Textual Practice, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 4, 671 693, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2012.738702

Robert Briggs
The future of prediction: speculating on William Gibsons
meta-science-fiction

Ever since famed science fiction (SF) author Ursula Le Guin insisted that
SF is not about the future but rather about the present, critics of SF nar-
ratives have largely rejected the genres popularly held associations with the
function of prediction. Recent celebration of ex-cyberpunk William
Gibsons Pattern Recognition as artistically ambitious SF, notwithstanding
its present-day setting, thus appears to mark the inevitable conclusion to
Le Guins claims for the allegorical function of future-based fictions. Taken
together, these events or trajectories may provide an opportunity to explore
the question of the place of prediction not only in contemporary SF and
SF studies, but also in what Bruce Sterling has called our truly science-fic-
tional world. For in a string of largely unremarked upon novels Gibson
published throughout the 1990s, the function of prediction seems dis-
placed from the level of narration and onto particular objects and charac-
ters appearing within the novels diegetic world. The narratives thus take
on a strange kind of metafictional quality, speculating on the very activity
of prediction that is sometimes imagined to define the work of SF. Exam-
ining Gibsons Bridge stories with a metafictional eye to how they
imagine the future of prediction, therefore, may enable us to pursue a
speculative engagement with cultural discourses on futurity thereby
reconsidering not only routine denunciations of SFs predictive sheen
but also the worldly uses of SFs visions of the future.

Keywords
Cyberpunk; metafiction; futurity

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

Textual Practice

If culture is a giant stream, scholarships job is not to keep abreast of

the speedboats and paddle-wheel casino of artists and entrepreneurs,
but to lag behind.1

The future of prediction?

It sometimes seems that science fiction (SF) studies, almost from the
moment of its inception, has been intent on erasing or denying SFs
popularly assumed function of prediction. Indeed, the entire enterprise
of SF studies seems increasingly devoted to rejecting the common-
sense view that SFs relations to and with the future can be character-
ised as the work of prediction. Famed SF author Ursula Le Guin put the
point most directly with her insistence in the introduction to The Left
Hand of Darkness that SF is not predictive; it is descriptive.2 But
more recently, the 100th issue of Science Fiction Studies (SFS) has
brought the point home. In that issue, William Gibsons Pattern Recog-
nition (2003) is treated to sustained and detailed discussion in not just
one, but three full-length articles despite the fact that the novel is the
first of Gibsons to be set in the present.3 The issues Editorial Intro-
duction seeks to account for this heightened attention via the theme of
the collapsed future one of the few remaining relations to the
future apparently available to SF. Thus, following a recap of the
history of SFS touching on the establishment of a breed of genre cri-
ticism that would be historical, international, and theoretical;4 on Le
Guins claim to the allegorical function of SF and thus to the legitimacy
of the genre for the historical moment;5 and on the rise of postmo-
dernism, cyberpunk, and technoculture the Editorial Introduction
arrives at the question of how to engage with the future, including
the futures of SF and of SFS:

it will probably not be business-in-the-future as usual. The post-

modern moment may be over, simply because the relentless de-his-
toricization of the present described by [Fredric] Jameson [in
Progress v. Utopia] has also completely evacuated the good old
modernist future. We find ourselves between, on the one hand,
a posthumanity few believe in, entranced by the prospect of a
technological transcendence that will make the future mute and
inaccessible; and, on the other, a future that has collapsed so com-
pletely into the present that our most influential SF artist, William
Gibson, has excised it entirely from his latest, most artistically
ambitious novel.6

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 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

That Gibson remains our which is to say, SF studies most influential

SF artist despite the present-day setting of his latest novels which now
include his Spook Country (2007), published not long after the SFS Edi-
torial7 is testament to the genres ambivalent and apparently incidental
relation to the question of prediction. By the same token, the editorials
ever-present tone of anticipation may hint at the extent to which SFs pre-
dictive potential has not been overcome so much as displaced. If the col-
lapsed futurity of Pattern Recognition marks the inevitable conclusion to
Le Guins claims for the allegorical function of SF, in other words, we
might pause to wonder whether theres something predictive something
science fictional even about SF studies itself. In that case, the question of
prediction should take the form not of whether we can imagine the future,
but of the extent to which the expectations of SF studies may be realised by
the future of SF. Can the SF of the future live up, in other words, to SF
studies predictions of a prediction-less SF?
Take, for example, Bruce Sterlings Cyberpunk in the Nineties, a
startlingly prescient account of the future of SF and of the Movement of
cyberpunk, in particular. The nineties, Sterling predicted at the very
start of that decade, will not belong to the cyberpunks. We will be there
working, but we are not the Movement, we are not even us anymore.8
From the perspective of the moment at which Sterling pronounced this
destiny barely two years after the publication of Mona Lisa Overdrive
(1988)9 his depiction of cyberpunk as belonging to the past would
surely have seemed premature. Yet if read from the other end of the
decade, his prognosis-cum-postmortem starts to seem particularly apt:

