Values worth having are not done so blindly. They must be examined critically and thoroughly in the harsh light of day by every generation. We must be deliberate in choosing and supporting our values if they are to have, well, value. It’s in this nebulous area where real education is integral for a healthy and prosperous society.

Real education is the water that cleans the grit of fear and ignorance out of our eyes. It washes away the superstition that allows us to be cowardly and hateful. It clears the way for us to see the possibilities that our lives could have free of the detritus of fearful tradition to trip us up. Today’s NYTimes obituary of Christopher Hitchens makes a similar point:

Not only do the things in the hate column inspire hate, they also try their best to destroy those things in the love column — the things that are a part of the subversive education.

I’m not talking about revolution. Subversion is more akin to quiet resistance à la Michel de Certeau. In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson puts it this way: “intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.” Later, the protagonist is discussing a similar topic with the constable; he asks her which path will she take: “conformity or rebellion.” She answers:

Real education teaches the subtleties in life — the nuances. It teaches us to revel in ambiguity, not run from it. Contradiction is a time for consideration and dialog, not guns.

Yet, the demagogy that teaches absolutes and obeisance might also be a necessary part of education, only in giving the truly educated something to subvert and challenge. As Ted Nelson points out: primary education is more about training us how to behave than it is about teaching knowledge. Creativity is sacrificed for conformity. When we get through this structured system of imposed boredom and systematized indoctrination, we are called citizens and patriots and normal. If we stop here, we’re never truly educated.

Only after getting through my first two years as an undergraduate did I begin to get a real education. In these classes, I took an active part in my learning; instead of sitting in grids, we sat around conference tables; instead of being told what I should be learning, I was able to discover the knowledge for myself under the guidance of the professor. This was a time when poetry began to sing for me. This was a time when I discovered that the way I had always ordered my life — white, heterosexual, catholic, capitalist, male — was not the only way to see the world. In fact, it was a fairly  narrow way to look at life, and I have since discarded most of those arbitrary categories.

Maybe this is why I have always liked computers. Again, Stephenson gives us a look at a potential future for education in The Diamond Age. The primer that Hackworth illegally compiles for his daughter falls into the hands of a disenfranchised little girl living in a future China. The idea for The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is thought up by a Lord who tells the actual builder to consider what it means to be subversive. Hackworth at least unconsciously takes this message to heart and invents a book that allows the reader to find her own knowledge. The book does not work by itself — there is a “ractor” named Miranda that is just as integral to Nell’s education as the primer — but it is a key component to subverting the dominance of the ideologies that would have kept Nell a second-class citizen her whole life. This primer reminds me of what is beginning to happen with education in the digital age. Or at least the possibility for a real education.

While much of education is the learning of what our parents and other authorities say is True, it’s as much about understanding how it’s not — of finding our own ways and discarding those truths that no longer work for us. I teach literature, irony, humor, nuance, subtlety. My job is to help others dispel their own tyrannies of thought.

I teach subversion.

When Clarke wrote the novel, World War 2 had just ended with a bang. The hydrogen bomb was at once the symbol of humanity’s greatest technological ingenuity while also a harbinger of its potential for self-annihilation. Clarke’s novel positions humanity at this crucial time in its history, while its fate could still go either way. Childhood’s End predicts the space race, something that wouldn’t come to the international stage until a decade later, but its main driving force begins when humanity’s choice in its own fate is removed by the coming of the Overlords.

Now, I have to say, I find Childhood’s End reads a bit like a technical manual. The prose is often mechanical; the characters are stiff at best and robotic at worst. I don’t understand the “jokes” that he points out to me, and the narratorial voice is like a effete academic after a bit too much claret. The novel is expansive in scope — the action takes place over about a century-and-a-half — and the setting is primarily on Earth, though there is some space travel and astro-projection. The scenes of dialog were often difficult to read — the characters seemed to be little more than stereotypes in the middle of the novel, bracketed by scientists and the Overlords. To me, the most interesting parts of the novel were the future histories: the third-person narrator became the voice of exposition, telling the facts of human development after the coming of the Overlords. In many ways, Childhood’s End is a test case for humanity: what happens when human conflict comes to an end? Indeed, as a colleague and I were discussing the other day, would we even remain human if we ended violence and war? Is conflict an integral aspect of humanity?

