from his jaw, creating no sound in anticipatory lust.

I said: “You must ask my friend.”

Korga said to me: “Will you watch if I go? Please?” And to the human: “Is it all right if Marq watches?”

The human, surprised, smiled and shrugged at once: “Yes. Certainly. Of course.” And to Korga: “You have come from very far away, am I right?”

Korga glanced at me.

“But that’s no matter.” The human hand dropped from my shoulder but remained on Korga’s. ⁵⁵

This scene resonates with the equally utopian set piece at the heart of De Palma’s Body Double —a music video of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” a song that was “one of the most controversial and most commercially successful records of the decade,” banned by the BBC throughout 1984 but still topping the charts for five consecutive weeks and returning to number two later that year. ⁵⁶ The scene in question begins with the film’s Rear Window (1954) pastiche hero, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), telling the porn actress Holly Body (Melanie Griffin), “I like to watch.”

As I hope this passage makes evident, the spaces in Delany’s novel represent a transfigured vision of the urban and especially queer communities in which Delany lived and thrived in the New York City of the 1960s and 1970s. Delany later reflects that it was precisely such mediatory spaces that encouraged “interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.” ⁵⁷ The world we are presented with in the novel similarly fulfills the criteria of all the great modern utopias, from Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) through Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) and Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds (2013) in that it stresses how these utopian spaces encourage and enable “evental encounters,” in Alain Badiou’s sense, to occur in the four conditions of politics, science, art, and love. ⁵⁸

Given the immensity of his achievement in this work, why does Delany not complete the project? Over the years, a range of possible answers have been suggested, including a number by Delany himself: the full onset of the AIDS crisis, the end of his eight-year-long relationship with Frank Romeo, and the general neoliberal remapping of the Manhattan cityscape—the last documented in Delany’s extraordinary nonfiction book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)—made the project feel increasingly out of step with an emerging reality. However, there may be something in the nature of the project that made its completion impossible.

Throughout his novel, Delany stresses the precarity of the utopian collective spaces achieved on Velm. First, on the most universal intergalactic plane, it is threatened by the rising tide of the fundamentalist political alliance known as the Family: soon after allying themselves with the Family, former allies of the Dyeths violently denounce the collective’s queer kinships: “a disease is not innocent, and this equation of unnatural crime with innocence is, in itself, a disease, which can only be cured by the most primitive means: quarantine, fire, prayer.” ⁵⁹ The Family no doubt figures the deeply homophobic Moral Majority—also mentioned early on in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue —founded by Jerry Falwell only five years before the novel’s publication, and influential in Reagan’s two presidential victories. Second, Delany raises the possibility that Velm itself be on the verge of what he calls “Cultural Fugue”: “For a world to go into Cultural Fugue—for the socioeconomic pressures to reach a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface—takes a lot of catastrophe. There are more than six thousand worlds in the Federation of Habitable Worlds. And Cultural Fugue is very rare.” ⁶⁰ Finally, there is the international “tragedy of the north” on Velm, a situation in the planet’s northern environs where the relationships between humans and Evelmi regularly explode into violence.

The narrative problem that Delany would have to confront in composing the book’s second volume would involve resolving satisfactorily (for himself and his readers) the various crises that emerge by the conclusion of Stars in My Pocket , such that the pocket utopian community of Marq’s home would be able to reproduce itself. ⁶¹ Such problems, considered in spatial terms, are fundamentally ones of scaling: how to translate the successes of the local, urban communities onto wider and wider national and global scales. As Jameson points out in the concluding section of Postmodernism , these questions are the same as those that in the latter part of the 1960s confronted successful radical political formations: “since the crisis of socialist internationalism, and the enormous strategic and tactical difficulties of coordinating local and grassroots of neighborhood political actions with national or international ones, such urgent political dilemmas are all immediately functions of the enormously complex new international space in question.” ⁶² Jameson’s case study is the rise and fall in the late 1960s and early 1970s of Detroit’s League of Black Revolutionary Workers. The challenges the movement faced and the ultimate reason for its failure were quite similar to those faced by Delany, albeit on different scales: “how to develop a national political movement on the basis of a city strategy and politics.” ⁶³

