I have a confession to make. I do not like William Gibson. I read this in hopes that I might find out more about him and his work and be able to confidently explain what I don't like, or find a new enjoyment in his work. These are interesting essays, although some of them were a little over my head at times.

Smart and almost lyrical in its arguments about Gibson's influence and contexts.. while I maybe don't perhaps think he's as central a figure inspirational... this is thought provoking and should be read by especially newcomers to these themes.

William Gibson revolutionized SF in the 1980s, leading the Cyberpunk subgenre to its hype phase. This book gives us 11 essays analyzing Gibson’s work from the perspective of high-brow literature. There’s nothing nerdy in it, the essays are extremely academic.

Nearly fifty pages of this 286 pages are reserved for the essay’s bibliographies and footnotes alone.

I’m used to reading academic works in my own field, computer science, and I’m able to understand and assess a work’s contribution. But in the case of this book, I’m far out of my comfort zone, as the essays mostly refer to topics that I know nothing of, or can’t relate to. They tend to reference and compare to titles outside of SF, and I know nearly nothing of American or British high-brow literature.

I can’t say if those essays are good or bad, I just mostly didn’t understand them. That’s why the rating is two stars, meaning “it’s ok”. For people who’ve studied English literature or are otherwise firmer in this academic field, the book might play out completely different.

I hope that the table of contents will help you in your decision if this work might be suitable for you:

Foreword by Malka Older: Crime and Dislocation: William Gibson’s Modernity
Introduction by Mitch R. Murray and Mathias Nilges: Periodizing Gibson
Part I. Gibson and Literary History
Phillip E. Wegner, When It Changed: Science Fiction and the Literary Field, circa 1984
Kylie Korsnack, No Future but the Alternative: Or, Temporal Leveling in the Work of William Gibson
Mathias Nilges, The Shelf Lives of Futures: William Gibson’s Short Fiction and the Temporality of Genre
Takayuki Tatsumi, The Difference Engine in a Post-Enlightenment Context: Franklin, Emerson, and Gibson and Sterling
Part II. Gibson and the Question of Medium
Andrew M. Butler, “A New Rose Hotel Is a New Rose Hotel Is a New Rose Hotel”: Nonplaces in William Gibson’s Screen Adaptations
Maria Alberto and Elizabeth Swanstrom, William Gibson, Science Fiction, and the Evolution of the Digital Humanities
Roger Whitson, Time Critique and the Textures of Alternate History: Media Archaeology in The Difference Engine and The Peripheral
Part III. Gibson and the Problem of the Present
Sherryl Vint, Too Big to Fail: The Blue Ant Trilogy and Our Productized Future
Am y J. Elias, Realist Ontology in William Gibson’s The Peripheral
Aron Pease, Cyberspace after Cyberpunk
Christian P. Haines, “Just a Game”: Biopolitics, Video Games, and Finance in William Gibson’s The Peripheral
Afterword
Charles Yu, The World Implied

In this collection of laudatory essays, the authors comprehensively examine the legacy of Gibson's work through a variety social-cultural lenses.

This work successfully establishes the purpose and existing need for this analysis, and the ideas within are clearly conveyed. The authors are clearly knowledgeable and skilled in the field of literary criticism and it shows in their insights and their vocabulary.

My experience with Gibson was limited prior to reading these essays. He had been on my TBR for a long time, and I had only read "The Difference Engine." When I was approved to read this ARC, I pulled "Neuromancer" and "Pattern Recognition" off my shelf and buzzed through them. With this perspective in mind, I can say that readers with any level of experience with Gibson will enjoy these essays. Reading them has inspired me to read more of Gibson's work - I now have five more of his books borrowed from the library!

