Understanding William Gibson

Gerald Alva Miller Jr.

Description

A study of the science fiction author who popularized the concept of cyberspace

Gerald Alva Miller Jr.'s Understanding William Gibson is a thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson, author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. Gibson is the recipient of many notable awards for science fiction writing including the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's iconic novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace. With his early stories and his first trilogy of novels, Gibson became the father figure for a new genre of science fiction called "cyberpunk" that brought a gritty realism to its cerebral plots involving hackers and artificial intelligences.

This study situates Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic affected both areas of literature. Miller follows a brief biographical sketch and a survey of the works that influenced him with an examination that divides Gibson's body of work into early stories, his three major novel trilogies, and his standalone works. Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors.

Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major countercultural movements that influenced him (the Beat Generation, the hippies, and the punk rock movement) while also placing him within the history of science fiction and examining how his early works reacted against contemporaneous trends in the genre. These early works also exhibit the development of his unique aesthetic that would influence science fiction and literature more generally. Next a lengthy chapter explicates his groundbreaking Sprawl Trilogy, which began with Neuromancer.

Miller then traces Gibson's aesthetic transformations across his two subsequent novel trilogies that increasingly eschew distant futures either to focus on our contemporary historical moment as a kind of science fiction itself or to imagine technological singularities that might lie just around the corner. These chapters detail how Gibson's aesthetic has morphed along with social, cultural, and technological changes in the real world. The study also looks at such standalone works as his collaborative steampunk novel, his attempts at screenwriting, his major essays, and even his experimental hypertext poetry. The study concludes with a discussion of Gibson's lasting influence and a brief examination of his most recent novel, The Peripheral, which signals yet another radical change in Gibson's aesthetic.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Science Fiction
• Samuel R. Delany
• Simulacrum
• Superiority (short story)
• Rubber's Lover
• Lewis Shiner
• George Clayton Johnson
• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Orwellian
• Ray Bradbury
• Harrison Bergeron
• Charles Stross
• Pat Cadigan
• Don DeLillo
• Alfred Bester
• David Cronenberg
• Fantasy
• Henri Bergson
• Samuel Delany
• William Gibson

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 28 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611176346
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING WILLIAM GIBSON
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster
Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats
Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle
Truman Capote | Raymond Carver | Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell
Chicano Literature | Contemporary American Drama
Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926-1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970-2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature | Robert Coover | Philip K. Dick | James Dickey
E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | Don DeLillo | Dave Eggers | John Gardner
George Garrett | Tim Gautreaux | William Gibson | John Hawkes | Joseph Heller
Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley | James Leo Herlihy | David Henry Hwang
John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Charles Johnson | Diane Johnson | Adrienne Kennedy
William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac | Jamaica Kincaid | Etheridge Knight
Tony Kushner | Ursula K. Le Guin | Jonathan Letham | Denise Levertov
Bernard Malamud | David Mamet | Bobbie Ann Mason | Colum McCann
Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle | Carson McCullers | W. S. Merwin
Arthur Miller | Steven Millhauser | Lorrie Moore | Toni Morrison s Fiction
Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor | Joyce Carol Oates | Tim O Brien
Flannery O Connor | Cynthia Ozick | Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy
Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers | Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx
Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke | Philip Roth | Richard Russo | May Sarton
Hubert Selby, Jr. | Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard | Neil Simon | Isaac Bashevis Singer
Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford | Robert Stone | Anne Tyler
Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut | David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren
James Welch | Eudora Welty | Colson Whitehead | Tennessee Williams
August Wilson | Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING
WILLIAM GIBSON
Gerald Alva Miller, Jr.