It sounds as if I’m being too hard on Clarke’s writing. Maybe. However, I might also suggest that Clarke meant to write his characters this way. After all, the most tedious parts of the novel were the dramatic scenes in the middle, called “The Golden Age.” Middles are often tedious. The “Earth and the Overloads” shows the coming of the aliens and humanity’s initial reactions, and “The Last Generation” plays out the drama. Perhaps Clarke is illustrating his difficulty with utopia in “The Golden Age”: with no contention, life begins to become stagnant, lacking adventure and challenge: “When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure” (92-93). Add to that Karellen’s injunction about man’s place in the universe: it is only on the Earth and does not include space travel. He states:

The key word in his speech is “evolution.” Clarke’s novel seems to posit that humanity’s ability to cope with the environment is determined by that environment. That is, in its current form, humanity is not capable of moving too far beyond Earth, or its natural environment. In order to leave the Earth in any appreciable way, humans must evolve. This means, it seems, losing our humanity.

Now, 2001 is not like that. It is an odyssey, and in an odyssey, the final stop is always home. True to form, the last scene in both the film and novel, the Star-Child returns to Earth, ushering in the next evolutionary step of humanity. One could argue the definition of “home” has changed, too, like in Homer’s original Odyssey. “Home” for the Star-Child is now larger than a single planet or solar system; it must led the way for humanity. However, the last chapter of Childhood’s End has the newly evolved post-humans leaving Earth for the stars. Not only do they leave, but Earth disintegrates, as if by the exodus of the children she produced, the Earth no longer has a purpose in the cosmos. By the end of the novel, humanity, in its current form, is extinct.

Therefore, Clarke’s exposition of humanity’s utopia in “The Golden Age” is necessarily a reflection of what humanity has been evolving toward. It is necessarily imperfect because the nature that created humanity is local, finite, and imperfect itself. Whatever humanity creates might help its position on the Earth, but ultimately, perhaps, humans cannot make the next transition alone.

One of the cheesiest scenes in Childhood’s End is the post-party Ouija board seance. I remember hearing this scene (I listened to the novel for the first time last summer) while driving though Kentucky or Tennessee. I was unimpressed, but the whole rest of the novel centers around the mystical revelations of this pivotal scene: Jan’s non-scientific confirmation of the Overlords’ star, and Jean’s “paraphysical” connection with the Overmind. The novel — scientific, sociological, political, and factual up until this point — becomes more mystical, “supernormal,” and occult. Looking at it allegorically, the Overlords seem to represent the products of pure science. They are the masters of all that is tangible — space travel, politics, psychology, etc. There is the Overmind, something that exists beyond the physical realities of this universe, yet has certain mystical connections with it. Then there are humans: they seem to be products of the measurable, quantifiable world, but heading along an evolutionary path that aligns some of them with the Overmind, not the Overlords.

In fact, one of the more poignant parts of the novel lies near the end, when Karellan explains to Jan, now the last human, that the name “Overlords” is tinged with irony: they, too, are products of a certain evolutionary path that will never know the Overmind:

The ending is bittersweet. The Overlords cannot help feeling sorry for the current humans that they helped to civilize and evolve, but at the same time they envy humanity’s ability to grow beyond the measurable galaxy. They exist in their current form, and they have the knowledge that they have reached the pinnacle of their evolution. Perhaps this is Clarke’s equivalent of lacking wonder beyond the real.

I think that ultimately Childhood’s End is a successful novel. Yet, its end is one of pathos, more of a sense that something is lost. Perhaps more accurately, it’s a sense that we humans, in our current evolutionary form, are so limited. We will be lucky to survive self-annihilation, to grow beyond greed and materialism, to achieve equality, and to live in peace. I’m left with the feeling that even if we do succeed in these Earthly endeavors, there is something we, in our “present state of evolution,” will never achieve.