The vast majority of Gibson's work is given its due, which is no small feat. There are only eleven essays in this work, yet they deftly span the breadth and depth of Gibson's work. Some of the essays take a broad view of Gibson's work, contextualizing it by comparing it to other literary and cultural reference points, or examining the concepts of time or nonspace in Gibson's body of work. Others take a deep dive into a specific work, connecting concepts and examining conscious decisions made. One example I found particularly interesting was the decision to exclude mention of Mary Shelley from "The Difference Engine;" in this essay the author examines Kant's work "The Modern Prometheus" which I was somehow previously unaware of.

Overall, I found these essays fascinating, engaging and challenging. They are all extremely well-researched and thoroughly cited. My recommendation to readers is to read these essays one at a time, giving yourself plenty of time to study the source material, and digest and synthetize the information.

From the afterword of the book:

> Think pieces, profiles, book reviews, scholarly essays, message board posts, midnight yawps of awe and admiration—how many thousands, millions of words have been written about Gibson’s work? How many of those words focus on Gibson’s uncanny knack for accurately imagining the future? And for good reason. He nailed it, okay? In about a thousand ways, from nano to macro. Gibson wrote stuff thirty years ago that, when you read it today, feels fresher than the nth generation of his literary offspring and imitators. He’s the before and the after and the during, he’s the origin story and today’s news. He was a piece of twenty-first-century fiction dropped into the twentieth. Genius here, just unevenly distributed, a disproportionate share of it clumped into his brain.

I almost wish the book were written in the style above than how it's written at some points; This is a collection of essays written by different authors, with varying levels of success.

Compare the quotation above with the following, by another author:

> Interestingly, Burges and Elias’s instance on the illusionary quality of capitalist temporality and Rancière’s attention to the fictionality of homogeneous time create a vision filled with space and potential for cultural resistance.

It's _some_ wordy effort.

Thankfully, there are a lot of bits and pieces in these essays to save it from becoming an intellectual abandoned shipwreck.

The first essay that I really liked in here is named _No future but the alternative or, temporal leveling in the work of William Gibson_ by Kylie Korsnack. From it:

> Halfway through William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, the protagonist, a New Yorker named Cayce, reflects on the early days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. She recalls sitting on a bench in Union Square, surrounded by the burning candles of newly erected monuments to the dead and the missing: “She remembered sitting there, prior to her tears, looking from the monument that was still taking shape at the base of Washington’s statue to that odd sculpture across Fourteenth Street, in front of the Virgin Megastore, a huge stationary metronome, constantly issuing steam, and back again to the organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages, as though the answer, if there was one, lay in somehow understanding the juxtaposition of the two.” Whereas Gibson offers a thorough description of the emerging, memorial art forms taking shape in Union Square, the “odd sculpture” across the street is suspiciously understated, especially considering it is “one of the largest private commissions of public art in New York’s history.” Designed by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, Metronome was installed in 1999 on a building that stands just south of Union Square. Composed of eight separate elements with names like “the vortex,” “the infinity,” “the passage,” and “the phases,” Metronome presents an overwhelming array of temporal signifiers. The artists describe the work as “an investigation into the nature of time” that “references the multiple measures of time that simultaneously inform and confound our consciousness of the moment.” Metronome also serves a functional purpose. In a review, artist and critic Robert C. Morgan commented: “It is questionable whether Metronome is less pragmatic than other utilitarian aspects of the building. After all, it does tell the time. Not only does it give the exact time of day in the most literal sense, it also extends the concept of time into geology and astronomy; in essence, it projects time from what is literal to that which is metaphysical—time beyond measure.” In this sense, Morgan’s review seems to align with the artists’ hopes for the project as a catalyst for temporal rumination, inviting viewers to contemplate, “geological, solar, lunar, daily, hourly, and momentarily, revealing the factions of seconds in the life of a city—and of a human being.” What neither of these perspectives takes into account is the fact that this “public art wall” adorns the outside of a building owned by the private company that funded its construction. What lies within that building? A luxury apartment complex with a website that proudly invites prospective residents to “Live Luxuriously in a Work of Art.”