A core doctrine in Movement theory was visionary intensity. But

it has been some time since any cyberpunk wrote a truly mind-
blowing story, something that writhed, heaved, howled, haluci-
nated and shattered the furniture. In the latest work of these
veterans, we see tighter plotting, better characters, finer prose,
much serious and insightful futurism. But we also see much less
in the way of spontaneous back-flips and crazed dancing on
tables. The settings have come closer and closer to the present
day, losing the baroque curlicues of unleashed fancy: the issues at
stake become something horribly akin to the standard concerns
of middle-aged responsibility.10

Taken together, Sterlings memorium and the recent celebration of Pattern

Recognition serve to remind us that Gibson cyberpunks pre-eminent
writer published throughout the 1990s a string of novels that surely
owed something at least to the cyberpunk manifesto. True to Sterlings
prediction, the Bridge trilogy consisting of Virtual Light (1993),

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Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrows Parties (1999)11 is set in the not-too-
distant future, and arguably features tighter plotting, better characters, and
so on. Also true to Sterlings prediction, however, those novels seem to have
failed to capture the critical imagination, for today there seems to be very
little scholarly attention devoted to the books our most influential SF
artist wrote and released in the period separating Mona Lisa Overdrive
and Pattern Recognition.12 The lack of critical fanfare might indeed be
attributed to a nagging feeling that Gibsons nineties work lacked Neuro-
mancers visionary intensity that for all its flash and burn, theres
nothing particularly trailblazing about it, as one reviewer of Virtual
Light has put it.13 Pattern Recognitions recent reception as artistically
ambitious SF, despite its present-day setting, thus does little to alleviate
this suspicion and indeed goes a long way towards confirming Sterlings
declaration that in the nineties the cyberpunk writers are not even them-
selves anymore.
From the divided but complementary stand-points of Sterling in
1990 and SFS in 2006, it would be easy to imagine Gibsons Bridge
trilogy as an unwelcome detour or a wrong-turn along the path of SFs
artistic aspirations to write a truly mind-blowing story. On that view,
Pattern Recognitions vision of a futureless present might understandably
(if unexpectedly) be thought to mark Gibsons return to the proper
work of SF. But what does such a thought suggest about SFs generic speci-
ficity, and in particular about its apparently ambivalent, incidental relation
to the question of prediction? For the term prediction has served (for
better or worse) as the name for some difference as imaginary or con-
tested as it may be between SF specifically and literature generally.
Not only has the term helped, albeit inconsistently so, frame the popular
or non-specialist reception of SF, but the prediction/allegory dichotomy
helped shape the understandings of SF that circulated in the early critical
literature, at least up to the mid-1980s and even later.14 Indeed (and iro-
nically), prediction continues to serve that role in SF studies ongoing
negation or denial of any predictive dimension to SF underscoring
precisely the possibility of SF-as-predictive at the same time as it concedes,
by force of opposition, that the notion continues to exert some influence
over popular and even specialist thinking about the genre.
While the term prediction itself undoubtedly obscures the many
differences between a whole range of possible relations to the future (pre-
diction, futurity, prophecy, extrapolation, anticipation, premonition, plan,
prognosis, and preparation), it thus remains the privileged marker of SFs
relations to and with the future as distinct from its relations to and with
the present.15 If Pattern Recognitions collapsed future can be read as the
apogee of SF studies compulsion to deny SFs predictive potential, there-
fore, that reading, by seemingly erasing a marker of SFs generic specificity,

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thereby throws the novels precedents in the form of the Bridge trilogy,
to be sure, but perhaps even the entire history of SF into disarray. To that
extent, the novels publication and reception present an opportunity to
pursue a different kind of SF studies, in the guise of an alternative
history a chance, that is, to conduct a thought-experiment in relation
to the textual, critical, and social history that has (or would) come, in one
way or another, to condition the event, that is (or will be), Pattern Recog-
nition. For example: what if we were never entirely able to reduce SFs pre-
dictive impulse? What if, moreover, such an eventuality had already been
predicted not just once, but many times over, throughout the history
both of SF and of SF studies?