This idea seems to come out of our discussion of Dune, which we also finished this week. While Paul Maud’Dib brings about multiple disruptions, the real one is yet to come. Dune ends with a sense of foreboding about the eminent jihad that Maud’Dib is powerless to stop. In human terms, war is often the ultimate social disruption. Even with its uneasy ending, there’s also a sense of an order established — that something repressive has ended, or at least changed with the coming of Paul Maud’dib. His endeavors mark a turning point in history, and change will come, for good or ill.

Asimov’s “Nightfall” has at its core something that seems always to be a central concern of his work: the limits of reason and science. Like his story “Reason,” ”Nightfall” shows how empiricism is always limited by location. The astronomers of Lagash know something is coming, but they have no idea what. Because of their location in the galaxy, Lagash is spends all of its time in the light of six suns. However, once every two-thousand and fifty years, all the suns but one set, and the remaining sun is eclipsed for about half a day. During this time, civilization ends and most of the population goes insane. This is the mystery and the conflict in the story. It is the point of disruption for their civilization.

Science, itself, disrupts. “Nightfall” illustrates the contention between science and religion, or fact and belief. The scientists attempt to explain what will happen, logically and empirically. The “Cultists” have their own explanation based on mythological narratives and mysticism. Asimov puts these views in the boxing ring. Both acknowledge the fact of the coming darkness, but both have different explanations about the significance of the fact. The point seems moot, but herein lies the point: facts have no respect for beliefs. The scientists agree with the Cultists; their facts support the coming doom. However, the Cultists belief — their faith — has been brought down to the level of measurable reality. Or, as the chief astronomer Aton 77 puts it,

What ultimately causes the destruction of Lagash’s civilization is up for interpretation, but is seems to have something to do with the sudden realization of insignificance. Ironically, since Lagash is bathed in perpetual light, being an astronomer there is limited. Their perception of the universe is like humanity’s old geocentric one: everything revolves around them. Therefore, they are the most significant entities in the cosmos. Only darkness brings light, in this case, but it’s such an unexpected disruption that reasonable men lose their minds. Curiously, it seems that the Cultist’s predictions are upheld here: in fact, much of the scientists’ knowledge about past cycles comes from the Cultists’ “Book of Revelations,” as Aton 77 admits above. Perhaps, since their belief included “Stars,” their minds are more able to handle the shock.

This is why Asimov is so good: belief is always significant in his vision.

The other selections from di Filippo and Pratt are essentially love stories. They look at what brings people together and the impossible odds that such things ever happen. In “Phylogenesis,” Earth’s ecosystems are destroyed by these mindless, gargantuan, alien entities, and the only way for humanity to survive is to evolve with the help of technology into a viral form that could feed on the creatures and therefore perpetuate the human species. Humans have always been somewhat viral in our approach to environment – as Agent Smith famously explains to Morpheus in The Matrix – and that propensity pushes an allegorical reading of di Filippo’s story. That’s fine, but it’s also about survival, adaptability, and the spirit of life.

Finally, Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams” is really just a good, old-fashioned, geek love story. It’s a celebration of fiction as it is, considers the possibilities of what might come, and wonders at what could have been. Pete’s world order is disrupted by the appearance of a movie store from an alternate reality. Pete knows films, but when he encounters films that never were, he gets angry because “movies mattered.” They mattered so much, his world crumbles when he encounters the impossible. Instead of going insane like the denizens of Lagash, he unexpectedly meets a girl. Out of this disruption comes the possibility of real, human contact. At least that’s the feeling at the end. Pratt’s story just makes us sf geeks feel good. And that’s OK.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I had not read Jack McDevitt until I heard he was coming to this year’s Crossroads Conference. I’m embarrassed because I’m supposed to be up on all things science fiction. His novel Seeker won a Nebula award in 2006 for best novel (and most of his other novels have been nominated), and I have come to thoroughly enjoy his writing. I did manage to read two of his novels before meeting him.

