Grunge Futurism
Julian Loose
- Virtual Light by William Gibson
Viking, 336 pp, £14.99, September 1993, ISBN 0 670 84081 5 - Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction by Scott Bukatman
Duke, 416 pp, £15.95, August 1993, ISBN 0 8223 1340 5
The future isn’t what it used to be. In one of William Gibson’s first published stories, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, a photographer is assigned to capture examples of ‘futuristic’ American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories. Familiarising himself with streamlined dime stores and Coca-Cola plants built like submarines, the photographer starts to glimpse an alternative world born of the aerodynamic optimism of that earlier age, sees blond-haired people driving shark-fin roadsters down 80-lane freeways towards a towering metropolis. But these are ‘semiotic ghosts’ from a heroic, expansionist future that has passed America by: a gee-whiz, fascist-tinged fantasy that ‘knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose’.
The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered please login here
- If you are using the site for the first time please register here
- If you would like access to the entire online archive subscribe here
- Institutions or university library users please login here
- Learn more about our institutional subscriptions here
Vol. 15 No. 21 · 4 November 1993 » Julian Loose » Grunge Futurism
pages 40-42 | 2360 words