Avatar. The Avengers. Iron Man 3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The Dark Knight Rises.
These are five of the top ten all-time highest grossing movies. Their (arguable) inclusion in the Science Fiction canon begs a question of the genre: is it just the spectacle that we shell out to witness, or is there some more primitive itch that these kinds of events scratch?
This blog is dedicated to figuring out how it is that Science Fiction addresses the problem of defining "human."
Alright well what the heck. I sort’ve understand this piece but at the same time I am hella confused. Firstly, I’m very aware that this is supposed to be a sort of “What if” scenario of how futuristic technology could have advanced but Gibson portrays this in such a weird way. Is the character seeing all these things cause he’s high? I think that’s really the only explanation right? Anyways, so I feel like Gibson is very anti-war. He blames WWII for essentially killing our opportunities to advance technologically. However both World Wars presented great advancements in technology, although they were only for the sake of warfare. I admit a lot of them weren’t any crazy sophisticated advancement, (world war 1 for example introduced the world to barbed wire which isn’t very technologically advanced but it sure helped the men on the war front.) but they were advancements none the less and they showed the capabilities of the human mind at the time. I don’t think we’ve advanced to the point of flying cars and all that jazz yet because we are simply not ready to. I think if the human race could handle such advancements some great mind would’ve been able to make them a reality. Also, I feel like maybe Gibson is against futuristic technology. Is that the human problem he’s trying to portray? That we’re too invested in the technology of the future? I’m not quite sure. This story feels so incomplete. Give me more to read so I’ll have more to think about Gibson!!
I get the feeling that Gibson, like a lot of sci-fi writers I guess, is using his story to make a social comment. It's pretty clear that he's trying to convey his opinion on the way society had progressed up until that point. He repeatedly references the futuristic architecture that was once viewed as the way of the future. The architecture itself might not have been what was really important, but instead maybe what the architecture stood for. Just like in the communist manifesto it has its roots in Italy, and is characterized by long, defined edges that imply speed, and strength. The whole short story, for me is written from the perspective of someone reminiscing on what could have been. Then again, I could be missing the point entirely who knows. I was also interested in how Gibson uses the "continuum" to illustrate two separate realities existing beside each other but in different dimensions. Its sounds a lot like the multiverse theory to me, but whether or not Gibson intended his story to resemble an actual scientific theory, I'm not sure. Regardless, it was great how Gibson used Gersnback for inspiration for his title and the continuum. I think it helped contrast the style of sci-fi Giersnback was known for, the typical genre that "checks all the boxes," and the cyberpunk Gibson preferred.
I found the commentary on how people of the past were so excited for the future really interesting. My brother and I were actually having a discussion the other day that this story flashed me back to. We were talking about how nostalgia plays a much larger role now in people's lives than it did in the past. In this story for example, people in the thirties to fifties are concerned with looking to the future. They are excited about technology and the extreme machine age with modern gadgets, architecture, and design. Sure it's not exactly like what they describe in the story (technologically) today, but obviously the technology and inventions that we've created from the thirties to now would be astonishing to anyone who was transplanted from that era to the present day. There aren't flying cars, but there are tiny computers and people talking to a seemingly imaginary person in their ear who is on the other side of the world.
But back to my point about nostalgia. We've reached this age. And while the future is ever ahead of us and development is still coming, maybe it's lost some of its luster. I mean social media is linked to depression, self-esteem issues, and loneliness now as well as retardation of children's social skills in general. Transportation technology, as is alluded to in the story, is killing the planet. The need for technology is drying out our bank accounts by taking our spending money and our jobs. It's changed relationships, both romantic and platonic and it's changed business and the economy. It's more fun imagining the glittery technology that heals all ills and is fancy, attractive, strange, unknown, and mysterious. The reality is far less fun. It's ambiguity allowed it perfection and simplicity.