I met Jack McDevitt early on Saturday morning. I was hurrying to hear him speak, and I saw him rushing out the door. He was going the wrong way. I said, motioning toward the door, “I think this is where you want to be.” He smiled: “I know. I’m just going to get my wife.” He did, and I began deciding how I was going to photograph the day. Yes, I was not really there as a writer, but as a volunteer photog. He soon returned with his wife Maureen. I snapped away while he gave the audience advice on how to publish. He reminded me of professors I most enjoyed in graduate school: ones who were no-nonsense – who just wanted you to know what you needed to know to be successful.

It wasn’t until the panel at 11:30 — “The Long and Short of It: Crafting Fiction” — where I finally introduced myself. I was scheduled to act as moderator, but this was a role I thought would require little more than my introducing the panelists. I was wrong. Since the panelists did not have prepared statements, they expected questions. Therefore, I put on my best Neal Conan hat, something I’ve done many times before. While the session was well attended, it took a while to get the audience asking questions that were actually germane to the panel’s topic. So, I ran things. No big deal, since I’m an academic conference veteran, but I did hope to take photos.

Afterward, I finally got to talk with McDevitt. I had many questions about his work, but I didn’t want to seem too forward or obnoxious — you know, fan-like. I think he sensed my enthusiasm, but he invited me to lunch anyway!  I graciously accepted, and he, Maureen, and I went downtown to Market City Café. We talked about sf, politics, and life. He asked me questions, and we had a pleasant meal. At one point, he said to me: “Jerry, life is good.” At that moment, I totally agreed. I just wish Autumn could have been there.

Next stop was the Golden Bough for McDevitt’s reading. Eric was waiting, but not many festival-goers were. I was disappointed in the low turnout, but it was a real pleasure to hear McDevitt read. He reminded me a bit of Asimov, though less Brooklyn Jew. He read two AI stories — “The Candidate” and “Henry James, this One’s for You” — both out of his Outbound collection. They are near-future stories about artificial intelligences: the former is George Washington running for president again and the latter is, well, you should read the story. There were only a couple of people in the audience, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the event. How often do you get a Nebula winner reading to you one-on-one? I’m glad I went to the bookstore, too, so I could get a book for McDevitt to sign: Time Travelers Never Die. I hope to start it this week.

After the Golden Bough was the book signing at the conference. I got Time Travelers signed. Since I enjoyed the stories from Outbound, I wanted a copy of that, too. I purchased a book from Lauretta Hannon (blog entry about that coming), so I only had $10 left. I told McDevitt that I was going to find an ATM, and he said “How about just taking the book?”

“No,” I replied, “I couldn’t do that.”

“OK,” he searched for one of his business cards and handed it to me: “you can send me a check.” What a guy.

So, I have two books inscribed by my current favorite sf writer. I attended his last panel, but had to duck out quickly afterward to photograph Steve Almond. Jack McDevitt came into the chapel, and I was able to say good-bye.

What a great experience. Thanks to Jack and Maureen for being so gracious with me — just a sf fan. You know I’m gonna have to read all of his books now, right? That’ll make up for my finding his writing so late.

The good news: I am the proud owner of a new camera: a Canon EOS 30D. A friend bought my Rebel (Thanks, Jamie!), so I was able to upgrade. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it. Coupled with Apple’s Aperture, I am growing quickly as a photographer. Still, I want a new lens: the Sigma 30mm F1.4. I’ll have to wait a bit, methinks, ’cause of the bad news.

The bad news: my PowerBook’s hard drive died. First, it stopped being able to install anything new, then it would take forever to download anything from Firefox, but it would still boot and run normally. Disk Utility told me there was a problem, so I booted off the Tiger install disk to try to fix the problem. It could not fix it; instead it seemed to supply the coffin’s final nail. Now, the PowerBook will no longer boot at all. I see the gray Apple screen with the wheely thing rotating at the bottom for about five minutes before the computer just shuts itself off. It seems I need a new PowerBook MacBook Pro. I’m thinking about the 15″, as if I can afford that. Until then, I’ll just use the department’s 17″ G4 PowerBook (slow and heavy) until a student requests to use it. (I’m not sure where it is…)

Computer woes aside, I have purchased some domain names, one I mentioned previously. Since purchasing grlucas.net, I now own Big Jelly (bigjelly.net), LitMUSE (litmuse.net), and the Humanities Index (humx.org). Here are my plans: this blog will soon be relocated to earthshine.org; when I say “soon,” I probably mean May at the earliest for professional reasons. I will continue to use Blogger, cause it’s cool and does exactly what I want without all the hassle of trying to keep up with Movable Type. Grlucas.net already has much of my portfolio on it, transferred from Earthshine. I will use it to feature one of my favorite things in life: me. LitMUSE will do what Earthshine used to do: operate as my courseware site for students; it’s already well underway.

