Foreword
1 . Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way , trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), 5–6.
2 . William Gibson, “An Interview with William Gibson,” interview by Jesse Hicks, The Verge , January 24, 2012, https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/24/2724370/william-gibson-interview .
3 . William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988), 71.
4 . William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkley, 2003), 6 and 106.
5 . Michael Schulson, “William Gibson: I Never Imagined Facebook,” Salon , November 10, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/11/09/william_gibson_i_never_imagined_facebook/ .
6 . Ibid.
7 . Tsvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in The Narrative Reader , ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2000), 120–27.
8 . Ibid., 122.
9 . A. S. Byatt, Possession (New York: Vintage, 1991), 253.
10 . Karl E. Weick, “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations,” Journal of Management Studies 25, no. 4 (1988): 305.
11 . See David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science Magazine , October 18, 2013, 377–80.
Introduction
1 . Stephen Poole, “Nearing the Nodal,” Guardian , October 30, 1999, https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/oct/30/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.williamgibson .
2 . See recent films Bladerunner 2049 (2017) and Ready Player One (2018), not to mention CD Projekt Red’s upcoming role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 , to which Keanu Reeves—star of Robert Longo’s 1995 film adaptation of Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”—lends his likeness and voice acting.
3 . Tim Adams, “Space to Think,” Observer , August 12, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/12/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.features .
4 . Rachel Greenwald Smith, ed., American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
5 . For more information on Agrippa , visit the online archive the Agrippa Files at http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/ .
6 . On Agency , see Mitch R. Murray, “The Worst of All Possible Worlds?” Public Books , July 20, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org/the-worst-of-all-possible-worlds/ .
7 . William Gibson, Michael St. John Smith, and Butch Guice, William Gibson’s Archangel (San Diego: IDW, 2017); William Gibson, Johnnie Christmas, and Tamra Bonvillain, Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2019).
8 . See Mathias Nilges, “William Gibson,” in Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature , ed. Sherryl Vint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), n.p.
9 . See Neil Easterbrook, “William [Ford] Gibson (1948–),” in Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction , ed. Mark Bould et al. (New York: Routledge, 2020), 86–91.
10 . Fredric Jameson, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007), 384–92; Tom Moylan, “Global Economy, Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tension in William Gibson’s Cyberpunk Trilogy,” Minnesota Review 43/44 (1995): 182–97; and Lee Konstantinou, “The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition ,” boundary 2 36, no. 2 (2009): 67–97.
11 . See Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); and Timo Siivonen, “Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in William Gibson’s Cyberspace Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 23, no. 2 (1996): 227–44.
12 . See Lauren Berlant, “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (2008): 845–60; Robert Briggs, “The Future of Prediction: Speculating on William Gibson’s Meta-Science Fiction,” Textual Practice 27, no. 4 (2013): 671–93; Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 452–72; Lisa Swanstrom, “External Memory Drives: Deletion and Digitality in Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) ,” Science Fiction Studies 43, no. 1 (2016): 14–32.
13 . See Darko Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk,” Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 46 (1989): 40–51; Jaak Tomberg, “On the ‘Double Vision’ of Realism and SF Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 2 (2014): 263–85; Sherryl Vint, “The World Gibson Made,” in Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives , ed. Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2010), 228–33; Phillip E. Wegner, “Recognizing the Patterns,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (2007): 183–200.
14 . See Neil Easterbrook, “Recognizing Patterns: Gibson’s Hermeneutics from the Bridge Trilogy to Pattern Recognition ,” in Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives , ed. Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2010), 46–64; Veronica Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Modernism,” Mosaic 23, no. 2 (1990): 29–44; Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Claire Sponsler, “Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson,” Contemporary Literature 33, no. 4 (1992): 625–44.
15 . Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 306.
16 . Andrew Hoberek, “Literary Genre Fiction,” in American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 , ed. Rachel Greenwald Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 70.
17 . On this latter genre, see Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
18 . Gibson quoted in Adams, “Space to Think.”
19 . Jeremy Rosen, “Literary Fiction and the Genres of Genre Fiction,” Post45 , August 7, 2018, http://post45.research.yale.edu/2018/08/literary-fiction-and-the-genres-of-genre-fiction/ ; emphasis in original.
20 . Ibid., note 3; emphasis in original. It is important to note that these authors are not just Rosen’s examples but a fairly routine list for scholarship on the genre turn. The fact that these authors all made their careers by writing distinctly literary novels is key here. Gibson, as masterful a literary stylist as any, would be a weird omission if not for the fact that literary criticism still often understands itself doing something distinct from what science fiction studies do.
21 . Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 29; emphasis in original.
22 . William Gibson, “The Art of Fiction No. 211,” interview by David Wallace-Wells, Paris Review 197 (2011): 109.
23 . See Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 409. The program era of American literature might also be described as the rise of “literary fiction” and its place as the metrological standard for the literary.
24 . Phillip E. Wegner, Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), xiii.
25 . Ibid., xiv.
26 . Hoberek, “Literary Genre Fiction,” 73. Hoberek emphasizes that this embrace of genre is strongly and problematically gendered, with women’s writing marking “the outer limits of what counts as literary” (71). Indeed, the arrival of cyberpunk in 1984 could be read similarly as an epitaph to the radical feminist science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, which includes landmark novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler.
27 . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 419, n.1; emphasis in original.
28 . William Gibson, Idoru (New York: Berkley, 1996), 26.
29 . Gordon Hutner, “Historicizing the Contemporary: A Response to Amy Hungerford,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 420–24. See also Theodore Martin, “The Currency of the Contemporary,” in Postmodern/Postwar—And After: Rethinking American Literature , ed. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 227–39.
30 . Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (London: Verso, 2015), 234.
31 . Ibid.
32 . William Gibson, Spook Country (New York: Berkley, 2008), 25.
Chapter 1
1 . The phrase “critical utopia” comes from Tom Moylan’s classic 1986 study, Demand the Impossible , which has recently been republished in an expanded edition. See Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014). I touch on Russ’s work as well and the emergence of the critical utopia in Phillip E. Wegner, “Introduction,” in Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), xiii–xxx. The first version of this essay was presented in spring 2016 at Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and I thank the center’s director, Reinhold Martin, for his generous invitation to speak.
2 . Joanna Russ, “When It Changed,” in Again, Dangerous Visions , ed. Harlan Ellison (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 258.
3 . I discuss The Word for World Is Forest and its influence in Phillip E. Wegner, Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), chap. 1.
4 . I discuss Nineteen Eighty-Four in some detail in Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 6.
5 . Wegner, Shockwaves of Possibility , 110.
6 . David Langdon, “AD Classics: AT&T Building / Philip Johnson and John Burgee,” Arch Daily , January 12, 2019, https://www.archdaily.com/611169/ad-classics-at-and-t-building-philip-johnson-and-john-burgee .