Before this can happen, Jameson suggests, a new collective narrative, or cognitive mapping, is necessary to allow these collectives to position their local experiences in relationship to the larger, discontinuous scales they also occupy. Unable to effect such a movement across scales—in the political sphere as much as in Delany’s novel—such projects lose their momentum and ultimately stall: “Having acceded to a larger spatial plane, the base vanished under them: and with this the most successful social revolutionary experiment of that rich political decade in the United States came to a sadly undramatic end.” ⁶⁴ Unlike the history of the league, Delany leaves us with an open-ended vision, where neither success nor failure are predetermined. However, without a figure of the new mediations between the collective lived spaces so brilliantly imagined in the novel and the more abstract “global” contexts in which they suddenly find themselves, the novel, for all its tremendous emotional and intellectual power, comes to take on the bittersweet nostalgic tone of a paean to the radical cultural and political possibilities made available by the 1960s and seemingly exhausted by the mid-1980s. Such a conclusion seemed to be reconfirmed by another monumental event that occurs late in 1984: the landslide reelection of the arch-neoconservative and fierce opponent of 1960s political mobilizations Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s reelections signals the “second death” of the 1960s, the deferred symbolic closure of a situation whose real conclusion had occurred more than a decade before. ⁶⁵ Revealingly, the ascendance in 1984 of the problematic of postmodernity was accompanied by a number of other significant looks backward to the 1960s: notable among them is the Social Text double issue “The 60s without Apology,” which also included Jameson’s essay “Periodizing the 60s”—an essay originally intended, Jameson announces in another work published in 1984, as part of “a book-length study of the 1960s.” ⁶⁶

The shared ground and differences between Neuromancer and Stars in My Pocket can be located in their respective attitudes toward the political, social, cultural, and spatial experiments of the 1960s and 1970s: a rejection in Gibson’s case, and cyberpunk more generally, of these older experiments and the development of new strategies for surviving, negotiating, and flourishing in an emergent present; and in Delany’s unfinished work, the refusal of such an emergent present and an affirmation of a fidelity to the past.

Jameson concludes Postmodernism with a call to arms: “‘We have to name the system’: this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the postmodernism debate.” ⁶⁷ Although this evocation would at first glance appear to be akin to that implicit in Delany’s project, I want to suggest that Jameson’s abandonment sometime in the mid-1980s of his 1960s book in favor of an extended engagement with the present situation—the period of the contemporary—points toward another very different project only then just beginning. In a discussion of the most effective relationship between any prior and current radical project, his case study being Lenin’s life work, Slavoj Žižek develops a productive distinction between what he calls “return” and “repeating.” Allow me to paraphrase Žižek here, replacing his name, “Lenin,” with that of the “sixties”:

As a result, repeating the sixties does not mean a return to the sixties—to repeat the sixties is to accept that “the sixties are dead,” that its particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. Repeating the sixties means that we have to distinguish between what the sixties actually did and the field of possibilities it opened up, the tension in the sixties between what it actually did and another dimension: what was “in the sixties more than the sixties itself.” To repeat the sixties is to repeat not what the sixties did but what it failed to do , its missed opportunities. ⁶⁸

It was precisely such a repeating of the 1960s New Wave that Carr hoped would be accomplished in his New Ace Science Fiction Specials series. Indeed, Carr maintains in his editor’s general introduction:

most of the science fiction today is no more advanced and imaginative than the sf stories of the fifties, or even forties: basic ideas and plots are reworked time and again . . . when authors are constrained to writing nothing but variations on the plots and styles of the past, much of the excitement of science fiction disappears. Science fiction is a literature of change; more than any other kind of writing, sf needs to keep moving forward if it is to be exciting. ⁶⁹

