Transcript “Historical Future” as Semiotic Ghosts William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”

“Historical Future” as
Semiotic Ghosts
William Gibson’s “The Gernsback
Continuum”
As a Meta-fictional Sci-fi
Outline
• Gibson on history and sci-fi;
• Questions
• Re-Visiting the “Futuristic” Past as Exotic and
Simulated
• Meanings of the 30’s & 40’s –
• Interpretation of the Photographer’s Vision
• The way out.
• Metafictional Messages
• Gibson on the Post-Human
William Gibson on History
• “. . .history, . . .is the ultimate in
speculative narrative, subject to ongoing
revision.
• Science fiction tends to behave like a
species of history pointing in the opposite
direction, up the timeline rather than back.”
• “Gernsback Continuum” turns backward to
a future that didn’t exist physically, but
exists as ‘semiotic ghost.’
Starting Questions
• How has history been discussed by
postmodern texts?
• What makes the appearance of “the future
of the past” in this story possible?
• What does the past (and its future) as
semiotic ghost mean? What does it reflect
on sci-fi itself?
• How does the narrator get out of his vision
of the past?
The Past Exoticized & Simulated
• Architecture – layers of history around us, reinterpreted in daily lives, but fetishized in photos.
• Dialta Downes– a pop-art historian p. 25; “This
way lies madness.”
• British mania for a uniquely American form of
architecture (“American Streamlined Moderne” =
Barris-Watford project) p. 25
• The past recycled first in the 50’s—as time fillers.
• Photographer “They decide, I shoot” 24; p. 27
photograph what isn’t there.
The 30’s & 40’s—meanings?
• P, 26 – beginning of industrial design
• Traces left in the present Segments of a
dream world ignored in the present time p.
26
• Populist 27; Totalitarian 27 & tacky -carries with it "a kind of totalitarian dignity,
like the stadiums Albert Speer built for
Hitler.
Traces of Futurism
Dime store 出售廉價品的商店
Fluted aluminum p. 25
Movie marquee
this Coca Cola Bottling Plant p. 28
Johnson Wax Building & FRANK R.
PAUL's
•
Image source: 1; 2
Futurist Vision (2)
Jules Verne’s airship
• Futurist -- Jules Verne – a French 19th-c
sci-fi writer
Slip-stream
chrome p. 28
Traces in the present—Gas
Stations
• Ming the Merciless is a
fictional character
appearing in the Flash
Gordon comic strip.
• The capital of his empire
is named Mongo in his
honour. p. 28
From Traces to Vision
• The way he shoots architecture p. 27  p. 29
penetrated a fine membrane of probability
• A journalist’s interpretation: people see things =
• (1) drug and hallucination p. 29
• (2) contactee stories – framed in sci-fi imagery
(e.g. a woman who gets assaulted by a bear
head);
• (3) semiotic ghost 31; fragments of the Mass
Dream
Vision of a City p. 33
• Spire on spire
• ziggurat (pyramidal
structure)  Blade
Runner
• Wing-liner 輪船
• Gyrocopter
• a perfect, blond, blueeyed young couple
materialize in the Arizona
desert 34 -- "all the
sinister fruitiness of Hitler
Youth propaganda."
His Way out of it
•
•
•
•
•
Exorcising with bad media 35
Watches a movie with eyes shut
Leaves Los Angeles
News about nuclear energy crisis p. 36
TV helps a lot p. 24; beginning as ending–
vision dismissed to ”the corner of the eye”
• What does all this mean?
Sci-fi presents
• A possible future world
• As signs, it becomes part of people’s
collective unconscious
• Some people may ‘live’ in this world.
• Whatever happens, the present world—
presented thru’ media--is still better.
• Gernsback Continuum—not temporal
continuum, but spatial or semiotic
continuum (“a conceptual space, an
alternative universe that exists
alongside our own - and occasionally
intersects with our 'real' world” (source).
Gibson on the Post-Human
• From No Maps for These Territories
• Humans – so mixed with and influenced
by technologies that we are not aware of it.
• They change our concept of time and
geography.
• No humans nowadays are not mediated.