William Gibsons meta-SF

If such questions seem unlikely, even a little mischievous, in the context of

a discipline defined by ideals of scholarly rigor, honesty, and art,16 they
nevertheless find some warrant in Gibsons post-Sprawl narratives, particu-
larly the three novels which make up the Bridge trilogy. For it would seem
that in the novels Gibson has published since Mona Lisa Overdrive, the
function of prediction, popularly accepted as a marker of SFs generic iden-
tity, is increasingly displaced from the narrative form itself and onto par-
ticular objects and characters appearing within the novels diegetic
worlds. Undoubtedly, the phenomenon is accentuated by the fact that
the novels are set at a time that is removed from their year of publication
by not more than a few decades,17 and it is probably the relative feeling of
familiarity with that world which helps to keep open the question of the
future in that work. The Bridge trilogy thus starts to take on a strange
kind of metafictional quality, activating the idea of prediction not
simply as a contested description of SFs raison detre, but moreover as
the very object of science fictional speculation. By the same token, the nar-
ratives engagements with the ideal of prediction hardly amount to
business-in-the-future as usual, for the dramatisation of predictive acts
cannot help but transform predictions critical status from extrapolative
technique to epistemological question. And if that is the case, then it may
yet turn out that the very feature which would lead Sterling to predict a
1990s cyberpunk lacking in visionary intensity is precisely what should
qualify Virtual Light and the other Bridge novels most definitively as artis-
tically ambitious SF.
In Virtual Light, the action set in post-quake California revolves
around a pair of Virtual Light glasses, which project a kind of blueprint for
a remodelled San Francisco, a vision of a future city organised around a
totalising, monolithic capitalist order. In this vision, hyperconsumerism

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and unregulated capital infiltrate every social space, obliterating all possibi-
lities for resistance and all alternatives to the cultural logic of late capital-
ism.18 No doubt, from the point of view of DatAmerica and the
Sunflower Corporation, the faceless, soulless sponsors of this ultra-urban
vision, the construction plans present an ideal, even idyllic vision of late-
capitalist desire.19 From the point of view of the novels dispossessed,
however most notably the flesh-and-blood people who have built for
themselves a minimal yet self-subsistent existence on the earthquake-
ruined San Francisco Bay Bridge the glasses present a dystopian future
that threatens to destroy the alternative economies and communities, the
sites of resistance and contestation, which have arisen in the margins of
the officially sanctioned cityscape. Of course, in the world of Virtual
Light, this projected city has not yet arrived, and thus it remains only
one possible future. But that future already has its antecedents in spaces
that feature in the novels present: notably, Century City II, a seemingly
hermetic, self-sufficient high-rise for the mega-rich; and Container City,
a shopping mall you have to pay to get into. In this manner, the future
depicted by the glasses offers an extrapolated vision of the novels
present, and Virtual Light, as a quasi-dystopian narrative about the
violent events which unfold around this vision, offers the chance to con-
sider the economic and political forces at play in attempts to engineer
change in the name of a prospective social order. Gibsons novel appears
to speculate, therefore, on the very activity of prediction that is sometimes
attributed to (and more regularly denied of) the work of SF at the same
time that it offers an extrapolation from and critical reading of certain
socio-historical trajectories.
If Virtual Light arguably lacks the radical images of futurity depicted
by the Sprawl trilogy, that is, that novel nevertheless remains within the
orbit of prediction by virtue of its metafictional force. And in the novels
sequels Idoru and All Tomorrows Parties the question of prediction
arises again, albeit this time in a rather different form. A central character
in those novels is Colin Laney, a man who owing to a slight concen-
tration-deficit, mutated via exposure to the experimental drug 5-SB and
developed through training in a specialist research technique possesses
a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures (Idoru, p. 25).20 Not
just an extremely good researcher, Laney is a cybernetic waterwitch,
an intuitive fisher of patterns of information (Idoru, p. 25), the kind of
patterns that enable him to identify nodal points, which seem to form
when something [is] about to change (Idoru, p. 250). It is this rare
ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of incidental infor-
mation (Idoru, p. 38) that gets him a job at Slitscan, a reality program-
ming and celebrity gossip empire that thrives on creating and then
destroying celebrity lives. But it is that same ability which also lands