Korsack defines the path in her essay:

> In this chapter, I trace Gibson’s long engagement with the concept of temporal multiplicity to highlight the importance of the framework to his narrative thinking. Across his work, we can identify a variety of narrative approaches that foreground his interest in temporality. Whether in the form of alternative history (The Difference Engine), psychological movement through time (“The Gernsback Continuum”), multiverse (The Peripheral), or machine-powered time travel (Archangel), it is often through overlapping or multiple timelines that Gibson explores the relationship between art, aesthetics, and culture. Although it might seem too obvious to suggest that time is important to Gibson’s aesthetic, I want to explore the possibility that there is something very particular about the how Gibson thinks about, represents, and problematizes temporal experience, especially in his most recent fictional works.

If you've ever read Gibson, you'll know he deals in time and context. Time is not necessarily a problem but as open as an ocean, seemingly endless, sprawling with opportunities, framing a human protagonist's paths through it all.

Gibson has, to me, never been far from Jonathan Franzen. I believe they have more in common than they are different, especially in considering how they have their fingers in knowing how humans work and getting it into their art. Sure, they can both be ham-fisted as hell and even obtuse, but largely speaking, there's few authors like them out there.

These essays don't question or criticise Gibson, but more delve into his way of writing.

I quote Andrew M. Butler in his essay _Gibson and the Question of Medium_:

> Cyberspace has no fixed identity, relationships, or history; it lacks authentic height, width, depth, and mass and can be thought of as an addition to the catalog of “nonplaces” of supermodernity identified by French anthropologist Marc Augé.
>
> Augé distinguishes “nonplaces” from “places” as lacking identity, relations, and history. The eras of industrial capitalism and supermodernity have erased distinctions between space and time, leading to the emergence of nonplaces such as: “the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself.” While the traditional town was centered on a few specific economic, political, and cultural nodes—such as the market, town, or church square—the supermodern city sprawls across networks and toward other cities (compare the Sprawl or Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan Axis in the Neuromancer trilogy). Augé argues that the nonplaces are “formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and [by] the relations that individuals have with these spaces.” These relations are constructed through texts and contracts.

Maria Alberto and Elizabeth Swanstrom paint an interesting picture of what humanity is in their essay _William Gibson, science fiction, and the evolution of the digital humanities_:

> In 2017 Chris Sevier filed a lawsuit against the state of Utah for the right to marry—his computer. The case was promptly dismissed for several compelling reasons, including the fact that Sevier’s computer was not at least fifteen years old and therefore did not satisfy Utah’s age-of-consent requirement. As ludicrous as this case might seem, however, it was neither the first—nor will it be the last—attempt to wed a computational entity. In 2009, Japanese gamer Sal9000 married Nene Anegasaki, “a character in the Nintendo DS dating simulation game ‘Love Plus,’” and in November 2018, Akihiko Kondo wed Hatsune Miku, “a hologram that was created by a computer as singing software.” Moreover, such realworld unions have multiple literary precedents, dating back to Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s depiction of Thomas Edison and the gyndroid Hadaly in L’Ève future (1886), farther back still to E. T. A. Hoffman’s automaton Olimpia in “The Sand-man” (1816), and arguably even to Pygmalion’s marble-carved lover Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE)— examples that demonstrate a long-standing interest in these unusual accords. But the contemporary penchant for an amans computans finds its most vivid literary blueprint in the work of William Gibson, whose cyberpunk fiction delights in merging computational and human entities. In Neuromancer (1984), which provides the master template for subsequent unions in Gibson’s oeuvre, this type of merger occurs when two artificial intelligences, code-named “Wintermute” and “Rio”/“Neuromancer,” consolidate to form the titular singularity, Neuromancer. This pattern is repeated in “Winter Market” (1986), when disabled artist Lise “dry dreams” with editor Casey, merging her consciousness with his as a first step toward merging with the digital ’net. A similar pattern surfaces in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), when simstim star Angie and her lover Bobby Newmark merge their consciousnesses with a vast, newly formed computational storage space called the Aleph, and again on a smaller scale in Pattern Recognition (2003), with the piecemeal creation of “the Footage” and its subsequent reconstitution by fans. Later the sustained dialog between proximate and distant futures in Peripheral (2014) follows such unions in temporal rather than spatial terms, as enabled though the medium of a quantum computer. Perhaps most visibly, in Gibson’s novel Idoru (1996) the marriage is literal, as eccentric rock star Rez weds Rei Toei, an “idoru” or computer-generated “synthetic personality” who exists only in virtual space. Though itself an interesting phenomenon, this pattern of integrated mergers between distinct and seemingly incompatible entities in Gibson’s fiction has ramifications beyond the romantic plotlines that often surround them. In fact, we assert that this trope in Gibson’s fiction— which itself has been fundamental in shaping popular and scholarly notions about computation since the early 1980s—has particular resonance with the emerging field of the digital humanities, or DH.