7 . Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 (New York: Back Bay Books, 2001), 8; Alan Light, “Why 1984 Was Pop Music’s Best Year Ever,” Billboard , October 24, 2014, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6296392/1984-best-year-of-pop-music-ever-essay . After listing some of the crucial works to appear in 1922—among others, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land , James Joyce’s Ulysses , Ranier Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus , and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room —Levin concludes, “Though I have been highly selective, the list is sufficient to justify an annus mirabilis .” Harry Levin, “What Was Modernism?,” Massachusetts Review 1, no. 4 (1960): 619.
8 . Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92. Also see Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,” New German Critique 33 (1984): 53–65; Fredric Jameson, “Exoticism and Structuralism in Wallace Stevens,” New Orleans Review 11, no. 1 (1984): 10–19; Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), vii–xxi; and Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (1984): 178–209.
9 . Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1998), 54.
10 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 88. Reprinted, with minimum modifications, in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 49. For his arguments for the shift from the notion of postmodernism to postmodernity, see Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (2015): 101–32.
11 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 78; Jameson, Postmodernism , 36.
12 . Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (New York: New Press, 2003), 146.
13 . Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2008), 435–55.
14 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 71; Jameson, Postmodernism , 25.
15 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 64; Jameson, Postmodernism , 16.
16 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 89; Jameson, Postmodernism , 50–51; emphasis in original.
17 . See Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 89–90; Jameson, Postmodernism , 51–52, 415–17; Wegner, Imaginary Communities , chap. 2. I discuss the notion of cognitive mapping in Phillip E. Wegner, Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), chap. 3.
18 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 92; Jameson, Postmodernism , 54.
19 . Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (New York: Verso, 2019), 190.
20 . Jameson, Postmodernism , 407.
21 . Interestingly, this is the same weekend that the second season of the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–present) purports to begin.
22 . Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 103.
23 . See Wegner, Shockwaves of Possibility , chap. 1. The notion of the 1960s as a belated upsurge of the radical utopia energies of modernism is first developed by Perry Anderson in his landmark essay, also first published in 1984 in the pages of New Left Review , “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 144 (1984): 96–113.
24 . Veronica Hollinger, “Science Fiction and Postmodernism,” in A Companion to Science Fiction , ed. David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 236.
25 . Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 147; and Steven Shaviro, Connected, Or, What It Means to Live in the Networked Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
26 . Jameson, Postmodernism , 38.
27 . Larry McCaffery, “The Fictions of the Present,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States , ed. Emory Elliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1164.
28 . William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 3.
29 . Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), 226.
30 . Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 103.
31 . Thomas Disch underscores the New Wave’s link to and distinction from modernism in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 108.
32 . Jameson, Postmodernism , 286.
33 . Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (New York: Verso, 2015), 229. Also see Scott Bukatman, “Gibson’s Typewriter,” in Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 32–47.
34 . Jameson, Ancients and the Postmoderns , 230.
35 . Ibid.
36 . Ibid., 234.
37 . Ibid., 235.
38 . Ibid., 237.
39 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 91; Jameson, Postmodernism , 53.
40 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 91–92; Jameson, Postmodernism , 53–54.
41 . Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 87–88. Reprinted with a new commentary in Jameson, Allegory and Ideology , chap. 5.
42 . Jameson, Ancients and the Postmoderns , 225.
43 . Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2–26.
44 . Gibson, Neuromancer , 37.
45 . Tom Moylan, “Global Economy, Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tension in William Gibson’s Cyberpunk Trilogy,” Minnesota Review 43/44 (1995): 191.
46 . For a superb analysis of the effects of this reorganization on the university, see Herb Childress, The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
47 . Gibson, Neuromancer , 7.
48 . Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience , trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1987); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (London: Zed Books, 2015), 99; and William Davies, “The New Neoliberalism,” New Left Review 101 (2016): 124.
49 . Gibson, Neuromancer , 43 and 77.
50 . Ibid., 85.
51 . Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), 146. For Delany’s reflections on cyberpunk more generally, and in particular the representation of racial difference in Neuromancer , see Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture , ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 193–201. Delany notes, “For most of us in the science fiction world, the cyberpunk movement was a vigorous, interesting—and extremely short-lived—moment. . . . But the continuing interest in the cyberpunks by academics, as something they persist in seeing as alive and still functioning, strikes me—I must confess—as a largely nostalgic pursuit of a more innocent worldview, which, as I said, to me has no more active historical validity once we pass the Los Angeles King riots” (199–200). I similarly discuss the 1992 Los Angeles uprising as a marker of a significant historical transition in Phillip E. Wegner, Life between Two Deaths, 1989–2001: US Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 115.
52 . Ross, Strange Weather , 146.
53 . Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 203.
54 . Ibid., 342–43.
55 . Ibid., 225–27.
56 . “Relax (Song),” Wikipedia , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relax_(song ), last modified January 20, 2020.
57 . Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 111.
58 . I discuss these three narrative utopias in Phillip E. Wegner, Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), chap. 7.
59 . Delany, Stars in My Pocket , 303.
60 . Ibid., 66; emphasis in original. Also see the discussion of Delany’s notion of the cultural fugue in Shaviro, Connected , 243–48.
61 . Delany, Stars in My Pocket , 209.
62 . Jameson, Postmodernism , 413.
63 . Ibid., 414.
64 . Ibid.
65 . I discuss the importance of the Lacanian notion of the second death in Life between Two Deaths , 28–32.
66 . Jameson, “Exoticism and Structuralism in Wallace Stevens,” 10.
67 . Jameson, Postmodernism , 418.
68 . Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” in V. I. Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 , ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2002), 310; emphasis in original.
69 . Terry Carr, “Introduction,” in Kim Stanley Robinson, The Wild Shore (New York: Ace, 1984), vii–viii.
70 . Sarah Brouillette, “Corporate Publishing and Canonization: Neuromancer and Science-Fiction Publishing in the 1970s and Early 1980s,” Book History 5 (2002): 205.
71 . Gibson, Neuromancer , 270.
72 . I discuss the value of this modified Greimasian semiotic square for presenting a specific historical situation, one of my case studies being the emergence of the novel form, in Periodizing Jameson , 81–117; my introduction to The Shape of Utopia , xix–xxvi; and Invoking Hope , chap. 1.
73 . See Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), chap. 7. For Moylan’s discussion of the other novels in the trilogy, see “Utopia Is When Our Lives Matter: Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge ,” Utopian Studies 6, no. 2 (1995): 1–25; and “Witness to Hard Times: Robinson’s Other Californias,” in Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays , ed. William J. Burling (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 11–47. For Moylan’s most recent meditations on Robinson’s work, see Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).