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Laney in trouble, when the patterns of information enable him to predict

certain courses of action. Thus, when a particular nodal point forms
around Alison Shires, a woman whose data he has been analysing, Laney
realises that she is going to kill herself (Idoru, p. 41). He tries to stop
her, but his prediction, extrapolated from the patterns of information gen-
erated by the actions which constitute Shires day-to-day life, turns out to
be all too accurate.
And not for the last time either, since Laney returns in All Tomorrows
Parties honing in on the mother of all nodal points, the one which enables
him to see that its all going to change (ATP, p. 4). This time, Laneys
prediction hinges on his recognition that history too [is] subject to the
nodal vision (ATP, p. 165). By the same token, that nodal vision a con-
frontation with the literal shape of all human knowledge, all human
memory (ATP, p. 107) is also what allows him to recognise that
there never was any such thing as history (ATP, p. 107), at least, not
in any accepted sense of the term:

He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography,

was dead. That history in the older sense was narrative, stories we
told ourselves about where wed come from and what it had been
like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and
indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of
interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made
it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipu-
lation and interpretation.
But the history Laney discovered, through the quirk in his vision
induced by having been repeatedly dosed with 5-SB, was something
very different. It was the shape comprised of every narrative, every
version; it was that shape that only he (as far as he knew) could
see. (ATP, p. 165)21

Laneys peculiar access to this single indescribable shape that is history

puts him in the seemingly unique position of being able to feel nodes of
potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming
the not-yet . . . a vision in which past and future are one and the same
(ATP, p. 106). While he cannot simply read these future histories, nor
even (strictly speaking) deduce from them the nature of the change to
come, Laney is able to sense from the shape of things that the world as
we know it is going to end and, indeed, that it is going to end in
San Fransisco (ATP, p. 169). In that sense, Laneys work amounts to a
kind of extrapolation and, as with the glasses in Virtual Light, it is
around his vision of the future that the characters and actions of All Tomor-
rows Parties revolve. In the case of both Idoru and All Tomorrows Parties,

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therefore, a metafictional drive appears to shape the narratives once again

albeit here prediction takes the guise not of any specific vision of the future
but rather of the classical hard SF technique of extrapolation.
From a certain point of view, it may not be all that surprising that
Gibsons work seems to foreground this meta-science-fictional quality.
After all, a critical link between SF and metafiction emerged as early as
the 1970s when Robert Scholes identified those two genres as different
dimensions to the literary tradition of fabulation.22 It has become com-
monplace in accounts of self-conscious fiction, moreover, to see metafic-
tion less as a particular species of fiction one genre among others than
as a tendency or function inherent in all novels.23 Accordingly, Frederic
Jameson, in his seminal essay on SF, progress and Utopia, concludes his
argument concerning the structural impossibility of utopian represen-
tation with a speculation on the auto-referential dimension to the SF
genre.24 Jamesons analysis is perhaps most famous for its depiction of
SF in terms which break with claims to the genres predictive power: reject-
ing the idea that SF narratives seriously attempt to imagine the real
future of our social system, Jameson conducts a kind of counter-history
to the genre by citing the modern historical consciousness embodied by
the historical novel as SFs most instructive precursor.25 But in doing
so he diagnoses the emergence of SF as the symptom of a mutation in
our relationship to historical time itself,26 such that the genre enacts
and enables a structurally unique method for apprehending the present
as history.27 Consequently, what is indeed authentic about SF, he argues,

is not at all its capacity to keep the future alive, even in imagination.
On the contrary, its deepest vocation is over and over again to
demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the
future, to body forth, through apparently full representations
which prove on closer inspection to be structurally and constitutively
impoverished, the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the
utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical differ-
ence; to succeed by failure, and to serve as unwitting and even unwill-
ing vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown,
finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-too-familiar, and thereby
becomes unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our
own absolute limits.28

Jamesons startling analysis of the culturalpolitical significance of SF

requires little elaboration here, not least of all because his negation of SFs
predictive claims is perhaps as well known and as oft-cited as Le Guins.29
But a rarely remarked upon coda to his intervention supplements the
point in a manner that ought to forestall attempts to isolate SF from

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practices of prediction. Having argued that our constitutional inability to