Although Neuromancer and cyberpunk did spark the kind of excitement Carr refers to here and thereby contribute significantly, as I suggested earlier, to a general reorganization of the literary field, it ultimately accomplishes a postmodern recontainment of 1960s New Wave energies rather than repeating them, which Carr calls for. Indeed, in an outstanding study of the place of Neuromancer in the context of contemporary science fiction publishing practices, Sara Brouillette points out that the success of the novel teaches its readers the decidedly postmodern ideological lesson that “corporate culture” can “effortlessly assimilate any creative intelligence that wants to critique it.” Rather than educating the desire of its readers for something radically other, Neuromancer shows them “the future they are already living in. It is, finally, that community’s canonical text, a text that explains and codifies what they see themselves as having lost at the hands of their corporate others.” ⁷⁰ This is borne out in Neuromancer ’s conclusion, whose literal deus ex machina brings Gibson’s science fiction narrative to a happy ending in the kind of wish-fulfilling fantasy that will be characteristic of so many subsequent techno-determinist celebrations of the “liberatory” power of the new informational technologies. The successful freeing of the AI by Case and his colleagues enables an unanticipated first contact with an alien intelligence from the “Centauri system.” ⁷¹ This seemingly closed antinomy formed by the pair of Neuromancer and Stars in My Pocket is beautifully captured in one of the hit songs of 1984 (also released on October 26), Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” The song at once stages the deadlock of the inevitable recuperation of all subcultures—“I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac”—and the impossibility of a return to the past—“Don’t look back, you can never look back.”

However, such closure is always imaginary or ideological. The couple of an emergent cyberpunk and the residuals of the New Wave do not exhaust the range of possibilities in this moment. I conclude this essay by briefly touching on another practice, one that opens toward the possibilities of the “new political art” Jameson calls for in his “Postmodernism” essay. Interestingly, this occurs in a work that was, along with Neuromancer , one the first novels to be published in the New Ace Science Fiction Specials series. Unlike Gibson’s novel, its significance was not fully recognized for a number of years. I am referring to Kim Stanley Robinson’s debut novel, The Wild Shore . One of the greatest of the New Wave writers, Le Guin—whose breakthrough The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) was published in the original Ace Specials—proclaims on The Wild Shore ’s cover, “There’s a fresh wind blowing in The Wild Shore . Welcome back, Ace Specials, and welcome Kim Stanley Robinson.” With The Wild Shore in hand, we can complete our survey of the science fictional field circa 1984 with the diagram in figure 2 . ⁷²

The Wild Shore is set in a postapocalypse Southern California, sixty years after thousands of neutron bombs had been exploded across the United States, reducing the nation to a scattering of isolated agricultural communities. The novel focuses on two such communities, those occupying the remains of Southern California’s coastal San Onofre Valley and San Diego (the wonderful original cover image, recalling Madelon Vriesendorp’s paintings for Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York [1978], is a representation of a scene in the latter location), and the contacts between the remaining Americans and the Japanese military who patrol the coast to prevent any breaking of a UN-imposed quarantine. The novel is a first for Robinson in a number of other ways. It is the opening novel in his Three Californias trilogy and was soon followed by what Moylan identifies as the “critical dystopia” of The Gold Coast (1988) and the marvelous green utopia of Pacific Edge (1990). ⁷³ In this trilogy, Robinson allegorically reverses and retraces the chronology of modern science fiction. He opens by reproducing a classic Cold War science fiction subgenre, the nuclear postapocalypse story—a subgenre also regularly mined to great effect by Philip K. Dick, another California-based writer who deeply influenced Robinson and on whom the latter wrote his doctoral dissertation (also published in a revised form in 1984). ⁷⁴ With The Gold Coast , Robinson moves further backward to the late-nineteenth-century precursor to modern science fiction, the fusion of the literary utopia and naturalism that produced what became the dominant middle-brow expression of literary science fiction, especially in Great Britain—the dystopia. ⁷⁵ Finally, Robinson brings the trilogy to a rousing climax with a contemporary version of the practice Darko Suvin retroactively identifies as science fiction’s great sociopolitical subgenre: the narrative utopia. The utopia of Pacific Edge is a throwback to this older literary practice in another way, in that its utopian imaginary remains constrained to the spatial scale of the nation-state. The next dialectical step in Robinson’s project will involve the arduous labor of constructing a vision of new collective spaces appropriate to truly global realities. This is exactly the labor he undertakes in his masterpiece of the 1990s, the trilogy of Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996).

Figure 2: Science fiction, circa 1984. Courtesy of Phillip E. Wegner.