All these changes can be scary and leave people reaching for the simpler past. Vintage is an incredible trend - 80s clothing, 70s hippie mentality, vinyl records, thrift stores, etc. And what's ironic is that technology is exactly what is facilitating this. With the click of power button you can search the web for old trends, music, and movies. You can look through an archive of pictures and home movies from childhood and remember when you were less stressed. You can go on youtube and look up old tv shows and disney classics. It's so easy now to relish in the past. Technology is a gateway to the future, but also a time machine to days gone by.
I really enjoyed reading this, it was a fun ride to go on. One thing I loved about this story was the double use of “dream.” It is frequently used in a way that can refer to the dream of the future, or the dream that he may or may not be having.an example of this is when he writes “But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution…” I thought this line was great. My favorite line of the piece is near the end, when he says to the owner of the news stand, “ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’” I think that this was just a witty way to sum up a lot of the feelings of the whole piece. That being said, I’m not sure what to do with this story. I believe that it fits in this class for sure, but I don’t know how to use it, what ideas to talk about or how it compares to other works we have read. I don’t know if I should read it as some sort of commentary? Or some way of talking about how we as a society use SCI FI? To do this though seems to stray from the formula of the class a bit, because of the meta nature of this story. It isn’t dealing with these new inventions, it is dealing with the thought of dealing with these new inventions. This is really interesting and provocative, but I’m not sure what to do with it other than saying, “Wow, that was a fun ride,” or “huh, that was odd.” I think I may feel this way because it only gestures towards the issues other pieces really deal with. as an example, It merely nods to the fascist ideas present in the 1930’s ideas on future, instead of really dealing with it. I suppose it also brings up the issues of perceptions of what technology will accomplish, or how we can become obsessed with technology, but again I feel like it doesn't do much with them.
I loved Neuromancer, but this I kind of just…tolerated. The writing is a bit too gonzo-ish for my palate, and as a result it was a little hard to engage with. It’s the same feeling I get with poetry, or our Afrofuturism segment: I get that it’s good and interesting in its own meaningful way, but it doesn’t get me excited, and I just don’t “get” it. Maybe it’s because I had crappy English teachers in elementary school, or because I’m an American white male. Probably both.
Still, I like this: “…a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams…” We imagined a glorious streamlined future, and we’re arguably capable of it, but look at what we’ve done instead. “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome…but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car…so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal.” Amazing Stories covers turned into Nazi V2 rockets and postwar consumerist ennui? THIS I can get into: It’s delightfully, deliciously cynical, my favorite. And how true too, looking back in history (a source of limitless cynicism). It’s the kind of thing that keeps you awake at night. What could have been, expectations versus reality, squandered opportunities, misguided endeavors, and repeating history despite having the history to reference. All the while, we unduly romanticize the past.
That said, if I want a trippy adventure story with complex messages, I’ll happily take a good ‘ol fashioned scifi novel. (PKD’s “Man in the High Castle” has history and Nazis, too!)
By the way, regarding “agrarian cyberpunk”: how about “Dune”?
I’m very confused from this story. I am unsure of what actually happened, particularly because of the way it was written. This style of writing was very start/stop for me, and somehow conveyed very little information by being too detailed. Because of this, I am left with more questions coming out of this read that I probably should have. I enjoy the references to the future of the past, a notion that one can see in an episode of the Jetsons. Chrome, crystal and esoteric skyscrapers. From what I could gather, as a combination of methamphetamine and as Kihn described, semiotic ghosts, the narrator is producing these wonderful scenes of a Jetson-like future. I am very confused as to why he seems to dislike the notion of a utopia such as the one that he “trips out” about, instead of the current dystopia he sees the country succumbing to. As a personal note, the scape that he describes, very closely mirrors the futuristic utopia shown in the film H.G. Wells’ Things to Come, which is a work that some of these aspirations were most likely drawn from.