imagine the future is not owing to any individual failure of imagination but
[is] the result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we
are all in one way or another prisoners,30 Jameson pursues a reading of
select utopian SF texts in light of what he calls the historical transformation
of the cultural text [in general] into an auto-referential discourse.31 For
Jameson, that is, literatures self-referential destiny is less an essential fact
of literary practice than a practical consequence of changes to the socio-
cultural conditions to literary reception. Nevertheless, that argument does
not so much reduce the metafictional dimension to SF as underscore its
inevitability. For in the context of that transformation, Jameson argues,
the centre of gravity of SF narratives unavoidably shifts towards an
auto-referentiality in which such texts become explicitly or implicitly,
and as it were against their own will . . . interrogation[s] of the dilemmas
involved in their own emergence.32 SFs relation to the power of prediction
thus turns out to be more profound even than its deepest vocation, insofar
as the very possibility of [its] own production and thus the possibility of
prediction itself turns out to constitute the genres deepest subject.33
Notwithstanding widespread critical attempts to sever SFs connection to
the work of prediction, therefore, Jamesons reading raises the possibility
that the genre maintains an insoluble bond with the question of prediction
by virtue, precisely, of its inevitable metafictionality.
If Jameson is right about SFs auto-referential destiny, then the
Bridge trilogys status as visionary, even ambitious SF might best be
assessed not so much by the extent of its unleashed fancy as by the irre-
ducible alienness of its metafictionality by its specific potential, that is,
to speculate on the question of prediction. In that respect, it is worth
noting that Sterling, too, has on at least one occasion sought to underscore
the inevitability of such a gesture. In his preface to the celebrated cyber-
punk anthology Mirrorshades (1986), Sterling seeks to account for the
specificity of the cyberpunk aesthetic in terms of its place within the SF tra-
dition (all the while adopting a tone slightly more optimistic than that
characterising his later, somewhat disheartening prediction of the future
to that movement):

Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the impact of SFs last desig-
nated movement, the New Wave, brought a new concern for lit-
erary craftsmanship to SF. Many of the cyberpunks write a quite
accomplished and graceful prose; they are in love with style, and
are (some say) fashion-conscious to a fault. But, like the punks of
77, they prize their garage-band esthetic. They love to grapple
with the raw core of SF: its ideas. This links them strongly to the
classic SF tradition. Some critics opine that cyberpunk is

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disentangling SF from mainstream influence, much as punk stripped

rock and roll of the symphonic elegances of Seventies progressive
rock. (And others hardline SF traditionalists with a firm distrust
of artiness loudly disagree.)34

Surprisingly, given his one-time dismissal of the view of SF as allegory,35

Sterling chooses here to bypass the debate over the allegorical versus the
predictive functions of SF in favour of depicting the genre in terms of
its blend of a particular literary style with a speculative approach to
ideas.36 If the movement maintains contact with the visionary neverthe-
less, that connection thus lies neither in SFs credible apprehension of the
future, nor in its keen insight into the present world, but rather in its specu-
lative willingness to take an idea, as Sterling puts it, and unflinchingly
push it past its limits.37 Cyberpunks speculative dimension which Ster-
ling defines in terms of its creative prizing of the unthinkable, its reassess-
ment and reinterpretation of the old notions38 thus counterpoises both
the work of prediction, of narrowing down the possibilities by determining
the most likely of scenarios, and the form of allegory, of rendering artisti-
cally what is really going on in the world today, by invoking instead an
opening to the future, to the many futures, through a rethinking of the
established ideas and practices which seemingly define the present. But
if this promise ties the movement to the classic SF tradition, cyberpunks
specificity is not reducible to its status as a new species (or sub-genre) of
SF. For cyberpunks emergence, according to Sterling, does not amount
simply to an aesthetic mutation but rather coincides with a far more
radical transformation to what might be called SFs text-world relations:

The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not

only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly
science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical hard
SF extrapolation, technological literacy are not just literary
tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding,
and highly valued.39

If, as Sterling argues, certain literary techniques have disseminated beyond

the sphere of literature and are now deployed on a mass scale in non-lit-
erary contexts, this is as much as to say that SF remains irreducible to a
genre, to a collection of texts, narratives, books, etc. Hence, cyberpunks
speculative indeed, metafictional promise, for SFs predictions must
be conceived on this view not so much as representations of or extrapol-
ations from some prior, identifiable world, but rather as inseparable
from the very idea of the the world. No longer simply a representation
of the world future or present in the form of popular narrative, SF

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 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