Yet to tell the story in this way ignores all the ways The Wild Shore already recognizes the challenges that must be surmounted in the extended and still incomplete project the novel inaugurates. The limits to the imagination and political action imposed on us by the older cognitive mapping of the nation-state are at the heart of The Wild Shore . The fantasy of returning to an imaginary past of American greatness—of restoring what, in 1984 at least, would readily be understood as a Cold War US global hegemony—is voiced by the imperious leader of San Diego (a stronghold then of neoconservatism): “‘You tell them they can make this country what it used to be. They can help. But we all have to work together. The day will come. Another Pax Americana, cars and airplanes, rockets to the moon, telephones. A unified country.’ Suddenly, without anger or whispery passion, he said, ‘You go back up there and tell your valley that they join the resistance or they oppose it.’” ⁷⁶ This passage not only prefigures George W. Bush’s chilling words to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001—“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”—it calls to mind another, more recent postapocalypse fiction set in Manhattan, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011): “It was a new day. Now the people were no longer mere survivors, half-mad refuges, a pathetic, shit-flecked, traumatized herd, but the ‘American Phoenix.’” ⁷⁷ The adventurism and voluntarism encouraged by the mayor and his allies ultimately results in the senseless death late in the novel of one of the protagonist’s companions. Robinson’s vision here thus gives effective voice to the anxiety then provoked by the increasingly vociferous saber-rattling of the Reagan administration and its desire to bury the shames of the Vietnam War in some new glorious military conflict (a fantasy even more evident in John Milius’s 1984 film Red Dawn ).

Even more significantly, the fantasy of being able to live in the enclosed and bordered totalities of the nation-state, and thus move through the world according to the dictates of obsolete cognitive mappings, is also one shared by those who first launch the attack on the United States. This fact is revealed to the reader through the device of the book-within-the-book, a perhaps authentic, perhaps fictionalized travel narrative, Glen Baum’s An American Around the World: Being an Account of a Circumnavigation of the Globe in the Years 2030 to 2039 :

I asked him if he could tell me why the weather had become so much colder on the California coast since the war. This was several hours into our trip, and the Soviets around us filled the compartment with an air of utter boredom; at the prospect of talking about his specialty, Johnson’s face brightened somewhat.

“It’s a complicated question. It’s generally agreed that the war did alter the world’s weather, but how it effected the change is still debated. It’s estimated that three thousand neutron bombs exploded on the continental United States that day in 1984; not too much long term radiation was released, luckily for you, but a lot of turbulence was generated in the stratosphere—the highest levels of air—and apparently the jet stream altered its course for good.” ⁷⁸

A little further on, the conversation continues:

“It sounds as if California’s weather has changed most of all,” I said.

“Oh no,” Johnson said. “Not at all. California has been strongly affected, no doubt about it—like moving fifteen degrees of latitude north—but a few other parts of the world have been just as strongly affected, or even more so. Lots of rain in northern Chile!—and my, is that washing all that sand off the Andes into the sea. Tropical heat in Europe during the summer, drought during the monsoon—oh, I could go on and on. It has caused more human misery than you can imagine.” ⁷⁹

This marvelous passage offers a full-blown announcement of what will become years later an even more effective figure of our global situation and the imperative to think on a planetary scale: the Anthropocene, or the transformation of the entire planet wrought by human-made global climate change.

In the end, Robinson’s first novel offers less a set of solutions than an articulation, no less provisional than that found in the latter parts of Jameson’s “Postmodernism” essay, of the fundamental project that will not only be at the center of Robinson’s subsequent literary output but also a fundamental aspect of all contemporary radical politics: an allegorical mapping of the concrete relationships between the individual, the local, and the global; and the development of the ability to “think globally,” as the slogan goes, and to think the new spatial forms—collectivities and urban mediators—necessary before “we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.” ⁸⁰ That The Wild Shore is no more than a beginning of such a project, oriented toward what still remains our collective future, is indicated in the novel’s final lines, which signal that the book is an example of another great utopian genre, the Künstlerroman , or the story of the artist: “The damp last page is nearly full. And my hand is getting cold—its getting so stiff I can’t make the letters, these words are all big and scrawling, taking up the last of the space, thank God. Oh be done with it. There’s an owl, flitting over the river. I’ll stay right here and fill another book.” ⁸¹ That Robinson did and continues to do so is something for which we can all remain grateful.