It too multiple readings for me to actually understand this. Or at least I think I understand this. The plot is pretty clear. It’s what happens during it that threw me off. I thought the references to other works were there for the sake of being there. They serve as descriptions of the architecture or what was in vogue during the timeframes mentioned. I think there’s more to the narrator and setting than the story lets on. What was the deal with the flying wing? I get the feeling that what the narrator is going through is one big hallucination instead of just the Dream scenes. Whether or not it is one big illusion, the narrator seems to be content with it or at the very least thinks that it’s better than living the future of the past. The way the future of the past was described seemed to be sterile and boring in spite of the technology it would’ve had. Maybe the future shouldn’t be perfect and have some flaws.
From Stephanie: I'm not super sure what to make of this story. It was interesting, and a fun read, but I don't feel like I have anything profound to say about it. One aspect of the story I really liked was the imagery. Because a huge portion of the piece was focused on the architecture, and the narrator himself was a photographer, the imagery definitely seemed important to the story. Plus it was just cool to imagine. One of my favorite instances was when he said "Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things ... , mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters …" It seems to focus on the illustrative quality of fiction more than the other pieces we've focused on, which made this one enjoyable for me, even though I still finished reading it without knowing what to do with it.
I get that it was supposed to focus on the contrast between problems in reality, and the idealized dream of the future, and show that even the perfect future would have problems, but I just didn't think there was much to say since the narrator said that himself at the end. I could be completely missing something, and I'm really interested in what everyone else has to say about it, but the actual message of the story wasn't really the interesting bit for me. I was much more entertained by the descriptions of the setting because it was a step away from everything we've done so far. Either way, it was a nice, quick read.
I liked this short story, even though I had to read it two or three times to actually begin to understand what was going on. After my first read-through, I did not pick up on his vision being a hallucination, "A 1980 that never happened". Even now, I still don't get a few things, like the flying wing at the beginning of the story; is it the same as the one in the end, and is it part of his dream or is it real? I thought how he described the cyberpunk alternate reality was interesting, especially the part where the photographer sees the couple in the "aluminum avocado". This is the when I started to notice that he does not like this future at all, and his friend Kihn gives him the advice to take up some vices to stop "seeing" this unsettling scene of imperfect perfection. I think the fact that he suggests pornography and soap operas as ways to impair his mind is hilarious, almost gesturing that we will never have to worry about such a level of perfection with our vices still influencing our actions and that our future is a much more imperfect, dark place.
I think I have more questions than anything this short story really confused me I think mostly because I don’t understand a lot of the architectural references so it made it really difficult for me to get an image in my mind of what they were actually trying to describe. So from what I understood there are a lot of things that designed to look weird but towards the end he was starting to actually hallucinate a different world merged with in his futuristic present world? But from what I understood there are normal people still just that the main character already had some abnormalities to begin with that would let him see stuff differently than others. One last thing was the “diet pill” why call it a diet pill when is a pill that basically make him lose his mind and focus to be able to see these hallucinations more.
The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson was a very confusing short story that I had read for this class. There were a lot of things that confused me from this short story, for example the images of old futuristic architectures. The short story talks about like a flying wing and giant zeppelins which I did not really get. I am guessing that this was suppose to be the inventions of the future that did not come to life? Also the narrator might of had problems which made him see things differently than normal people. The second time that I read this short story was when I saw that the photographer was having hallucinations. Overall, this was a confusing science fiction short story to read, but somewhat interesting.