thus becomes part of a broader textual field incorporating a range of cul-

tural (as distinct, in a sense, from literary) practices which both separately
and collectively encourage speculation on a range of philosophical, lit-
erary, political, and practical questions including, significantly, ques-
tions concerning the nature of prediction.
While the latter point is hardly revolutionary today,40 it nevertheless
helps to distinguish Sterlings theory of cyberpunk not just from the idealist
take on fabulation but also from Jamesons cultural Marxist account of SFs
deepest vocation. Against the idealist concession to the apparent autonomy
of the literary text, that is, Sterling imagines a much more dynamic
relationship between SF narratives and the cultural worlds from which
they ostensibly emerge. Thus, where Scholes attributes metafictional fabu-
lations emergence to changes in literatures self-understanding of its epis-
temological status from positivism to fallibilism such that literature
can no longer be thought to reach all the way to the real,41 Sterlings
account underscores SFs saturation of the material reality which shaped
cyberpunks very birth. For Sterling, in other words, it is not that SF
fails to reach the real, but rather that there is no real that has not
already been suffused by the attitudes and processes of SF. By the same
token, Sterlings take on our truly science fictional world and the speci-
ficity of cyberpunk aesthetics throws into relief some of Jamesons particu-
lar less guarded observations about SFs relations to the political
unconscious of our age. For instance, Jameson tends to organise the SF
novels he refers to according to their location within a rather respectable
literary tradition,42 and in terms of their status as Utopian or Dystopian,
which is to say as visions of a future defined primarily in terms of a
socio-political order. By contrast, SF, as Sterling tells it, has always been
about the impact of technology.43 Thus, where Jameson attributes the
meta-fictional (or auto-referential) quality of SF to the general thrust of
literary modernism,44 the transformation of the text-world relations
which underpins Sterlings overview is a consequence of the widespread
dissemination of a technics extrapolation, technological literacy
that is on the one hand seemingly peculiar to SF (as distinct from literature
more generally) and on the other intimately bound to a large-scale shift in
the practical distribution of technological authority and expertise from
ivory tower science to street-wise artists and pop culture technicians,
hackers, and rockers.45
Likewise, Jamesons enabling proposition regarding SFs primarily
socio-political purpose of exploring the idea or value of progress has the
effect of restricting his conclusions about the function of SF to the
latters endless repetition of a failure.46 With this move he introduces, of
course, a highly imaginative and significant means for thinking through
the conditions of contemporary existence. But against this account or,

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better still, as a supplement to it Sterling identifies in cyberpunk a contrary

function, one which is more in tune with the technical revolution which he
sees as driving in part the emergence of cyberpunk.47 For him, cyberpunk
. . . [is] a voice of Bohemia, a useful place to put a wide variety of people,
where their ideas and actions can be examined.48 As the voice of
Bohemia the basic social function and vital aspect of SF cyberpunk
comes from the underground, from the outside . . .. It [comes] from people
who [dont] know their own limits, and [who refuse] the limits offered them
by mere custom and habit. So where Jameson reflects on the deeper and
vaster narrative movement in which the groups of a given collectivity at a
certain historical juncture anxiously interrogate their fate and thus sees
SF run up against its absolute philosophical limits time and again,49 Ster-
lings view from the ground focuses on the practical potential of SF to
play a part in the transformation of everyday limits limits presented not
by a vast ideological closure but by mere custom and habit. In view of
the latter account, SFs attempts to imagine the future never function at
such a grand scale as to plot the path of progress, but rather seek merely
to experiment with ways of thinking things anew.
To that end, it is worth noting that the predictions driving the action
within Gibsons meta-SF are much more modest in scope, more delimited
by external factors, than would be expected of the Utopian narrative. In
Idoru and All Tomorrows Parties, for instance, Laney offers nothing so
grand as a full-fledged vision of a future social order and, indeed, is
quick to concede the impossibility of imagining the future. He is always
at a loss as to how it is he can see the things he sees in the data he analyses,
but he is acutely aware that his extrapolations depend upon nodal points
which emerge out of the deliberate actions of those whose data he reads:
he could not predict a persons death, he says in Idoru, unless there was
a degree of intentionality that would emerge from the data. Accidents,
actions by anyone who isnt represented . . . . (p. 267), he trails off,
noting the many, unanticipatable factors involved in the direction of
events, like if an earthquake had come (p. 250). Indeed, the nodal
points themselves only indicate emerging change, but not what that
change will be (ATP, p. 194). And so even when Laney gets it right, it
is barely more than an accident itself, since no degree of intentionality
or foresight, be it individual or structural, is great enough to reduce hap-
penstance to degree zero a point made to hilarious effect in the following
exchange from Virtual Light between Rydell and his sociopathic captor,
Loveless, who asks Rydell,

Has it occurred to you that you wouldnt even be here right now if
Lucius fucking Warbaby hadnt taken up rollerblading last month?