I hope to use the Humanities Index as a collaborative space where educators can share notes on various aspects of literature for students. Here is where I will put all of my literary notes, ideas, and ramblings. I will encourage my colleagues to do the same. I really think this could be a worthwhile project. I’ve been porting entries from this blog over there, and I hope to have more there soon. Interested in contributing? Send me an email. And you don’t have to be a professional educator.

Now, Big Jelly should be interesting. It is the brainchild of Tom and me, based on the ideas in the eponymous short story by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. Like a big jelly, our ideas are kind of squishy and amorphous right now. We want a place to talk about science fiction and futurism and how these ideas wind in-and-out of one another and touch other cultural texts that interest us. We want to have round tables, reviews, essays, editorials, links, and anything else we think might be apropos. It’s as a place where old school meets new skool. There’s nothing there right now, but stay tuned.

I guess one of the most exciting things about these new domain names is that I have discovered a new web host: AN Hosting. Unlike the crappy support and services of IPowerWeb, I can host up to 10 domain names on one account, for about $30 less a year. Too cool, no? When I send tech support an email (no mandatory web forms to fill out), I usually have a response in under an hour. No kidding. It used to take IPowerWeb two days to send me some boilerplate that didn’t even answer my question or solve my problem. So far, I am very pleased with these new guys.

Now, to try to enjoy the rest of my break. Hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday.

• It cost too much, staying human.
  - Bruce Sterling
• Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
  - Margaret Atwood
• Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.
  - Vernor Vinge
• God to Earth: “Cry more, noobs!”
  - Marc Laidlaw

Ray Kurzweil explains the theories behind quantum computing to the layperson in his The Age of Spiritual Machines. Based on the idea that phenomena need conscious beings to perceive and order them, quantum computing begins through paradox until the “answer” is determined through a decision, causing the ambiguity to resolve, or disambiguation. Like digital computing, quantum computing is based on bits: a one for on and a zero for off. In digital computing, these bits are either on or off (one or zero) and sequences of these bits form larger structures of information: text, graphics, word processors, etc. Instead of bits, the quantum computer would use qu-bits, or bits that are both one and zero at the same time, until the “process of disambiguation causes that particle to ‘decide’ where it is, where it has been, and what properties it has” (Kurzweil 110). Like a beam of light hitting a pain of glass, each photon that makes up the beam either goes straight through the glass or bounces off of it, reflecting away. Each photon actually takes both paths until something observes the phenomenon and forces each particle to decide which path to take. While the outcome of research in quantum computing would be to dispel ambiguity and arrive at the correct answer to a particular problem, the theories behind quantum mechanics and the application are products of an Einsteinian view of physics that posits multiplicity and relativity as the norm — states of fluctuation that do not necessarily concur with human perceptions of actuality.

Since we live in time of flux and post-Einsteinian physics, Murray proposes that we have become more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity (136). However, while this opinion might hold credence in how we experience fiction, I suggest that we still want our everyday lives ordered, certain, and predictable. Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” explores the implications of fiction entering the everyday, much like “José Chung.” “Gernsback” begins in medias res with the unnamed narrator trying to regain a more normal perception of reality by narrowing his vision “to a single wavelength of probability” (Gibson 1). With mention of a “flying-wing liner” and “mad-doctor chrome,” the narrator flings us abruptly into his continuum, catching us off guard and forcing us to penetrate his reality: what happened to this guy?