74 . Kim Stanley Robinson, The Novels of Philip K. Dick (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984).
75 . I discuss the relationship between dystopia and naturalism in Life between Two Deaths , 117–24; and Phillip E. Wegner, “The British Dystopian Novel from Wells to Ishiguro,” in A Companion to British Literature, Volume 4: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837–2000 , ed. Bob DeMaria, Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zache (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 454–70.
76 . Kim Stanley Robinson, The Wild Shore (New York: Ace, 1984), 106.
77 . George W. Bush, “Transcript of President Bush’s Address,” CCN.com/US, September 21, 2001, http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ ; Colson Whitehead, Zone One (New York: Random House, 2011), 99.
78 . Robinson, The Wild Shore , 202.
79 . Ibid., 203–4.
80 . Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 92; Jameson, Postmodernism , 54.
81 . Robinson, The Wild Shore , 371. I explore the utopianism of the Künstlerroman in more detail in Invoking Hope , chap. 5.
Chapter 2
1 . Jacques Rancière, “In What Time Do We Live,” Politicacomun 4 (2013), doi:10.3998/pc.12322227.0004.001.
2 . William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkley, 2003), 186.
3 . Public Art Fund, “Metronome,” https://www.publicartfund.org/view/exhibitions/5961_metronome (accessed November 30, 2018).
4 . Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, “Metronome,” http://jonesginzel.com/project/metronome (accessed December 14, 2018).
5 . Robert C. Morgan, “Metronome,” Sculpture 19, no. 4 (May 2000): 10.
6 . Jones and Ginzel, “Metronome.”
7 . See Related Companies Ltd., “One Union Square South,” https://www.relatedrentals.com/apartment-rentals/new-york-city/union-square/one-union-square-south (accessed November 30, 2018).
8 . Fredric Jameson, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” in Archaeologies of the Future : The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 384.
9 . Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias, “Introduction: Time Studies Today,” in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present , ed. Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 3.
10 . Ibid., 3.
11 . Rancière, “In What Time.”
12 . Ibid.
13 . Ibid.
14 . Ibid.
15 . William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor (New York: Putnam, 2012), 201–9.
16 . See Gibson, “Time Machine Cuba,” “My Obsession,” and “Dead Man Sings,” all in Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor , 199; 133; 52–53.
17 . Gibson, Distrust that Particular Flavor , 52.
18 . Ibid., 1–2.
19 . M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames , ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 15–25.
20 . Ibid., 15.
21 . William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 51.
22 . Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 17.
23 . William Gibson, Virtual Light (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 60, Kindle edition.
24 . Bahktin, “Forms of Time,” 19.
25 . Gibson, Virtual Light , 69–70.
26 . Burges and Elias, Time: A Vocabulary , 3.
27 . Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor , 46.
28 . Ibid., 46.
29 . Some early reviews champion this as Gibson’s first “mainstream novel” or first attempt at contemporary realism. For a critical stance suggesting that Pattern Recognition should not be considered science fiction, see Graham Slight, “Review of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson,” New York Review of Science Fiction 15, no. 9 (May 2003): 8–9.
30 . For two takes on this reading, see Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (November 2006): 452–72; and Phillip E. Wegner, “Recognizing the Patterns,” New Literary History 38, no. 1 (2007): 183–200. For the Fredric Jameson quote, see “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003): 695–718.
31 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 57.
32 . Neil Easterbrook, “Alternate Presents: The Ambivalent Historicism of ‘Pattern Recognition,’” Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 493–94. The Swiftian intertext Easterbrook refers to here is none other than Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). When Gulliver visits the island of the Lilliputians, he discovers a satirical faction exists between those inhabitants who break their eggs on the big end and those who practice the reverse.
33 . Easterbrook, “Alternate Presents,” 495.
34 . Hollinger, “Stories about the Future,” 463–64.
35 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 143.
36 . Ibid., 91–93; emphasis added.
37 . Ibid., 245–46; emphasis in original.
38 . Rancière, “In What Time.”
39 . Glyn Morgan, “Detective, Historian, Reader: Alternate History and Alternative Fact in William Gibson’s The Peripheral ,” Polish Journal of Science Fiction 12 (2018): 312.
40 . For a recent discussion of “ecological time” in The Peripheral , see Katharine E. Bishop, “Ecological Recentering in William Gibson’s The Peripheral ,” Polish Journal of Science Fiction 12 (2018): 319–34.
41 . John Pier, “Narrative Levels,” in Living Handbook of Narratology , ed. Peter Hühn et al., last modified October 10, 2016, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-levels-revised-version-uploaded-23-april-2014 .
42 . Ibid.
43 . William Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: Putnam, 2014), 14; emphasis added.
44 . Ibid., 15.
45 . Ibid., 175, 185.
46 . See, for example, Anna McFarlane, “‘Anthropomorphic Drones’ and Colonized Bodies: William Gibson’s The Peripheral ,” English Studies in Canada 42, nos. 1–2 (2016): 115–31.
47 . Gibson, The Peripheral , 179.
48 . Ibid., 179.
49 . Ibid., 176.
50 . Ibid., 179.
51 . William Gibson, “William Gibson Interview: Time Travel, Virtual Reality, and His New Books,” interview by Adi Robertson, The Verge , October 28, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7083625/william-gibson-interview-time-travel-virtual-reality-and-the-peripheral .
52 . Rancière, “In What Time.”
53 . William Gibson, “Nostalgia for the Future: William Gibson on The Peripheral and His Legacy,” interview by Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire , November 3, 2014, http://flavorwire.com/486048 .
54 . Rancière, “In What Time.”
Chapter 3
1 . Bruce Sterling, “Preface,” in William Gibson, Burning Chrome (New York: Eos, 2003), xi.
2 . Ibid.
3 . Ibid.
4 . Ibid., xii.
5 . Ibid., xi.
6 . William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Eos, 2003), 23.
7 . Ibid., 28.
8 . Ibid., 28.
9 . Phillip E. Wegner, “Recognizing the Patterns,” New Literary History 38 (2007): 187. It is also important to foreground Wegner’s suggestion that cyberpunk science fiction can be regarded as “a kind of literary realism” (187).
10 . Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 29.
11 . Ibid.
12 . Ibid., 33.
13 . Ibid., 34; emphasis in original.
14 . Ibid., 35.
15 . Ibid.
16 . Ibid., 36.
17 . Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht , trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 121.
18 . Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 598.
19 . See Gordon Hutner, “Historicizing the Contemporary: A Response to Amy Hungerford,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 420–24.
20 . See Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time without Future (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
21 . Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 17; emphasis in original.
22 . Richard Terdiman, “From City to Country: An Outline of ‘Fluvio-Critique,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 41, no. 1 (2007): 54.