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 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

Hows that?
He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, cant drive, you wind
up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage
capitalism? (pp. 259260)

The answer, of course, is very little at all. As it turns out, the vision of the
future offered by the glasses fails to come to pass, but the events responsible
for foiling the dream of unregulated capital are unable to be traced back to
anything more auspicious than an accident, being attributable neither to
the deliberate (or contradictory) machinations of the late-capitalist
system nor even to any purposeful resistance to that system. If the future
is unimaginable, therefore, it is also underivable.50
In view of a seemingly nave theory of SF-as-predictive, that is, the
Bridge trilogy foregrounds as the experiences of Laney and Rydell,
respectively, suggest an attention to the socio-political uses of prediction,
extrapolation, and visions of the future. Accordingly, prediction is signifi-
cant in the Bridge trilogy by virtue of the way it is called upon for practical
more often than not, commercial ends. The Virtual Light glasses are
an obvious example, and in that case seemingly bound to some grand
design. However, the vast bulk of the narrative is driven not by the
future presented by those glasses but like Poes purloined letter by
the almost mundane circumstances which befall the glasses themselves.
The glasses are stolen by Chevette from the courier simply because
he was an asshole and she just didnt like him (VL, p. 41). This
almost arbitrary action brings into play a number of violent characters
who are bent on getting the glasses back. What is on the glasses makes
little difference in terms of the initial events that unfold, and even when
the vision they contain is made known, Rydell at least is unfazed: So
whats the problem?, he asks; they wanna do that, let em (p. 260). To
be sure, there are people who would object to the fact that this sort of
plan even exists (p. 261) notably, a group of hackers who go by the
name of The Republic of Desire but that is precisely what enables
Rydell to recruit those hackers for the purpose of achieving his own,
more modest goal of saving his and Chevettes skins.
That is not to say that there is not something disturbing about the way
that global capital seems always to stake a large claim bordering on the
monopolistic in the dividends of prediction. There can be no doubt
that the vision offered by the Virtual Light glasses serves the interests of
the multinationals and the monopolisation of capital at the expense of the
alternative economies of the Bridge community and the Republic of
Desire. Theres the business of real estate, for instance, as Loveless tells
Rydell; the people who know where to buy, the people whove seen

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where the footprints of the towers fall . . . theyll get it all (VL, p. 262). Simi-
larly, it is the giant corporation DatAmerica less a power than a territory
. . . a law unto itself (Idoru, p. 55) that first identifies, cultivates and
exploits Laneys special abilities, after which Slitscan is only too happy to
capitalise on that dubious investment, turning a profit out of Laneys predic-
tive talents. Nevertheless, the mobilisation of such vision for the furthering
of corporate interests amounts to but one worldly use of the forms and
practices of prediction. Accordingly, and with regard at least to the narra-
tives logic of character action, the dream of unregulated capital projected
by the VL glasses founders not so much on the dilemmas involved in its
emergence some internal contradiction which evinces our constitutional
inability to imagine Utopia or Dystopia as such, as Jameson might have it51
as on that visions irrepressible appropriability. Gibsons DIY cyberpunk
mantra the street finds its own uses for things52 applies just as much to
the forms and techniques of prediction, in other words, as to the fantastic
technologies which populate the imagined worlds of our future.

The (paracritical) uses of prediction

Every metafiction has its paracritical effects.53 If images of prediction can

be read as metonymic of the generic work of SF, then Gibsons Bridge nar-
ratives would appear to call into question many influential accounts of SFs
relations not just to the future (SF-as-predictive) or to the world (SF-as-
descriptive), but to literature as well (SF-as-generic). In the first place,
the question of prediction in Gibsons Bridge narratives turns not so
much on what the future holds in store but on how the practices of predic-
tion are deployed in specific ways and, in that sense, Gibsons meta-SF is
irreducible to the view of metafiction as self-conscious fiction54 or exper-
imental fabulation,55 as foregrounding the fictionality of the world or as
explor[ing] a theory of fiction through the practice of writing.56 For the
Bridge trilogy would appear neither to highlight the fictionality of the con-
ditions of being nor to explore the reality of processes of fiction, but merely
to speculate on the activity of prediction itself. In the context of such self-
conscious and experimental works as those by Borges, Barth, Calvino,
Pynchon, and Carter, moreover, Gibsons narratives appear pointedly
conservative in structure and determinedly realist in style.57 Rather than
reproducing the non-mimetic strategies of much fabulation or the self-
referential playfulness of modern metafiction, in other words, the Bridge
narratives concern themselves with a set of techniques, functions, and pro-
cesses for engaging with the future (prediction, extrapolation, futurology,
and projection) which are regularly viewed all problematisations of
generic purity aside58 as immanent to the SF genre specifically rather

