William Gibson’s noir Science Fiction was a breath of fresh air in the 1980s. Science Fiction, especially in the American market, resisted the noir style that entered mainstream literary markets during the Great Depression (1890-1930). In other genres, depression era writers were affected by what they saw. During this period, the reading market expanded from the upper class into the middle class, and everyday people identified with a new crop of middle class characters struggling to eek out a living.

Despite the depression, SF was insulated by writers who imagined the ills of society cured by technological advances. World War II supported this premise: mechanical computers that break enemy encryption, airplanes, and the atomic age. During the moon race in the fifties and sixties, SF exploded with stories of a better future through governments and corporations backing the proletariats of SF—engineers.

In the later seventies, with a failed war under the US’s belt and inflation ruining the economy, corporate slogans such as "modern living through chemistry" became nightmares as noir SF developed around governments and corporations abusing technology for short term gains. In William Gibson’s short story, "The Gernsback Continuum" (Burning Chrome, 1986), a modern day photographer travels around America shooting photos of futuristic looking 1930s and 1940s architecture (movie marquees, space-age looking diners). On his way out of Tucson, Arizona, he hallucinates that the city has turned into a glowing metropolis of the future. Then the photographer puts his finger on why visions such as this were a siren song—it was for show, a populist picture because that was what people wanted. The people of the forties who dreamed of the eighties didn’t want to be bothered with details like pollution and the finiteness of fossil fuel.

Gibson throws out the well-groomed cast of geeks and morally righteous CEOs of SF’s Golden Age and puts in their place billionaires with multinationals above any country’s law and ne’er-do-wells who, despite technological advances, are having trouble getting by. In his first novel, Neuromancer, we follow the life of Case, a twenty-four-year-old hacker who had a successful career as a data thief. But Case broke his personal rule about stealing from his clients and got caught. Rather than kill him, his pissed off clients damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. When the story starts, he can’t do what he lived for—roam the electronic realm. He has to steal without the buffer of a computer, and try to earn enough to get his nervous system repaired.

Gibson leaves his readers with visions of the wealthy trying to become not only untouchable, but nearly immortal. He alludes that the technology to do this is like the glowing metropolis, but clarifies one point—only a few can afford the rent.

Copyright© 2004 Lancer Kind

***

Read an extract from Lancer Kind's Splice

LANCER KIND grew up on a farm in Montana where he learned to ride a horse at the age of five and shoot varmints by the age of fourteen.  In the nineties he lived north of Denver where he studied big city life and ski areas while working for a large high tech firm.  Today, Lancer lives in the Pacific Northwest with his lovely wife Shelli and their imaginary rooster Jimmy. 
Contact Lancer