okay. 1. so the future of 'things'(objects, buildings, technology) is argued here to be a sleeker version of what we have now, making it smaller or shinier or smoother or simpler. kind of see it in today's market, iphones are using sapphire glass now (ooooooo) and are keeping slender edges and a flat flat flat fronts and backs to make it look like something out of a sterile futuristic hospital. whatever. I'm disapointed that art seems to usually take a backseat to what futuristicishness is expected to be like. It's less often (from what I've seen) to observe fancy architecture or elaborate craftsmanship in future movies. I suppose its done away with the same hand that claims that efficiency and equality is the goal of the future. 2. How gibson ends it, woah. his sentence uhhh copy paste “That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.” like, yeah! So we see this in a lot of dystopia entertainment now, bladerunner, bioshock, also Deus Ex, Gataca. I like this so much because its a flip of mindset as compared to those people who sit in their rocking chairs and shake a fist at youngsters "ohhh back in the good ol' days". Nah grandpa, there was no good ol' days. society just will never become what is expected to become in retrospect. These people expected flying cars, they were promised jetpacks (I got you), I wanted to have a self heated sweater by now but, it will most always come later than hoped for. and by the time it does it's like "well I'm already on the next evolutionary step of mankind, you're too late, hoverboard". Being a guy who looks to the future excited for change, and doesn't really do much to incite it themself, will always get disapointed I suppose. But such is life.
I honestly have no idea what I just read. The Gernsback Continuum was a really confusing short story for me, probably because of the way it was written. Like Sebrina said, I don’t understand a lot of the architectural references either, so I could not really imagine what was being described. I think the first half of the short story is what confused me the most though because I had trouble following what it was saying. I kind of understood the last half of it and what was going on. I think he was hallucinating a different world that was part of his present world that he is living in. It seemed kind of interesting, but I still did not really get the architectural references. It also kind of brought up how people all kind of looked the same and dressed the same, which I think is so boring. I would hate to have to dress is all white. This short story did not do anything for me. I would have preferred not to read it at all.
As I read further into this piece I felt like Gibson’s tone was getting more and more frustrated with the development of technologies over the years and I couldn’t really understand why. When he mentioned the bit about the pencil sharpeners I felt that he was dissatisfied that the design and aesthetic have become increasingly more important than the actual performance of this technology being developed. He jumped around so much from topic to topic with seemingly little relation, but perhaps I just didn’t read the piece closely enough? This was also present in the sketches of the airliners that would never have been able to actually travel by air, but simply looked cool. What I understood from this is that the public doesn’t actually want the functioning technology to bring them to the future to be available to them, they would be happy with only the idea of it, even if executing these designs is impossible.
Alright well what the heck. I sort’ve understand this piece but at the same time I am hella confused. Firstly, I’m very aware that this is supposed to be a sort of “What if” scenario of how futuristic technology could have advanced but Gibson portrays this in such a weird way. Is the character seeing all these things cause he’s high? I think that’s really the only explanation right?
ReplyDeleteAnyways, so I feel like Gibson is very anti-war. He blames WWII for essentially killing our opportunities to advance technologically. However both World Wars presented great advancements in technology, although they were only for the sake of warfare. I admit a lot of them weren’t any crazy sophisticated advancement, (world war 1 for example introduced the world to barbed wire which isn’t very technologically advanced but it sure helped the men on the war front.) but they were advancements none the less and they showed the capabilities of the human mind at the time.
I don’t think we’ve advanced to the point of flying cars and all that jazz yet because we are simply not ready to. I think if the human race could handle such advancements some great mind would’ve been able to make them a reality. Also, I feel like maybe Gibson is against futuristic technology. Is that the human problem he’s trying to portray? That we’re too invested in the technology of the future? I’m not quite sure. This story feels so incomplete. Give me more to read so I’ll have more to think about Gibson!!
I get the feeling that Gibson, like a lot of sci-fi writers I guess, is using his story to make a social comment. It's pretty clear that he's trying to convey his opinion on the way society had progressed up until that point. He repeatedly references the futuristic architecture that was once viewed as the way of the future. The architecture itself might not have been what was really important, but instead maybe what the architecture stood for. Just like in the communist manifesto it has its roots in Italy, and is characterized by long, defined edges that imply speed, and strength. The whole short story, for me is written from the perspective of someone reminiscing on what could have been. Then again, I could be missing the point entirely who knows.
