Of all genres, science fiction seems the most susceptible to anachronism. To “dating.” Stories written a decade or more ago can betray oddities to the contemporary reader that must, to greater of lesser degree, be compenstated for. Technology does not go whefe we think it will, even when we might get the broad outlines right. Details will trip us up.
The most succesful authors avoided this by not being too specific, by suggesting things can be done and then leaving the methods and means up to the reader. FTL is a case in point, though that one seems to have been a difficult-to-ignore challenge for many writers. How that might work becomes a necessary element differentiating hard from soft SF. There’s perhaps a bit of showing off going on, but usually it’s an attempt to add verisimilitude to the story. But it’s chancy.
For instance, payphones. It’s likely a certain audience will react with “What?” And either draw a blank or assume a burner is being suggested, but the universal presence of phone booths was at one time an unquestioned fixture no one expected to disappear. Their presence dates a text. Depending on how they’re used, it’s the kind of detail that can kick a reader right out of the story and spoil the experience. Unless…
I recently reread William Gibson’s Neuromancer and, yes, there are payphones. In kiosks. All over the place. In fact, they are essential to one scene which develops into an anxiety-ridden bit of Big Brother horror that frankly only works because of the cultural acceptance of their presence. It’s an affecting scene, powerful. But how well does it work if you’re barely 20 and have no experience of phone booths and public pay telephony? I can’t answer that question satisfactorily. I can’t go into my memory and excise a lifetime of experience that includes as an unquestioned universal the ubiquity of payphones and phone booths. I reflexively know what they are and how they worked and therefore I can automatically decode that scene as one of mounting horror.
Interestingly, though, I am aware of the pitfalls of such an inclusion and in other stories such details have ruined it for me. (For example, a former favorite of mine, Gordon Dickson’s None But Man, set in an interstellar milleu, opens with a scene of the protagonist being returned to Earth as a prisoner. They’ve thrown him into a cargo hold of a starship—with the mail bags. I was immediately thrown out of the story. Even though I am fully aware of what mail bags are and what they mean, in the same way I am about phone booths, this one just violated my ability to suspend disbelief.) Yet, rereading Neuromancer, 41 years after the first time I read it, I was not derailed. There are other infelicities scattered through the novel, oddities that today one would not tolerate in a new work for a second, but which slide by painlessly as the story carried me inexorably to its conclusion. I noted them along the way and went on, undisturbed.
Because, I decided, the novel is still brilliant, even in those aspects that fail to anticipate what we now believe the future will be like.
Perhaps that’s how he did it.
One of the traps of building a SFnal world is the assumption that everything has to be reimagined, It can’t be done, because we don’t think about Everything, and at some point we rely on the given world just as in any other genre. But even if we do have that level of attention and awareness, not everyone will. Gibson never makes the mistake of second-guessing the relationships his characters will have with the world they move through. They are different in direct proportion to the differences important to them as they move through the story. He can pass on certain details because, in the end, we can assume Something Like That will be in place. I had no trouble afterward thinking that the payphones Case uses are the same thing as the payphones I grew up with, because even if they aren’t, it makes little to no difference to Case. That Gibson “got it right” by some fictional calculation is not germain to the characters.
Or maybe it’s just that he was so on top of his craft even then we are compelled by the story to just accept.
One of the problems that subsequent attempts to use what quickly became defined as a subgenre—Cyberpunk—encountered was a misapprehension of the important aspects of Gibson’s world. Too much that followed by those not quite as perceptive tried to deal with the future as if it were all fashion. The mirrorshades and trendy jackets, the slang, and the general disshabile of the world were presented as the substance of the world instead of the reasons those things were as they were. Most of these did not last long. But it’s a persistent problem in science fiction and one we argue about all the time—the tropes. Mistaking the windowdressing for the contents of the store(y). If that windowdressing were really that important, then we would not still be reading Neuromancer.
What we are left with is a study about how the world grinds people up in pursuit of birthing a new thing. How people unknowingly, even when they think they’re acting volitionally and with full awareness, do not know what may come of their actions. That, in fact, the future is not a choice but an emergent property.
Neuromancer is one of those science fiction novels that manage to avoid obsolence because it is very much about its themes and the human costs of confronting change. Even with the anachronisms, the smartness of Gibson’s writing is that it eases you past them and lets you get on with the story. Those details that may seem like fatal flaws end up being the subject of discussion about how this future differs from the one that we lived into and perhaps will be different again from that of the actual future Gibson suggested. We are not required to accept that if one detail is wrong then the rest is by definition undone, because Gibson—as he has shown in all his subsequent novels—seems to know how this stuff works. One of his major interests in all his fiction is the process and consequence of accommodation, something we have to deal with constantly.