Our narrator’s predicament begins when Dialta Downes, a British dilettante of American popular culture, hires him to photograph images for her newest book: The American Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. The narrator comments on the British “obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture,” what Downes calls the “American Streamlined Moderne,” that are remnants of thirty’s and forty’s architecture “that most Americans were scarcely aware of.” He slowly realizes, showing that he is an example of “most Americans,” what she is talking about:

This “American Streamlined Moderne” is derived from both the realized expressions of this vision of the future in the architecture that can still be glimpsed everywhere from the Chrysler Building in New York City to the façades of McDonald’s in small, rural towns of Georgia. Yet coupled with those fading landmarks are also scenes from the “covers of old Amazing Stories pulps” that featured impractical glimpses of flying luxury machines:

I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

“This thing couldn’t have flown . . .?” I looked at Dialta Downes.

“Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve giant props; but they loved the look, don’t you see? New York to London in less than two days, first-class dining rooms, private cabins, dancing to jazz in the evenings. . . . The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.” (Gibson 3-4)

Downes’ obsession pulls the narrator into her vision of an American dream world. This obsession, which slowly becomes that of the narrator as he attempts to “photograph what isn’t there” by thinking himself “into Dialta Downes’ America” (4), I would argue, is the point of trauma that introduces violence into the narrative and causes the intersection of quantum realities: the narrator’s and the one in which that giant wing liner can fly.

As the narrator becomes more involved in his assignment, some of his subjects begin to take on, at least in his perception, aspects of totalitarian and fascistic designs that were mixed in with kitschy car lots and motels. Images of Hitler and totalitarianism mixed with fictional representations of utopian/dystopian “martial architecture” begin to dominate the narrator’s thoughts as he photographs Downes’ America: “During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations” (Gibson 4). He begins to pose what-ifs, comparing his world with that of “the inhabitants of that lost future world,” which might be his point of trauma. Murray posits that often anxiety and trauma result from the continuous posing of what-if questions to oneself that allow doubt and uncertainty enter into one’s own choices and experiences that precipitated one’s current reality. The narrator’s “frame of mind” begins to focus increasingly on this “architecture of broken dreams” until he “penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability” that ostensibly allows this world of half-fictions and fragments to break through and manifest itself in the narrator’s reality as a “twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear — maybe — the echo of jazz” (Gibson 5).

Shaken by his sighting, the narrator consults his friend Mervin Kihn, a free-lance Fox Mulder type who is in touch with the “loonier reaches of the American mind” (Gibson 5). Kihn blames the sighting on what he calls a “semiotic ghost”; these are like a feedback loop that uses the mind to manifest into actuality the reality of popular culture, like The X-Files:

Seemingly, Downes’ obsession coupled with the narrator’s desire to photograph “what isn’t there” caused latter’s own traumatic sighting. The possibility exists, too, that the sighting was nothing but an odd hallucination caused by the narrator’s use of drugs in the sixties. Yet, Kihn easily dismisses the narrator’s trauma by suggesting that he is “obviously impressionable” and relates the case of a girl’s encounter in Virginia that sounds very similar to the case in “José Chung”:

The narrator leaves Kihn unsatisfied, takes “a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of [his] shaving kit for three years,” and begins his drive through the desert back to Los Angeles.

His trip through the desert is colored by his recent sighting coupled with the old diet pill, but he is able to limit his “vision to the tunnel of the Toyota’s headlights,” so he is fine until he stops for a rest on the side of the road “safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of [his] own familiar continuum,” or so he thinks ADDIN ENRfu (Gibson 7, 8). When a light shining from behind him wakes the narrator, he sees “an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come . . . soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires” (Gibson 8). He is quick to dismiss this vision as “amphetamine psychosis,” drawing on one of Kihn’s explanations and his recent ingestion of an old diet pill, but the manifestation of this city and its two citizens on the road beside him begin to convince him otherwise:

The word “real” remains problematic, suggesting that indeed this scene is real, having been imagined in the books on Thirties design that the narrator kept in his trunk; and the images contained in these books also are part of, as Kihn suggests, the mass unconsciousness, and so represent semiotic phantoms that the narrator is so sensitive to because of his assignment to photograph Downes’ streamlined moderne. Downes’ obsession with this lost aspect of American culture has, to some extent, been passed to the narrator like a virus and therefore has influenced his perceptions of his reality, as if he were feverish, suffering from a particularly virulent strain of the flu. Sickness makes one aware of the reality of one’s situation — of the physical dis-ease that has invaded the body at the same time it distorts perception. Here, perhaps, the virus, rather than biological, is informational, attacking cognitive abilities and perhaps growing and mutating within the host.