Christian P. Haines paints an interesting picture of Gibson's art in relation to the world of videogames in his essay _"Just a game": Biopolitics, video games, and finance in William Gibson's_ The Peripheral.

> In January 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) added the diagnosis of “gaming disorder” to its eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases. WHO defines the disorder as “a pattern of gaming behavior (digital-gaming or video-gaming) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.” Instead of the moral panic linking video games to violence, a diagnosis emphasizes the disruption of daily routines because of an inability to properly manage one’s time. However, gaming disorder isn’t pure disruption, for, as the WHO suggests, it has its own pattern. The problem is that gaming threatens to go viral, subsuming the rest of life and colonizing the pleasures and obligations of the everyday with the yearning to escape into digital fantasies. That the threat gaming presents is not only psychological but also economic can be seen in think pieces that worry over gaming’s contribution to rising rates of unemployment, especially among young men. The specter of young men opting out of the labor force in favor of digital play indexes a more general fear of economic stagnation and political disaffection, an anxiety that so much time might go to waste and that this waste might return to haunt the social body of capitalism. To his credit, Ryan Avent, an editor for The Economist, recognizes that this social pathology is less cause than symptom of an economy in which long-term careers have been replaced with contingent employment and consumer credit: “A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective.”
>
> Gaming disorder is a symptom of financialized capitalism. It is less a suspension of capitalist temporality than an element of the more general transition toward an economy in which temping (temporary labor) has become the norm. Financialization is, at least, a twofold phenomenon. First, it is, in Greta Krippner’s words, “a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than trade and commodity production.” This aspect of financialization pertains not only to the restructuring of corporations so that they are more responsive to the interests of shareholders but also to how companies not traditionally associated with finance increasingly rely on financial revenue streams. Since the 1970s, corporations and nation-states have relied more and more on financial speculation to compensate for declining profit rates. Second, financialization also names the spread of financial techniques into everyday life. Randy Martin writes: “Financialization integrates markets that were separate, like banking for business and consumers, or markets for insurance and real estate. It asks people from all walks of life to accept risk into their homes that were hitherto the province of professionals. Without significant capital, people are being asked to think like capitalists.” Financialization generalizes the ethos of speculation so that it encompasses all kinds of social conducts, from parenting to leisure activities. It replaces the ascetic worker-subject described by Max Weber with an opportunistic freelancer always seeking to transform a situation into another revenue stream. Opportunism is the mood of financialization; it’s the background hum of subjects compelled to speculate on contingent possibilities to survive in conditions of economic stagnation.

To me, Haines's essay could be the most interesting of the bunch; gaming oneself into the capitalistic sphere? No: gaming _is_ capitalism. I urge you to read his essay about gaming and temporality in relation to Gibson's writing.

I have skipped quotes from some of the essays that didn't excite me; I have not read much of what Gibson has written, so I'm possibly not the target audience for this anthology, but where I found the essays to be engaging and not trying-too-hard, I really got some bang out of it. I can imagine fans of Gibson would eat this book up, have a ponder, and a strong urge to re-read his books and re-watch everything he wrote the script for.

