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By Root 989 0

with that. We can both control and not control our creations. I’m no Freudian or Marxist. I don’t like any criticism that tells me the writer didn’t know what he was doing. On the other hand, I think it’s futile to deny that many things we don’t intend to express often show up in our work…. Look at the body of work produced in the career of somebody like Heinlein…Starshîp Troopers is both about the virtues of a military social morality and about the eroticism of machines and violence. How can you evaluate one side of this book without acknowledging the other?”

Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City

William Gibson

Though he is the quintessential cyberpunk, the label never encompassed all that William Gibson’s fiction did. Or maybe what Gibson did in his early work was not entirely what people said he was doing. Even at the time he said, “I think that a number of reviewers have mistaken my sense of realism, of the commercial surfaces of characters’ lives, for some deep and genuine attempt to understand technology.” Famously, Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter, and his contribution to Mirrorshades is “The Gernsback Continuum,” which is not about computer hackers slicing into corporate databases, but about “semiotic ghosts” of science fiction past.

If you want to see this story as cyberpunk, look at it this way. It seems to be all about surfaces. It juxtaposes a small portion of the urban landscape with the implied human life within it, exposing this life through a series of images. No human being appears onstage, but in the end Gibson evokes a sense of human tragedy through the artifacts of our culture.

ONE

DEN-EN

Low angle, deep perspective, establishing Tokyo subway station interior.

Shot with available light, long exposure; a spectral pedestrian moves away from us, into background. Two others visible as blurs of motion.

Overhead fluorescents behind narrow rectangular fixtures. Ceiling tiled with meter-square segments (acoustic baffles?). Round fixtures are ventilators, smoke-detectors, speakers? Massive square columns recede. Side of a stairwell or escalator. Mosaic tile floor in simple large-scale pattern: circular white areas in square tiles, black infill of round tiles. The floor is spotless: no litter at all. Not a cigarette butt, not a gum-wrapper.

A long train of cardboard cartons, sides painted with murals, recedes into the perspective of columns and scrubbed tile: first impression is of a children’s art project, something choreographed by an aggressively creative preschool teacher. But not all of the corrugated cartons have been painted; many, particularly those farthest away, are bare brown paper. The one nearest the camera, unaltered, bright yellow, bears the Microsoft logo.

The murals appear to have been executed in poster paints, and are difficult to interpret here.

There are two crisp-looking paper shopping-bags on the tile floor: one near the murals, the other almost in the path of the ghost pedestrian. These strike a note of anomaly, of possible threat: London Transport warnings, Sarin cultists… Why are they there? What do they contain?

The one nearest the murals bears the logo “DEN-EN.”

Deeper in the image are other cartons. Relative scale makes it easier to see that these are composites, stitched together from smaller boxes. Closer study makes the method of fastening clear: two sheets are punctured twice with narrow horizontal slits, flat poly-twine analog (white or pink) is threaded through both sheets, a knot is tied, the ends trimmed neatly. In fact, all of the structures appear to have been assembled this way.

Deepest of all, stairs. Passengers descending.

TWO

BLUE OCTOPUS

Shallow perspective, eye-level, as though we were meant to view an anamorphic painting.

This structure appears to have been braced with a pale blue, enameled, possibly spring-loaded tube with a white, non-slip plastic foot. It might be the rod for a shower-curtain, but here it is employed vertically. Flattened cartons are neatly lashed to this with poly-tie.

The murals. Very faintly,