Virus, here, is not necessarily pejorative, though the narrator seems to think so. Perhaps, the informational virus has made the narrator not only aware of the multiplicity of his reality — his material and experiential history that has molded his mind just so — but has somehow allowed him to penetrate the folds of quantum realities in order to glimpse a path that was taken by his culture in another fork in time, space, and perception. Like in Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” where the flow of time is not a single path — it only appears to be based on how we experience it. Once a choice is made and a path is chosen, it is traveled with only the occasional musing about where other paths would have led. In “Gernsback,” Gibson not only addresses the residue of a Gernsbackian future left over in a cultural consciousness, but suggests that time is not as linear and uniform as it appears to our perception; time may be very much like a web that intersects every possibility. The narrator becomes conscious of the “pullulating possibilities of life,” but his conception of time is linear and absolute, not fluid and multiform (Murray 35). He cannot process the splitting of his real world by that of Gernsbackian view of the future made real. “The Gernsback Continuum” represents a postmodern view of parallel possibilities that do not remain separate, but can merge through linked points of trauma, infection, or dis-ease, much like reading a hypertext. Our narrator, via diet pill, semiotic ghosts, or cultural overdose, has ended up in this quantum flux in the middle of the Arizona desert experiencing “all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda” (Gibson 9).

Not only does this alternate present seem totalitarian to the narrator based on the images that he has photographed so far, but suggests another layer to the metaphor. The narrator sees this Gernsbackian reality being forced upon him, perhaps trying to replace the current reality of his world, leaving him stranded in what he sees as a fictional world. Yet, if this alternate reality is indeed another parallel time, then its appearance points to the complete fictionality of the quantum path we call reality. Even while photographing these various aspects of American culture before going “over the Edge,” the narrator muses about “what the inhabitants of that lost future world would think about the world I lived in” (Gibson 5). Indeed, while attempting to cure himself of his visions, the narrator espies, perhaps the ultimate icon of American totalitarianism: Disneyland.

Hollinger suggests that “Gernsback” “warns against the limitations, both humorous and dangerous, inherent in any vision of the future which bases itself upon narrowly defined ideological systems which take it upon themselves to speak ‘universally,’ or which conceive of themselves as ‘natural’ or ‘absolute’” (Hollinger 39). Perhaps “Gernsback” is also a warning about our perception of time and reality. These ideas seem absolute and certain, but only insofar as we agree to them. Technological advances may one day show the possibility of time and space travel that crosses the, perhaps arbitrary and deceptive, borders made solid by our perception of them. The first step to realizing that technology, if it is indeed desirable, would be to imagine it, or else keep our vision narrowly focused on the small point in front of us.

The narrator’s cure, as we found out in the beginning of the story, is to narrow his perception into “a single wavelength of probability” (Gibson 1). And slowly, through hours of watching television, movies like Nazi Love Motel, and other “really bad media,” he begins to exorcise his semiotic ghosts and block out the other possibilities through the mundanity of game shows, soap operas, and porno movies. Yet, some residue of the experience remains with him, for the flying wing makes one more appearance. Yet, we are able to assume that his actual writing of his experiences was able to purge most of his system of his quantum information virus, much like the narrator suggests in Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl”: its writing becomes the obsession, purged to a piece of paper that can now be spread to the readers. So his writing becomes an anti-viral, which ironically passes the informational virus to the reader.

One thing I have done that I think is pretty cool: I used Dokuwiki to begin a wiki on science fiction. My current students will begin populating it this semester, but I’m hoping that others might like to contribute. Probably not, but maybe.

I’ll post more when I can.