23 . Ibid.
24 . See, for instance, Tibi Puiu, “Neil DeGrasse Tyson Explains Why ‘We Stopped Dreaming,’” ZME Zine , March 13, 2012, https://www.zmescience.com/space/neil-degrasse-tyson-why-we-stopped-dreaming-13032012/ .
25 . Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 25.
26 . Ibid.
27 . Ibid.
28 . Ibid., 26.
29 . Ibid.
30 . Ibid., 27.
31 . Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays , trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 217. See Mathias Nilges, “The Realism of Speculation: Contemporary Speculative Fiction as Immanent Critique of Finance Capitalism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 19, no. 1 (2019): 37–60.
32 . Alain Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” in Badiou & Zizek: Philosophy in the Present , ed. Peter Engelmann (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 2.
33 . Nicholas Brown, “One, Two, Many Ends of Literature,” Mediations 24, no. 2 (2010): 91.
34 . Ibid.
35 . Jonathan Arac, “What Good Can Literary History Do?,” American Literary History 20 (2008): 2.
36 . Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6.
Chapter 4
1 . See Thomas Disch, “Queen Victoria’s Computers,” New York Times Book Review , March 10, 1991, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/disch-gibson.html .
2 . D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature , ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20.
3 . Immanuel Kant, “The Modern Prometheus,” 1755, quoted in Angelina Stanford, “Immanuel Kant on Benjamin Franklin,” Circe Institute Podcast Network, February 11, 2016, https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/immanuel-kant-benjamin-franklin .
4 . Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (New York: Penguin, 2018), 29.
5 . Ibid., 45; emphasis added.
6 . Benjamin Franklin, “Epitaph,” in The Autobiography and Other Writings , ed. Peter Shaw (New York: Bantam, 2008), 348.
7 . Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography , in The Autobiography and Other Writings , ed. Peter Shaw (New York: Bantam, 2008), 3.
8 . Lawrence, Studies , 181.
9 . Ibid., 185.
10 . Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004), 55.
11 . William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), 191–92.
12 . Ibid., 193.
13 . Ibid.
14 . See Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as No. 1: Lessons for America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
15 . Gibson and Sterling, Difference Engine , 422.
16 . Yukichi Fukuzawa, Gakumon no Susume (An Encouragement of Learning ), trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2012), 5.
17 . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2003), 103.
18 . Gibson and Sterling, Difference Engine , 486; emphasis added.
19 . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2003), 39; emphasis added.
20 . See Takayuki Tatsumi, Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2018).
Chapter 5
1 . Maitland McDonagh, “Clive Barker & William Gibson: Future Shockers,” Film Comment 26, no. 1 (1990): 63.
2 . William Gibson, “Academy Leader,” in Cyberspace: First Steps , ed. Michael L. Benedikt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 27.
3 . Andrew M. Butler, “Journeys beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavored Novels of Jeff Noon,” in Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives , ed. Sherryl Vint and Graham Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2010), 69.
4 . Sarah Chaplin, “Report to Virtual HQ: The Distributed City,” Journal of Architecture 2, no. 1 (1997): 48.
5 . Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, “Fetishizing the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 1 (2000): 121.
6 . Longo had a background in fine arts but had made pop videos and video art and intended to direct a black-and-white low-budget adaptation. He had collaborated with Gibson on the performance piece Dream Jumbo: Working the Absolutes (1989) at the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts.
7 . Frances Bonner, “Separate Development: Cyberpunk in Film and TV,” in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative , ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 207.
8 . Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 52.
9 . Ibid., 78.
10 . Ibid., 94.
11 . McDonagh, “Clive Barker & William Gibson,” 62.
12 . Brian McHale, “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk,” Critique 33, no. 3 (1992): 161. The spores eventually appeared in Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017).
13 . William Gibson, Alien III Revised First Draft Screenplay , https://www.awesomefilm.com/script/Alien3.txt .
14 . William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1987), 29.
15 . Bruce Sterling, “Preface,” in William Gibson, Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1987), x.
16 . Gary Westfahl, “‘The Gernsback Continuum’: William Gibson in the Context of Science Fiction,” in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative , ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 90.
17 . Gibson, “Gernsback Continuum,” 33.
18 . Details of Tomorrow Calling were confirmed to me by Leandro, personal communication, October 14, 2018.
19 . Augé, Non-Places , 4.
20 . John Fiske, “Reading the Beach,” in Reading the Popular (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 43–76.
21 . Rogier Van Bakel, “Remembering Johnny,” Wired , June 1, 1995, https://www.wired.com/1995/06/gibson-4/ .
22 . Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, “Johnny Mnemonic : The Day Cyberpunk Died,” in Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1996), 50, 51.
23 . Augé, Non-Places , 78.
24 . Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 134.
25 . Claudia Springer, “Psycho-cybernetics in Films of the 1990s,” in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema , ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 213.
26 . Laurence A. Rickels, “American Psychos: The End of Art Cinema in the ’90s,” Art/Text , no. 67 (2000): 62.
27 . McDonagh, “Clive Barker & William Gibson,” 62.
28 . Gavin Smith, “Dealing with the Now,” Sight and Sound 7, no. 4 (1997): 9.
29 . Paweł Frelik, “‘Silhouettes of Strange Illuminated Mannequins’: Cyberpunk’s Incarnations of Light,” in Cyberpunk and Visual Culture , ed. Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink (London: Routledge, 2018), 84.
30 . Shaviro, Connected , 153.
31 . Maitland McDonagh, “New Rose Hotel ,” Film Journal International (November 2004).
32 . Augé, Non-Places , 103.
33 . Ibid., 117–18.
34 . Felix Brinker, “Conspiracy, Procedure, Continuity: Reopening The X-Files ,” Television & New Media 19, no. 4 (2018): 329.
35 . Bronwen Calvert, “William Gibson’s ‘Cyberpunk’ X-Files ,” Science Fiction Film and Television 6, no. 1 (2013): 48.
36 . Sue Morris, “First-Person Shooters—A Game Apparatus,” in ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces , ed. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 87.
37 . Calvert, “William Gibson’s ‘Cyberpunk’ X-Files ,” 50.
38 . Augé, Non-Places , 106.
39 . Ibid., 102.
40 . Mark Bould, “Preserving Machines: Recentering the Decentered Subject in Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic ,” in Writing and Cinema , ed. Jonathan Bignell (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 176.
41 . Augé, Non-Places , 111.
Chapter 6
1 . Zeynep Yenisey, “This Dude Married His Computer, and Is Now Suing Alabama for Not Recognizing His ‘Machinist’ Sexuality,” Maxim , September 8, 2017, https://www.maxim.com/news/man-marries-computer-2017-9 . Lest one’s sympathies be roused by this tale of star-crossed lovers, Sevier really filed this lawsuit, and others in three states, to express his disdain for marriage equality.
