The future isn't what it used to be. In one of William Gibson's first published stories, 'The Gernsback Continuum', a photographer is assigned to capture examples of 'futuristic' American design from the Thirties, the kind of dream architecture that graced the covers of pulp science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories. Familiarising himself with streamlined dime stores and Coca-Cola plants built like submarines, the photographer starts to glimpse an alternative world born of the aerodynamic optimism of that earlier age, sees blond-haired people driving shark-fin roadsters down 80-lane freeways towards a towering metropolis. But these are 'semiotic ghosts' from a heroic, expansionist future that has passed America by: a gee-whiz, fascist-tinged fantasy that 'knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose'.

LRB 4 November 1993 | PDF Download