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in how Gibson uses the "continuum" to illustrate two separate realities existing beside each other but in different dimensions. Its sounds a lot like the multiverse theory to me, but whether or not Gibson intended his story to resemble an actual scientific theory, I'm not sure. Regardless, it was great how Gibson used Gersnback for inspiration for his title and the continuum. I think it helped contrast the style of sci-fi Giersnback was known for, the typical genre that "checks all the boxes," and the cyberpunk Gibson preferred.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI found the commentary on how people of the past were so excited for the future really interesting. My brother and I were actually having a discussion the other day that this story flashed me back to. We were talking about how nostalgia plays a much larger role now in people's lives than it did in the past. In this story for example, people in the thirties to fifties are concerned with looking to the future. They are excited about technology and the extreme machine age with modern gadgets, architecture, and design. Sure it's not exactly like what they describe in the story (technologically) today, but obviously the technology and inventions that we've created from the thirties to now would be astonishing to anyone who was transplanted from that era to the present day. There aren't flying cars, but there are tiny computers and people talking to a seemingly imaginary person in their ear who is on the other side of the world.
ReplyDeleteBut back to my point about nostalgia. We've reached this age. And while the future is ever ahead of us and development is still coming, maybe it's lost some of its luster. I mean social media is linked to depression, self-esteem issues, and loneliness now as well as retardation of children's social skills in general. Transportation technology, as is alluded to in the story, is killing the planet. The need for technology is drying out our bank accounts by taking our spending money and our jobs. It's changed relationships, both romantic and platonic and it's changed business and the economy. It's more fun imagining the glittery technology that heals all ills and is fancy, attractive, strange, unknown, and mysterious. The reality is far less fun. It's ambiguity allowed it perfection and simplicity.
All these changes can be scary and leave people reaching for the simpler past. Vintage is an incredible trend - 80s clothing, 70s hippie mentality, vinyl records, thrift stores, etc. And what's ironic is that technology is exactly what is facilitating this. With the click of power button you can search the web for old trends, music, and movies. You can look through an archive of pictures and home movies from childhood and remember when you were less stressed. You can go on youtube and look up old tv shows and disney classics. It's so easy now to relish in the past. Technology is a gateway to the future, but also a time machine to days gone by.
I really enjoyed reading this, it was a fun ride to go on. One thing I loved about this story was the double use of “dream.” It is frequently used in a way that can refer to the dream of the future, or the dream that he may or may not be having.an example of this is when he writes “But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution…” I thought this line was great.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite line of the piece is near the end, when he says to the owner of the news stand, “ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’” I think that this was just a witty way to sum up a lot of the feelings of the whole piece.
That being said, I’m not sure what to do with this story. I believe that it fits in this class for sure, but I don’t know how to use it, what ideas to talk about or how it compares to other works we have read. I don’t know if I should read it as some sort of commentary? Or some way of talking about how we as a society use SCI FI? To do this though seems to stray from the formula of the class a bit, because of the meta nature of this story. It isn’t dealing with these new inventions, it is dealing with the thought of dealing with these new inventions. This is really interesting and provocative, but I’m not sure what to do with it other than saying, “Wow, that was a fun ride,” or “huh, that was odd.” I think I may feel this way because it only gestures towards the issues other pieces really deal with. as an example, It merely nods to the fascist ideas present in the 1930’s ideas on future, instead of really dealing with it. I suppose it also brings up the issues of perceptions of what technology will accomplish, or how we can become obsessed with technology, but again I feel like it doesn't do much with them.
I loved Neuromancer, but this I kind of just…tolerated.
ReplyDeleteThe writing is a bit too gonzo-ish for my palate, and as a result it was a little hard to engage with. It’s the same feeling I get with poetry, or our Afrofuturism segment: I get that it’s good and interesting in its own meaningful way, but it doesn’t get me excited, and I just don’t “get” it. Maybe it’s because I had crappy English teachers in elementary school, or because I’m an American white male. Probably both.