Disclaimer: I would like to thank the editors and publisher for sharing an advanced electronic copy of this book for review.

"William Gibson and the Future of Contemporary Culture" is a collection of 11 full essays that minutely analyze the writings of and about William Gibson. Before reading this book I thoughtlessly assumed it would be similar to book reviews or commentaries that one might read in magazines such as Asimov's Science Fiction or Analog Science Fiction and Fact. This book is, however, very firmly an academic analysis. For example, the Foreword and Introduction sections span 25 pages and include 43 footnotes and bibliographic references. The sum of footnotes, references, and bibliography fill up a full 47 pages of this 286 page book. Some of the essays exceed computer science conference papers in terms of complexity. Some of the essays are academic discussions of what other academics have written about Gibson's works along with the author's contributions to the field. Other essays are quite digestible and help the reader understand Gibson's works better. For example, the essay in Chapter 4 provided meaningful background on the modern history of science in Japan and helped the reader understand the famous Japanese scientists that are mentioned in Gibson's books. Chapter 5 took an interesting look at Gibson's contributions as a screen writer. Chapter 6 looked at the wonderfully Gibson-esque area of Digital Humanities, touched on various types of fictional computational devices throughout the ages, and even included word clouds generated from various corpuses of science fiction. Other chapters look at consumerism and gamification with respect to Gibson's works, as well as the impact of Gibson's ideas on society.

It is clear that everyone involved with this book has a firm appreciation for the creative works and genius of William Gibson. I, too, have enjoyed Gibson's novels and after reading these essays have vowed to read or reread all of his novels in order.

A comprehensive literary analysis of Gibson’s oeuvre, consisting of a series of essays, which are structured in three parts: Gibson and Literary History, Gibson and the Question of Medium, and Gibson and the Problem of the Present.

I have found the collection a bit uneven: some of his works (Pattern Recognition and The Peripheral) are given too much attention in the detriment of the others. Parts one and two were the most interesting; part three’s essays, more or less, repeat with more details what was already said in the first two parts.

Beside the criticism, there are a lot of intriguing facts that I had no idea about, like that Gibson cowrote two episodes from The X Files with Tom Maddox, Kill Switch (1998) and First Person Shooter (2000), and that "Cultivating the way from self-made man to man-made self and inventing the all-American discourse revisionism, [Benjamin] Franklin deserves the name of protocyberpunk author of alternate history.”

And I will leave here one more quote, on the influence of literature:

“The first chapter of Nature [Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, 1836] includes the following mysterious sentence: “If starts should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Without this sentence, Isaac Asimov, a major voice of hardcore science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, could not have come up with the idea for “Nightfall”, published in 1941. Without Emerson’s idea of transcendentalism inspired by Kant and Coleridge and crystallized in Nature, Friedrich Nietzsche could not have developed his theory of superman (Übermensch) mentioned in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), which inspired Arthur C. Clarke to write such masterpieces as Childhood’s End (1953) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Likewise, Emerson’s post-Unitarian transcendentalism induced even cyberpunk writers to create a brand-new paradigm of science fiction, in which the computer as the all-seeing eye occupies the place of Universal being. While Franklinian self-made man was turned into man-made self, cyberpunkish man-made self if turned into cybertranscendentalist “all-seeing eye”. Herein lies a breakthrough in literary and cultural history.“

I think it’s both suitable for Gibson’s fans and for those who have not read him yet. For the first category, because it makes you see with different eyes a lot of references and details from the books which are very easy to overlook, and for the second, because you’ll know what to expect when you’ll dive in for the first time – if you don’t mind some spoilers; it’s a literary analysis, after all.

This volume examines the work of William Gibson from a variety of perspectives, providing insight into this author’s work. Well worth reading and further study.