Tomorrows
I bought a copy of All Tomorrow’s Parties in a second-hand bookshop recently for two dollars. I felt a little bad for William Gibson; I mean, it’s not his best book, but surely a (good condition, hardback) copy of it is worth more than that. On the back, there’s a big picture of Mr Gibson, wearing a slightly outlandishly sized cell phone. A tactical error on his part, one would think—imagine if old editions of Neuromancer had featured pictures of those crazy old ’80s modems (that featured actual loudspeakers you hooked up to a phone). Although maybe they almost do. Glueboot read Neuromancer a while back and balked at the now impossibly retro character of Gibson’s future. I first read the book some time in the early ’90s, before I’d ever seen the Internet (though I think I’d vaguely heard about it, or at least about bulletin boards). When do possible futures become inaccesible, and why? What on earth are we to do with all the no-longer accesible futures that must litter the last 200 years of conceptual time?
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It’s not one of his better books, really. It’s worth about that. You do have to consider that Gibson ate out on Neuromancer and the subsequent “cyberpunk” street cred until he started Pattern Recognition.
In regards to possible bygone futures…it’s elements of them that stay around longer than the images as wholes (constructed and marketed though they be, like Chicago’s White City, GE’s Futurama, or the films Soylent Green or Silent Running…as always, whose future?). We may not have jazz blaring from flying wings filled with debutantes and ballrooms, but we have relatively cheap intercontinental travel. We might not have atom ray disintegrator guns, but we have cruise missiles. We don’t have moon bases or deep space missions, but we do have the Hubble. Chunks of the bygone futures stay around and become concrete.
Gibson actually wrote something about this in an excellent short story of his called The Gernsback Continuum (it’s the the Burning Chrome short collection, which I highly recommend). Bits of the never-born future of sci-fi pulp magazines fade into existence to haunt a southern california photographer. It made me miss the futures that never happened (is there a psychological name for missing a future that didn’t and will never happen?)
~
Comment by deleuzer @ 2/22/2006 12:55 am
or, as martin says,”What year does MJF go to in Back to the Future three, and has it happened yet?”
At risk of sounding like a spambot, I found a site you might be interested in - http://www.jihadwatch.org/
Comment by leila @ 2/22/2006 12:58 am
yeah, speaking of the future, we just saw “Soylent Green” for the first time last night. I’ve got to admit that, despite knowing more or less how it would end, I was still pleasantly surprised.
Comment by geo @ 2/22/2006 8:49 am
That Jihadwatch site is some scary shit (does Back to the Future III have a future in it? I only remember the wild west shenanigins).
Deleuzer, good point on the bits of what once were the future that continue to exist in the present. The way in which what once appeared completely other gets incorporated, without obvious disruption, is interesting. I’m thinking Deleuze sort of talks about this; and it makes me think of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ This whole theme of the disruption of temporality interests me.
Comment by tim @ 2/23/2006 12:03 am
damn! BTTF 2 is what i meant, of course. sorry to misquote marty
Comment by leila @ 2/23/2006 2:24 am
You better be.
Comment by Marty @ 2/24/2006 4:30 am
“What on earth are we to do with all the no-longer accesible futures that must litter the last 200 years of conceptual time?”
Light them on fire and throw them at cops, clearly. (Underneath the future, the beach!)
Comment by Nate @ 2/24/2006 9:20 pm
“Underneath the future, the beach!”
Fuck, that’s a brilliant slogan.
Comment by tim @ 2/26/2006 12:41 am
Its brilliance surely some-what limited by being a pun on a 40 year old in-joke …
Comment by Stefan @ 2/27/2006 2:33 am
Only if you’re not in on the joke Stefan, or are too young or too old to fit into the proper demographic.
Comment by Nate @ 3/3/2006 11:53 pm