2 . Lisa Katayama, “Man Marries Video Game Computer,” Boing Boing, November 23, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsikPswAYUM .
3 . Elizabeth Zwirtz, “Man, 35, Reportedly Marries Computer Hologram,” Fox News, November 14, 2018, https://www.foxnews.com/world/man-35-reportedly-marries-computer-hologram .
4 . Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3–4.
5 . Matthew K. Gold, “Day of DH,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities , ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 67–74.
6 . Jason Heppler, “What Is Digital Humanities?,” https://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ . As a commentary on this fluid notion of DH, Heppler created the “What Is Digital Humanities?” website, which displays a different definition each time the page loads. There are more than 800 entries.
7 . Meredith Hindley, “The Rise of the Machines: NEH and the Digital Humanities: The Early Years,” Humanities 34, no. 4 (2013), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/julyaugust/feature/the-rise-the-machines . One of the earliest humanities computing projects was undertaken by Father Roberto Busa, a Catholic priest with expertise in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. In the late 1940s, Busa conceived of the Index Thomisticus, a tool to track all word concordances in Aquinas’s body of writing. Building the index took him thirty years, even in partnership with IBM, and helped pave the way for future works of the same kind.
8 . Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Classes?,” in Debates in Digital Humanities , ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3–11.
9 . Patricia Cohen, “Digital Keys for Unlocking Humanities’ Riches,” New York Times , November 16, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html .
10 . C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2.
11 . Stephen Ramsay, “Who’s In and Who’s Out,” in Defining Digital Humanities , ed. Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte (New York: Routledge, 2013), 240. In a DH roundtable at the 2011 Modern Language Association’s annual meeting, noted DH scholar Stephan Ramsay threw down a gauntlet: “Digital Humanities is not some airy Lyceum,” he said. “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of Digital Humanities and I say ‘yes’” (“Who’s In and Who’s Out,” 240). This moment illustrates that the tension between these two approaches—to quantitative traditional humanities computing on one hand and to the qualitative domains of cultural studies and aesthetic production on the other—has not yet been resolved. Put another way, we might update Horkheimer and Adorno’s statement about “corrosive rationality” in the context of DH, where it would now read that “anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility is [still] viewed with suspicion.”
12 . William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 193.
13 . OED Online, Oxford University Press, “computer, n,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37975?redirectedFrom=computer#eid .
14 . Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: Penguin, 2000), 174. Kubrick’s ubiquitous 2001 adapted Clarke’s “The Sentinel” (1951) for film, and Clarke wrote the novelization to coincide with the film’s release.
15 . Ibid.
16 . Anne McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang (New York: Delray, 1985), 1–3.
17 . Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Tor, 1966), 381–82.
18 . William Gibson, “The Winter Market,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace Books, 1987), 118.
19 . See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chap. 2.
20 . Gibson, “The Winter Market.”
21 . Kathryn Allan, Disability in Science Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 8.
22 . Gibson, “Winter Market,” 126.
23 . Ibid., 130.
24 . Ibid., 125.
25 . Ibid., 133.
26 . Ibid., 123.
27 . Nicola Nixon, “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?,” Science Fiction Studies 19, no. 2 (1992): 219–35.
28 . Nikkianne Moody, “Untapped Potential: The Representation of Disability/Special Ability in the Cyberpunk Workforce,” Convergence 3 no. 3 (1997): 90.
29 . Gibson, “Winter Market,” 150.
30 . Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 49–82; Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
31 . We are grateful to the editors of Science Fiction Studies , who allowed us to digitize all of the journal’s content from 1973 onward and provided financial support for these efforts; to Julia Flanders and Élika Ortega for helping us locate the abstracts from the past twelve years of DH conferences; and to Elizabeth Callaway and the members of the DH Collaboratory at the University of Utah, who graciously shared their DH corpus.
Chapter 7
1 . William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, “Afterword,” in The Difference Engine 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011), Kindle edition.
2 . Ibid.
3 . Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Kindle edition, chap. 5.
4 . William Gibson, “William Gibson Talks about ‘The Peripheral,’ the Power of Twitter, and His Next Book Set in Today’s Silicon Valley,” interview by Matt Rosoff, Business Insider , August 13, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/william-gibson-the-peripheral-interview-business-insider-2016-8 .
5 . Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media , trans. Anthony Enns (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 9.
6 . Ibid., 9.
7 . Jussi Parikka, “Media Archaeology as a Trans-Atlantic Bridge,” introduction to Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 9.
8 . Phillip E. Wegner, Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 206.
9 . Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 27.
10 . Gibson and Sterling, “Afterword.”
11 . Roger Whitson, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories (London: Routledge, 2017).
12 . Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 11.
13 . Ibid., 56.
14 . Ibid., 35.
15 . Ibid., 79, 82.
16 . Wolfgang Ernst, “From Media History to Zeitkritik,” Theory, Culture, and Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 4.
17 . Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine , Third Iteration.
18 . Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 65.
19 . Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine , Third Iteration.
20 . Zieger shows how the proliferation of ephemera like tobacco cards created the same circuit of anxiety in the Victorian period as is experienced in contemporary social media applications. See Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 210.
21 . See, for instance, Babbage’s description of the division of labor in Charles Babbage, On the Economies of Machinery and Manufacture (London: John Murray, 1846), and Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (London: John Murray, 1837).
22 . Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine , First Iteration.
23 . Ibid.
24 . Ibid.
25 . Ernst, Chronopoetics , 78.
26 . Roger Whitson, “There Is No William Blake: @autoblake’s Algorithmic Condition,” Essays in Romanticism 21, no. 1 (2016): 69–87. Also see Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3.
27 . William Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: Penguin, 2014), Kindle edition, chap. 18.
28 . Ibid.
29 . Bratton, The Stack , xvii.
30 . Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol. 3, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (New York: International, 1977), 820.
31 . Jameson, Political Unconscious , 19.
32 . Bratton, The Stack , 5.
33 . Ibid., 76; emphasis in original.
34 . Ibid., 77; emphasis in original.
35 . Ibid., 116.
36 . Ibid., 121.
37 . Ibid.
38 . Gibson, Peripheral , chap. 3.
39 . Ibid., chap. 7.
40 . Ibid., chap. 15.
41 . Ibid.
42 . Ibid.
43 . Ibid.
44 . Ibid., chap. 21.
45 . Ibid.
46 . Steven Jones, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (London: Routledge, 2014), Kindle edition, chap. 1.
47 . Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine , “Afterword”; emphasis in original.
48 . Bratton, The Stack , 27–28.