Still, I like this: “…a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams…” We imagined a glorious streamlined future, and we’re arguably capable of it, but look at what we’ve done instead. “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome…but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car…so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal.” Amazing Stories covers turned into Nazi V2 rockets and postwar consumerist ennui? THIS I can get into: It’s delightfully, deliciously cynical, my favorite. And how true too, looking back in history (a source of limitless cynicism). It’s the kind of thing that keeps you awake at night. What could have been, expectations versus reality, squandered opportunities, misguided endeavors, and repeating history despite having the history to reference. All the while, we unduly romanticize the past.
That said, if I want a trippy adventure story with complex messages, I’ll happily take a good ‘ol fashioned scifi novel. (PKD’s “Man in the High Castle” has history and Nazis, too!)
By the way, regarding “agrarian cyberpunk”: how about “Dune”?
I’m very confused from this story. I am unsure of what actually happened, particularly because of the way it was written. This style of writing was very start/stop for me, and somehow conveyed very little information by being too detailed. Because of this, I am left with more questions coming out of this read that I probably should have.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy the references to the future of the past, a notion that one can see in an episode of the Jetsons. Chrome, crystal and esoteric skyscrapers. From what I could gather, as a combination of methamphetamine and as Kihn described, semiotic ghosts, the narrator is producing these wonderful scenes of a Jetson-like future. I am very confused as to why he seems to dislike the notion of a utopia such as the one that he “trips out” about, instead of the current dystopia he sees the country succumbing to. As a personal note, the scape that he describes, very closely mirrors the futuristic utopia shown in the film H.G. Wells’ Things to Come, which is a work that some of these aspirations were most likely drawn from.
It too multiple readings for me to actually understand this. Or at least I think I understand this. The plot is pretty clear. It’s what happens during it that threw me off. I thought the references to other works were there for the sake of being there. They serve as descriptions of the architecture or what was in vogue during the timeframes mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI think there’s more to the narrator and setting than the story lets on. What was the deal with the flying wing? I get the feeling that what the narrator is going through is one big hallucination instead of just the Dream scenes. Whether or not it is one big illusion, the narrator seems to be content with it or at the very least thinks that it’s better than living the future of the past. The way the future of the past was described seemed to be sterile and boring in spite of the technology it would’ve had. Maybe the future shouldn’t be perfect and have some flaws.
From Stephanie:
ReplyDeleteI'm not super sure what to make of this story. It was interesting, and a fun read, but I don't feel like I have anything profound to say about it. One aspect of the story I really liked was the imagery. Because a huge portion of the piece was focused on the architecture, and the narrator himself was a photographer, the imagery definitely seemed important to the story. Plus it was just cool to imagine. One of my favorite instances was when he said "Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things ... , mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters …" It seems to focus on the illustrative quality of fiction more than the other pieces we've focused on, which made this one enjoyable for me, even though I still finished reading it without knowing what to do with it.
I get that it was supposed to focus on the contrast between problems in reality, and the idealized dream of the future, and show that even the perfect future would have problems, but I just didn't think there was much to say since the narrator said that himself at the end. I could be completely missing something, and I'm really interested in what everyone else has to say about it, but the actual message of the story wasn't really the interesting bit for me. I was much more entertained by the descriptions of the setting because it was a step away from everything we've done so far. Either way, it was a nice, quick read.
I liked this short story, even though I had to read it two or three times to actually begin to understand what was going on. After my first read-through, I did not pick up on his vision being a hallucination, "A 1980 that never happened". Even now, I still don't get a few things, like the flying wing at the beginning of the story; is it the same as the one in the end, and is it part of his dream or is it real?
ReplyDeleteI thought how he described the cyberpunk alternate reality was interesting, especially the part where the photographer sees the couple in the "aluminum avocado". This is the when I started to notice that he does not like this future at all, and his friend Kihn gives him the advice to take up some vices to stop "seeing" this unsettling scene of imperfect perfection. I think the fact that he suggests pornography and soap operas as ways to impair his mind is hilarious, almost gesturing that we will never have to worry about such a level of perfection with our vices still influencing our actions and that our future is a much more imperfect, dark place.
