47 pages • 1 hour read
William GibsonBurning Chrome
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 2 Summary: “The Gernsback Continuum”
The narrator is an American photographer working in the 1980s. His current assignment is to cover examples of futuristic 1930s architecture, industrial design, and popular culture (predominantly sci-fi illustrations) in the style known as Streamlined Moderne. His publishers in London, Cohen and Dialta Downes, encourage him to think of the style as depicting “a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams” (28). On assignment in California, the narrator describes details of various examples of the style, such as “A Flying Car” (25), “old Amazing Stories pulps” (26), and “raygun emplacements.” He agrees with his publishers, realizing that what was imagined to be the future in the 1930s is unlike what has been realized in the 1980s.
The more involved he becomes in his assignment, the more his obsession with the objects of the Streamlined Moderne grows. He begins seeing objects that aren’t really there, like a futuristic “flying-wing liner” (24). At the same time, he is aware that he is most likely hallucinating. He turns to his friend Kihn for advice. Kihn remarks that the hallucinations are “[s]emiotic ghosts,” bits of cultural imagery that have become so widespread and reused that they form part of the collective unconsciousness of what the alternative, imagined future looks like. Suggesting that too much of this imagery can distort reality, Kihn advises the narrator to gorge on mindless pop culture, like porn and trashy television, as an antidote. Worn down by the visions, the protagonist completes the photo job and heads back to New York.
Story 2 Analysis
“The Gernsback Continuum” shows Gibson’s ability to blend different styles and to shift between straightforward fiction and cultural critique. In many ways, “The Gernsback Continuum” is a critical essay on the nature and purpose of science fiction, nestled within the framework of a story about the narrator-photographer and his assignment to document the Streamlined Moderne. The story is essay-like insofar as it seeks to define and critique the Streamlined Moderne, yet it manages to extend that critique through the fictional narrative.
The narrator defines the Streamlined Moderne as the stylistic epitome of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction. In fact, the title “The Gernsback Continuum” is a nod to Hugo Gernsback, a famous editor and publisher of early- to mid-20th-century science fiction magazines; “rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps” are even singled out in the story (28). The era in which Gernsback published works by numerous sci-fi authors coincides with the genre’s Golden Age (roughly the mid-1920s to the early 1960s). His influence in shaping the characteristics of sci-fi literature was recognized when one of the most prestigious awards in the field, the Hugo Award, was named after him.
“The Gernsback Continuum” does not celebrate the Golden Age of Science Fiction’s style. Instead, it presents as a lie. Streamlined Moderne viewed the future optimistically, with full faith in scientific and technological progress’s ability to improve life. In the Gernsback era, there was a staunch belief in the good of technological progress. Reflecting back on the earlier years’ fictional version of the 1980s from within the 1980s themselves, the narrator of “The Gernsback Continuum” sees an imagined, alternate reality that is only “skin-deep” (26).
The optimistic promise of the Streamlined Moderne’s future did not come true, and the narrator experiences a letdown. Instead of living among technological wonders, he experiences the imagined future as hallucinations in his present. What the Streamlined Moderne imagined to be possible is not real, for the narrator. He sees the elements of the style as false advertising, as a mind-bending alternate reality that must be resisted—in his case, through a diet of trashy television and pornography. By reading “The Gernsback Continuum” as an essay, readers can see Gibson’s own critique of optimistic, progress-driven science fiction and understand why his attention in the stories of Burning Chrome and elsewhere is turned toward a skepticism about technology and the future, and to exploring its dangers, risks, and antiheroes.
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