49 . William Gibson, “William Gibson on Urbanism, Science Fiction, and Why The Peripheral Weirded Him Out,” interview by Karin L. Kross, Tor.com, October 29, 2014, https://www.tor.com/2014/10/29/william-gibson-the-peripheral-interview/ .
50 . Joshua Rothman, “How William Gibson Keeps Science Fiction Real,” New Yorker , December 9, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gibson-keeps-his-science-fiction-real .
51 . Bratton, The Stack , 353.
52 . Gibson, The Peripheral , chap. 79.
53 . Ibid.
54 . Jameson, Political Unconscious , 102.
55 . Gibson, The Peripheral , chap. 79.
56 . Ibid., chap. 120.
57 . Ibid., chap. 124.
58 . Ibid.
59 . Ibid., chap. 26.
60 . Ibid.
61 . William Gibson, “William Gibson on the Apocalypse, America, and The Peripheral ’s Ending,” interview by Analee Newitz, io9 , November 11, 2014, https://io9.gizmodo.com/william-gibson-on-the-apocalypse-america-and-the-peri-1656659382 .
62 . Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine , Third Iteration.
63 . Ibid.
64 . Gibson, The Peripheral , chap. 79.
65 . Ibid.
66 . Bratton, The Stack , 294.
67 . Jameson, Political Unconscious , 281.
68 . Ibid.
69 . Ibid., 289.
70 . See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1: The Process of Production of Capital , Marxists Internet Archive, 1999, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ .
71 . For an account of undersea cables and the ecologies inhabiting them, see Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
72 . For a description of control societies and TCP/IP protocol, see Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
73 . For a discussion of how rare-earth metals participate in global politics, see Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015).
74 . Bratton, The Stack , 351.
Chapter 8
1 . As well as the reference to the bailout of banks at taxpayer expense following the 2008 financial crisis, caused by inadequate market regulation of speculative instruments, especially collateralized debt obligations based on mortgages as their underlying asset, the title of my essay also points to the description of Bigend as too big to fail. William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Putnam, 2010), 396.
2 . Jaak Tomberg, “On the ‘Double Vision’ of Realism and SF Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 2 (July 2013): 263; emphasis in original.
3 . Ibid., 274; emphasis in original.
4 . William Gibson, Spook Country (New York: Putnam, 2007), 100.
5 . Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Sussex: Soul Bay Press, 2009), dictum 1.
6 . Ibid., dictum 4.
7 . Ibid., dictum 36.
8 . William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkley, 2003), 9.
9 . Ibid., 86.
10 . Ibid., 1.
11 . Gibson, Zero History , 54.
12 . Ibid., 213.
13 . Ibid., 21, 213.
14 . Ibid., 118.
15 . Ibid., 228.
16 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 44.
17 . Ibid., 61.
18 . Ibid., 254.
19 . Debord, Society of the Spectacle , dictum 42.
20 . Gibson, Zero History , 345.
21 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 104.
22 . Ibid., 329.
23 . Gibson, Zero History , 139.
24 . Ibid., 31.
25 . Ibid., 336.
26 . Ibid., 119.
27 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 8.
28 . Gibson, Zero History , 336.
29 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 104.
30 . Ibid.
31 . Ibid.
32 . Ibid., 194.
33 . Debord, Society of the Spectacle , dictum 2.
34 . Ibid., dictum 17.
35 . Ibid., dictum 16.
36 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 340.
37 . Ibid., 84.
38 . Ibid.
39 . Ibid., 17.
40 . Debord’s work no longer enjoys the centrality to leftist critical tradition that it once had. In his recent Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (London: Verso, 2019), McKenzie Wark makes détournement central to their arguments about how best to embody anticapitalist resistance today.
41 . Gibson, Spook Country , 10.
42 . Ibid., 29.
43 . Gibson also seems to anticipate how new communication media increasingly isolate rather than connect people, anticipating the divisive consequences of social media such as Facebook or Twitter on the public sphere, visible in recent, polarized US political discourse. Discussing his role in enabling Alberto’s locative art, Bobby explains that each server, each augmented version of reality, would show its own preferred reality, “the world we walk around in would be channels” (Spook Country , 87).
44 . Debord, Society of the Spectacle , dictum 226.
45 . Ibid., dictum 207. See https://www.adbusters.org for examples of cultural work done by détournement of advertisements.
46 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 286.
47 . Ibid., 69.
48 . Gibson, Spook Country , 69.
49 . Gibson, Zero History , 153.
50 . Ibid.
51 . The suggestion that the world of global commodities, much more than the world of technological mediation, propels this alienation is apparent in Stella’s nostalgic description of the Soviet era as a time of community, compared with a capitalist present in which the rich use police lights to warn others they (the rich) are not required to obey traffic laws: “Once Victor Tsoi sang here, in this room. People had time, in those days. The system was collapsing under its own weight, but everyone had a job, often a pointless one, very badly paid, but one could eat. People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit. Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true” (Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 301).
52 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 69.
53 . Ibid., 67.
54 . Gibson, Spook Country , 307.
55 . Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party , 1848, Marx-Engels Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007 .
56 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 57.
57 . Ibid., 1.
58 . Gibson, Zero History , 335.
59 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 115.
60 . Ibid., 292.
61 . See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre , ed. Gerry Canavan (Dublin: Ralahine Utopian Studies, 2017); Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000); Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future : The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); and Phillip E. Wegner, Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization and Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014) for only the most widely cited formulations of this idea. Jameson’s essay “Progress vs. Utopia,” first published in 1982 and reprinted in Archaeologies of the Future , is the most influential formulation of this idea that science fiction is a kind of historical fiction, or at least that it takes over the cultural role previously occupied by historical fiction.
62 . For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Sherryl Vint, “Introduction to the Futures Industry,” Paradoxa 27 (2016), http://paradoxa.com/volumes/27/introduction .
63 . See Sherryl Vint, “Promissory Futures: Reality and Imagination in Fiction and Finance,” The New Centennial Review 19, no. 1 (2019): 11–36.
64 . Gibson, Zero History , 401; emphasis in original.
65 . Gibson quoted in Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction , ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 280.
66 . Gibson, Zero History , 84.
67 . Gibson, Spook Country , 102.
68 . Ibid., 171.
Chapter 9
1 . I thank the editors of this volume for allowing me to flesh out my review discussion of The Peripheral , Amy J. Elias, “The Futureless Future,” American Book Review 36, no. 5 (2015): 12–13.
2 . See, for example, Istvan Csicery-Ronay Jr., “Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson’s Count Zero,” Science Fiction Studies 22, no. 1 (1995): 63–86. Csicery-Ronay correlates different novels in the Sprawl trilogy to different art movements, such as futurism and surrealism.