The University of South Carolina Press
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-633-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-634-6 (ebook)
Front cover photograph by Ulf Andersen
http://ulfandersen.photoshelter.com
To the memory of my father, Jerry Miller,
Who taught me to love science fiction.
For my mother, Debbie Miller,
Who has always supported me no matter what.
For Jane, my daughter,
Who has brought new inspiration into my life.
And, finally, for Leigh,
Without whom none of this would have been possible.
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Understanding William Gibson
Chapter 2 A Cyborg Apprenticeship: The Early Stories and the Retrofitting of Genres
Chapter 3 Beneath the Televisual Sky: The Sprawl Trilogy and the Rise of Cyberpunk
Chapter 4 Nodal Points: Singularities, Heterotopias, and Organic Spaces in the Bridge Trilogy
Chapter 5 Twenty-First-Century Singularities: The Future s End in Gibson s Bigend Trilogy
Chapter 6 Engaging with Difference: William Gibson s Genre and Media Explorations
Conclusion: Retrofitting Cyberpunk-Gibson s Lasting Influence
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives- and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ABBREVIATIONS
Works by William Gibson
BC
Burning Chrome
CZ
Count Zero
DTPF
Distrust That Particular Flavor
N
Neuromancer
PR
Pattern Recognition
Other Frequently Cited Works
WGLC
Tom Henthorne s William Gibson: A Literary Companion
WGO
Lance Olsen s William Gibson
WGW
Gary Westfahl s William Gibson
CHAPTER 1
Understanding William Gibson
Born on March 17, 1948, William Ford Gibson is often given the moniker father of cyberpunk, the subgenre of science fiction (or sci-fi or SF) that focuses on computer information systems, corporate control, and hyperurbanized spaces. Ironically, Gibson s early years were not spent in an urban environment or in an area known for technological advancement. Born in the coastal town of Conway, South Carolina, he spent the bulk of his childhood in Wytheville, a small Virginia town in the Appalachian Mountains (Dellinger 1). As Andrew Ross and Scott Bukatman discuss, many of the major cyberpunk authors also hailed unexpectedly from southern locales instead of from the major northern cities one might expect. Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and Rudy Rucker, for example, were born in Brownsville, Texas; Houston, Texas; and Louisville, Kentucky, respectively. 1 Despite his rural upbringing, Gibson became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States and a critic and visionary of the digital age.
From the Rural to the Virtual: A Brief Chronology of Gibson s Life
Gibson spent his first eight years in various parts of the South. His father, William Ford Gibson, Jr., managed a construction company that did plumbing work at Oak Ridge, where the first atomic bomb was built (Feller). Gibson s father died when the boy was eight, after which he and his mother, Elizabeth Otey, moved back to her hometown of Wytheville, Virginia (Feller). Because his mother was the town librarian, Gibson developed an early passion for books, and his writing style was influenced equally by sources as diverse as hard-boiled crime authors such as Raymond Chandler and postmodern novelists such as Thomas Pynchon (Dellinger 1). But it was the Classics Illustrated comic book version of The Time Machine that led Gibson to H. G. Wells s original novel and the genre of science fiction (Feller). At this time in the 1950s and 1960s, Gibson was inundated by science fiction from all sides. Gibson developed a voracious reading habit that included Philip K. Dick s classic The Man in the High Castle (1962), as well as other major science fiction writers of the 1950s, including Alfred Bester, [Robert A.] Heinlein, and Theodor Sturgeon ( WGW 11). Television also bombarded him with sci-fi in the form of shows such as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950-55), The Mysterious Dr. Satan (1940), and The Twilight Zone (1959-64), and he found even more sci-fi in genre magazines such as Galaxy ( WGW 10-11). However, Gibson soon discovered an author who would forever transform his outlook not just on science fiction but also on the potential of literature more generally-William S. Burroughs.
Gibson s discovery of Burroughs came at an opportune time-right before his departure from Wytheville. When he was fifteen years old, his mother sent him to a school in Tucson, Arizona, called the Southern Arizona School for Boys ( WGLC 7). As Gibson explains in his biographical essay Since 1948 on his website, he made an important discovery before leaving Wytheville: I had stumbled, in my ceaseless quest for more and/or better science fiction, on a writer named Burroughs-not Edgar Rice but William S., and with him had come his colleagues Kerouac and Ginsberg . The effect, over the next few years, was to make me, at least in terms of my Virginia home, Patient Zero of what would later be called the counterculture ( DTPF 22-23). Burroughs showed Gibson the possibilities of combining science-fictional plots with experimental aesthetics, and he also introduced the teenager to a world of hustlers, con artists, and drug addicts that helped shape the plots of Gibson s early works.
When he arrived at the Arizona school, Gibson recounts that he began the forced invention of a less Lovecraftian persona ( DTPF 22-23). Gibson suggests that his acquaintance with the Beat Generation helped him experiment with one identity after another in an attempt to find himself. Then, anot