I think I have more questions than anything this short story really confused me I think mostly because I don’t understand a lot of the architectural references so it made it really difficult for me to get an image in my mind of what they were actually trying to describe. So from what I understood there are a lot of things that designed to look weird but towards the end he was starting to actually hallucinate a different world merged with in his futuristic present world? But from what I understood there are normal people still just that the main character already had some abnormalities to begin with that would let him see stuff differently than others. One last thing was the “diet pill” why call it a diet pill when is a pill that basically make him lose his mind and focus to be able to see these hallucinations more.
ReplyDeleteThe Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson was a very confusing short story that I had read for this class. There were a lot of things that confused me from this short story, for example the images of old futuristic architectures. The short story talks about like a flying wing and giant zeppelins which I did not really get. I am guessing that this was suppose to be the inventions of the future that did not come to life? Also the narrator might of had problems which made him see things differently than normal people. The second time that I read this short story was when I saw that the photographer was having hallucinations. Overall, this was a confusing science fiction short story to read, but somewhat interesting.
ReplyDeleteokay.
ReplyDelete1. so the future of 'things'(objects, buildings, technology) is argued here to be a sleeker version of what we have now, making it smaller or shinier or smoother or simpler. kind of see it in today's market, iphones are using sapphire glass now (ooooooo) and are keeping slender edges and a flat flat flat fronts and backs to make it look like something out of a sterile futuristic hospital. whatever. I'm disapointed that art seems to usually take a backseat to what futuristicishness is expected to be like. It's less often (from what I've seen) to observe fancy architecture or elaborate craftsmanship in future movies. I suppose its done away with the same hand that claims that efficiency and equality is the goal of the future.
2. How gibson ends it, woah. his sentence uhhh copy paste “That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.” like, yeah! So we see this in a lot of dystopia entertainment now, bladerunner, bioshock, also Deus Ex, Gataca. I like this so much because its a flip of mindset as compared to those people who sit in their rocking chairs and shake a fist at youngsters "ohhh back in the good ol' days". Nah grandpa, there was no good ol' days. society just will never become what is expected to become in retrospect. These people expected flying cars, they were promised jetpacks (I got you), I wanted to have a self heated sweater by now but, it will most always come later than hoped for. and by the time it does it's like "well I'm already on the next evolutionary step of mankind, you're too late, hoverboard". Being a guy who looks to the future excited for change, and doesn't really do much to incite it themself, will always get disapointed I suppose. But such is life.
I honestly have no idea what I just read. The Gernsback Continuum was a really confusing short story for me, probably because of the way it was written. Like Sebrina said, I don’t understand a lot of the architectural references either, so I could not really imagine what was being described. I think the first half of the short story is what confused me the most though because I had trouble following what it was saying. I kind of understood the last half of it and what was going on. I think he was hallucinating a different world that was part of his present world that he is living in. It seemed kind of interesting, but I still did not really get the architectural references. It also kind of brought up how people all kind of looked the same and dressed the same, which I think is so boring. I would hate to have to dress is all white. This short story did not do anything for me. I would have preferred not to read it at all.
ReplyDeleteAs I read further into this piece I felt like Gibson’s tone was getting more and more frustrated with the development of technologies over the years and I couldn’t really understand why. When he mentioned the bit about the pencil sharpeners I felt that he was dissatisfied that the design and aesthetic have become increasingly more important than the actual performance of this technology being developed. He jumped around so much from topic to topic with seemingly little relation, but perhaps I just didn’t read the piece closely enough? This was also present in the sketches of the airliners that would never have been able to actually travel by air, but simply looked cool. What I understood from this is that the public doesn’t actually want the functioning technology to bring them to the future to be available to them, they would be happy with only the idea of it, even if executing these designs is impossible.
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