3 . When targeting ontological questions raised by the novels, readers often configure the problem of worlding as the overcoming of humanist mind/body dualism, focus on cognitive processes such as memory as a bridge between differing realities or times, or analyze shifts in ontological status in terms of a mystical/empirical dualism. For example, see Ralph Pordzik, “The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction,” Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (2012): 142–61. Mojca Krevel understands the attack on mind/body dualism in the Sprawl trilogy in relation to Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the singularity, a merging of human mind with AI (Mojca Krevel, “‘Back to the Future’: Technological Singularity in Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy,” British and American Studies 20 [2012]: 27–35). Such readings are certainly supported by the ending of Mona Lisa Overdrive , when Angie and Bobby upload their consciousness into the Aleph. In contrast, in “Mind against Matter: The Physics of Interface in William Gibson’s The Peripheral ,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60, no. 1 (2019): 34–48, Paul Piatkowski presents the novel’s cybernetic peripherals as interfaces that eliminate mind/body dualism not through the absorption of human mind into cybersingularity but through leveling the hierarchy between mind and body through embodiment. This kind of reading of Gibson’s work was presaged in Carl Gutierrez-Jones, “Stealing Kinship: Neuromancer and Artificial Intelligence,” Science Fiction Studies 41, no. 1 (2014): 69–92. For different treatments of memory as an ontological problem, see Joel Elliot Slotkin, “Haunted Infocosms and Prosthetic Gods: Gibsonian Cyberspace and Renaissance Arts of Memory,” Journal of Popular Culture 45, no. 4 (2012): 862–82, and Amy Novak, “Virtual Poltergeists and Memory: The Question of Ahistoricism in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984),” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 4 (2001): 395–414. For examples of how ontological discussions divert into discussions of mysticism versus empiricism or the sublime—usually configured as epistemology rather than ontology—see Lance Olsen, “The Shadow of Spirit in William Gibson’s Matrix Trilogy,” Extrapolation 32, no 3 (1991): 278–89; and Jack G. Voller, “Neuromanticism: Cyberspace and the Sublime,” Extrapolation 34, no. 1 (1993): 28–29.
4 . For a general explanation of multiverse, see Anthony Aguirre, “Multiverse: Cosmology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica , December 19, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/science/multiverse . On many-worlds theory, see Lev Vaidman, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds/ . See H. Everett, “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics,” Review of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454–62. For a quick introduction to Wiseman and Hall’s “many-interacting-worlds” theory, see https://phys.org/news/2014-10-interacting-worlds-theory-scientists-interaction.html .
5 . A contestable claim, actually. In Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), David Wittenberg describes the genre of time travel as a strategic suppression of social and psychological issues, supplanted by “an abiding concern with the mechanisms of time travel and with the innovative storytelling forms that such mechanisms can generate” (206).
6 . William Gibson, “William Gibson on the Apocalypse, America, and The Peripheral ’s Ending,” interview by Annalee Newitz, io9 , November 11, 2014, https://io9.gizmodo.com/william-gibson-on-the-apocalypse-america-and-the-peri-1656659382 .
7 . For discussions of the Subjunctive in Pynchon’s work, see Amy J. Elias, “History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon , ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 123–35; Brian McHale, “Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, a Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon , ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 43–62; and Kathryn Hume, Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
8 . Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin, 2013).
9 . McKenzie Wark, Telethesia: Communication, Culture, and Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 30.
10 . William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 259.
11 . David Chalmers, “Ontological Anti-Realism,” in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology , ed. D. J. Chalmers, D. Manley, and R. Wasserman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 77.
12 . Alexander Miller, “Realism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/realism/ .
13 . For a succinct definition of correlationism in relation to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, see Levi Bryant, “Correlationism,” in The Meillassoux Dictionary , ed. Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
14 . For discussions of these points, see Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 225–33; Graham Harman, “An Outline of Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Science Progress 96, no. 2 (2013): 187–99; Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (London: Zero Books, 2010); Graham Harman, “Realism without Materialism,” SubStance 40, no. 2 (2011): 52–72; Timothy Morton, Realist Magic (London: Open Humanities Press, 2013).
15 . William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace, 1986).
16 . William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988), 127.
17 . Gary Westfahl, William Gibson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 108, 84.
18 . See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
19 . William Gibson, The Peripheral (London: Penguin, 2014), 145.
20 . Ned Beauman, “William Gibson: ‘We Always Think of Ourselves as the Cream of Creation,’” Guardian , November 16, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/16/william-gibson-interview-the-peripheral .
21 . Sam Leith, “The Peripheral by William Gibson—A Glorious Ride into the Future,” Guardian , November 19, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/19/the-peripheral-william-gibson-ride-future . Gibson has mentioned The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, Keith Roberts’s works, and the film Winter’s Bone as influences. William Gibson, “William Gibson on Urbanism, Science Fiction, and Why The Peripheral Weirded Him Out,” interview by Karin L. Kross, Tor.com, October 29, 2014, http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/10/william-gibson-the-peripheral-interview . One commentator has noted similarities to Timescapes . Bryan Alexander, comments on “The Peripheral , by William Gibson,” Goodreads, July 17, 2014, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821159-the-peripheral .
22 . Gibson, “William Gibson on Urbanism, Science Fiction.”
23 . Gibson, The Peripheral , 279.
24 . Karin L. Kross, “The Future Is Here: William Gibson’s The Peripheral ,” Tor.com, October 27, 2014, http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/10/book-review-the-peripheral-william-gibson .
25 . Gibson, The Peripheral , 481–82.
26 . Gibson, “William Gibson on Urbanism, Science Fiction.”
Chapter 10
1 . William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkley, 2003), 57.
2 . I take this term from Lance Olsen, but I also have in mind the Electronic Frontier Foundation. John Perry Barlow, one of the organization’s founding members, metaphorically connected Gibson’s vision to the Wyoming distance of his childhood, seeing it as a “frontier region, populated by the few hardy technologists who can tolerate the austerity of its savage computer interfaces” but also the “place where the future is destined to dwell.” Lance Olsen, “Virtual Termites: A Hypotextual Technomutant Explo(it)ration of William Gibson and the Electronic Beyond(s),” Style 29, no. 2 (1995): 296; Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow, “Across the Electronic Frontier,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 10, 1990, https://www.eff.org/pages/across-electronic-frontier .
3 . William Burroughs, “The Fall of Art,” in The Adding Machine (New York: Arcade, 1986), 60–64.
4 . William Gibson, Spook Country (New York: Putnam, 2007), 141.
5 . William Gibson, “The Net Is a Waste of Time,” in Distrust That Particular Flavor (New York: Putnam, 2012). Gibson does still write in a way related to this figure of the surfer, toggling between a word processing application and a web browser, as if a hacker going between cyberspace and simstim.
