William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum

The Gernsback Continuum is a 1981 short story by cyberpunk author William Gibson, published in the anthology Burning Chrome and in Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling. With some similarity to Gibson’s later appraisal of Singapore for Wired magazine in Disneyland with the Death Penalty, as much essay as fiction,^[it depicts the encounters of an American photographer with the period futuristic architecture of the American 1930s when he is assigned to document it for fictional London publishers Barris-Watford, and the gradual incursion of its cinematic future visions into his world. The “Gernsback” of the title alludes to Hugo Gernsback, the famous pioneer of early 20th century pulp magazine science fiction . . . Continue reading