6 . Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FANG) are four of the prime companies of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” and Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism.” I see both as attempts to understand the new production of space I describe here. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019); Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
7 . William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Putnam, 2010), 179.
8 . Fredric Jameson, “A Global Neuromancer ,” in The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (New York: Verso, 2015), 214.
9 . Jameson does not seem invested in the technical specificity of axonometric drawing, as compared with other forms of descriptive geometry that represent three-dimensional building on two-dimensional paper (printed or virtual). The importance of the concept for Jameson is the development of types of architectural drawing whose powers of abstraction extend representation beyond mimesis.
10 . Jameson, “A Global Neuromancer ,” 220.
11 . Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 , trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 135.
12 . Jameson, “A Global Neuromancer ,” 220.
13 . William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988), 264.
14 . Ibid., 16.
15 . Friedrich Kittler, “The City Is a Medium,” trans. Matthew Griffin, New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 717–29.
16 . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), see chap. 8.
17 . Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive , 76; emphasis in original.
18 . Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, [1974], 1991).
19 . Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media , trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, [2002] 2010), 58.
20 . Ibid., 62.
21 . Ibid.
22 . Lefebvre, Production of Space , 79.
23 . Kittler, Optical Media , 56.
24 . Ibid., 65.
25 . Damjan Jovanovic, “Fictions: A Speculative Account of Design Mediums,” in Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture , ed. Laura Allen and Luke Caspar Pearson (London: Riverside Architectural Press, 2016), 32; emphasis in original.
26 . David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 189. Kim Stanley Robinson shares this view and offers the compelling metaphor “granaries for holding money”; New York 2140 (New York: Orbit, 2017), 526.
27 . Veronica Hollinger, “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition,” Science Fiction Studies 33 (2006): 452–55.
28 . Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb , trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, [1998] 2000), 1.
29 . Ibid., 17.
30 . Ibid.
31 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 9.
32 . Ibid., 21.
33 . Ibid., 17–18.
34 . Ibid., 12.
35 . Ibid.
36 . Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject , trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press [2009] 2010), 10.
37 . Ibid., 21.
38 . Lee Konstantinou, “The Brand as Cognitive Map in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition ,” boundary 2 36, no. 2 (2009): 70.
39 . Fredric Jameson, “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 386.
40 . Jaak Tomberg, “On the ‘Double Vision’ of Realism and SF Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 40, no. 2 (2013): 268.
41 . Hollinger, “Stories about the Future,” 463–64.
42 . Tomberg, “On the Double Vision,” 272. Olsen also refers to the “speed of Gibson’s sentences” in Neuromancer ; “Virtual Termites,” 306.
43 . Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (2002): 175–90, http://www.jstor.org/stable/779098 . Jameson does in fact compare this style to that of cyberpunk, which seems “to revel in its own (and its world’s) excess.” Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May/June 2003): 76.
44 . Ibid., 74.
45 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 1.
46 . Gibson, Zero History , 243.
47 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 9.
48 . Ibid., 12.
49 . Ibid., 110.
50 . Gibson, Spook Country , 4.
51 . Gibson, Pattern Recognition , 146.
52 . William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Arbor House, 1986).
53 . William Gibson, “Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Great Cities,” in Distrust That Particular Flavor (New York: Putnam, 2012).
54 . Joe Shaw and Mark Graham, “An Informational Right to the City?,” in The Right to the City: A Verso Report (London: Verso, 2017).
55 . Ibid.
56 . Gibson, Zero History , 37.
57 . Ibid., 183–84.
58 . William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 56.
59 . Ibid., 63.
60 . Gibson, Zero History , 184.
61 . Lefebvre, Production of Space , 101.
62 . Kapor and Barlow, “Across the Electronic Frontier.”
Chapter 11
1 . World Health Organization, “Gaming Disorder,” http://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/ (accessed December 8, 2018).
2 . See, for example, Ryan Avent, “Escape to Another World,” The Economist 1843 , April/May 2017, https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world ; and Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, and Erik Hurst, “Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 23552 (June 2017).
3 . Avent, “Escape to Another World.”
4 . See Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Penguin, 2018).
5 . Greta Krippner, “The Financialization of the American Economy,” Socio-Economic Review 3, no. 2 (2005): 174.
6 . Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 12.
7 . Newzoo, “Newzoo’s 2017 Report: Insight into the 108.9 Billion Global Games Market,” Newzoo, June 20, 2017, https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoo-2017-report-insights-into-the-108-9-billion-global-games-market/ .
8 . William Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: Putnam, 2014), 3. All further citations indicated parenthetically.
9 . Brendan Keogh, A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 22; emphasis in original.
10 . See Mackenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 006.
11 . On gamification, see especially Paolo Ruffino, “Life after Gamification: How I Broke Up with Nike+ FuelBand,” in Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2018), 26–44. On casual games, see especially Aubrey Anable, “Rhythms of Work and Play,” Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 71–102.
12 . Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xix.
13 . Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 , trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 147, 227.
14 . Ibid., 259–60. Foucault is drawing out American neoliberalism’s reliance on the field of mathematics known as game theory. On this subject, see S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
15 . See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017); and Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
16 . Brown, Undoing the Demos , 70.
17 . Michel Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age , trans. Gregory Elliott (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2018), 193.
18 . Martin, Empire of Indifference , 21.
19 . On the subprime, see Fred Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 237–45. See also Christian P. Haines, “Fictions of Human Capital, or, Redemption in Neoliberal Times,” in Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature , ed. Stephen Shapiro and Liam Kennedy (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2019), 114–35.
20 . See Christopher Paul, The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
21 . Ivan Ascher, Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2016), 123.
22 . Ibid., 124.
23 . Wark, Gamer Theory , 140.
24 . Ibid., 134.
25 . Lisa Adkins, The Time of Money (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 92.
26 . J. Paul Narkunas, Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 65.
27 . Keogh, A Play of Bodies , 152.
28 . Christopher Breu describes this outsourcing of vulnerability as avatar fetishism. See Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 22–23.
29 . Claus Pias, Computer Game Worlds , trans. Valentine A. Pakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 18, 122–23.
30 . Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 27. See also Aden Evens, The Logic of the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
31 . For a popular account of the digitization of finance, see Scott Patterson, Dark Pools: The Rise of Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market (New York: Crown, 2013). For a critical theorization, see Katherine Hayles, “Temporality and Cognitive Assemblages: Finance Capital, Derivatives, and High-Frequency Trading,” in Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
32 . Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 8–9.
Afterword
1 . William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 11.
2 . William Gibson, The Peripheral (London: Penguin, 2014), 35.
3 . Ibid., 47.
4 . William Gibson, “The Art of Fiction No. 211,” interview by David Wallace-Wells, Paris Review , no. 197 (Summer 2011): 110.