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 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

than as characteristic of literature generally. More transparently than much

other SF, that is and to paraphrase Jameson59 Gibsons Bridge trilogy
is about its own processes of prediction. The novels metafictionality thus
presents a challenge to prevailing accounts of metafiction as a general form
or practice of writing, insofar as their auto-referentiality is implicitly bound
to the more or less generically sited practice of imagining the future. By the
same token, the Bridge narratives would appear to call into question Jame-
sons attempt to account for what he calls the genres deepest vocation. If
the function of SF narratives is, as Gibsons meta-SF may indicate, unable
to be sourced to their form, if SFs predictions are inevitably open to appro-
priation in myriad ways, then SFs functions remain irreducible to demon-
strating and dramatising our incapacity to imagine the future, to
bring[ing] home, in local and determinate ways, our constitutional
inability to imagine Utopia itself.60
On the contrary or in addition the Bridge trilogy invites us to
speculate on the idea of prediction itself, not by presenting it as some
monological ideal or more to the point fantasy, but rather by rethink-
ing its apparent impossibility before allegorising the many possible
worldly uses of SFs predictions. Thus, Idorus symbol of the multi-
media tabloid empire Slitscan, for instance, offers a particularly vivid
take on the culturalindustrial exploitation of SFs predictions for the
purpose of achieving market and ultimately political power. Specifically,
Laneys boss, high-level Slitscan employee Kathy Torrance, presents an
image of Slitscans audience a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpe-
tually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed (Idoru,
p. 28) which speaks volumes about the ways in which a publishing
industry (for example) can exploit SF narratives as saleable commodities,
as commercial fodder, if not as a hegemonic technique of mass distrac-
tion.61 Likewise, Virtual Lights depiction of the relative powerlessness of
the Bridge people in the face of corporate visions of late-capitalist
Utopia may be read as dramatising the potential for visions of Utopia
and for the work of prediction more generally to be accompanied by the
most pernicious consequences. To that extent, Gibsons quasi-dystopian
narrative underscores the dangers of certain uses of prediction, projecting
at the same time an oppositional utopian impulse via the negation,
that is, of an imagined future whose destructive effects can be measured
by the predictions impact on the world outside it. More optimistically,
then, SFs predictions might also be produced and appropriated as
means of resistance, experimentation, and transformation, along the lines
suggested by Sterlings account of cyberpunk as the voice of Bohemia.
And so in the same way that cyberpunk imagery and ideas have been appro-
priated for unconventional existential purposes and incorporated into sub-
cultural practice, Laneys extrapolative abilities become integral to the

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emergence of virtually inconceivable forms of existence such as the mar-

riage, in Idoru, between the mega-pop-star Rez and his girlfriend, Rei
Toei, the idol-singer or idoru, who is actually some kind of a software
agent (Idoru, p. 99), a personality construct . . . the creation of infor-
mation designers (p. 92), and who is later born, literally materialised,
via a Lucky Dragon Nanofax, in All Tomorrows Parties (pp. 268269).62
It is in the context of this last possible use of SF as experiment and
transformation, that we might say that, pace Jameson, one laudable func-
tion of SF is precisely to keep the future alive albeit not as a specific
vision of a future present to be striven for, or instituted on a grand scale.
Instead, the future kept alive by Gibsons meta-SF, at least works
to bring home, in local and determinate ways, the continuing possibility
of transforming the present, to propagate the multiplication of such possi-
bilities, the better, perhaps, to disrupt the monologic of capitalism. In that
sense, the future of prediction may lie in attending to predictions uses as
much as to its closure with the implication that SF studies cannot afford
to relegate the function of prediction to SFs critical past. Indeed, not only
is an affirmation of SFs visionary intensity vital for its speculative, metafic-
tional promise to take hold, but in that move SF studies itself plays a key
part in keeping that promise alive by way, that is, of its own appropria-
tion of SFs predictions for the scholarly purpose of cultural criticism. To
note the scholarly nature of such an enterprise is not to suggest, of course,
that this use does not itself profit from SFs predictions, thereby propagat-
ing the business of staking a claim on the dividends of the utopian impulse.
But it is to stress the role that SF studies continues to play in keeping the
future of prediction alive. Sometimes, surprisingly perhaps, it does so most
radically at the moment it seeks to deny SF its predictive role, by pushing
the idea of SF past its limits. But in any case, and whatever its stance on
SFs deepest vocation, SF studies continues to affirm the future of predic-
tion for as long it uses SF to remind us, as Laney recognises in All Tomor-
rows Parties, that Future is inherently plural (p. 107).

Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University

Notes

1 Editorial Introduction, Science Fiction Studies 33.100 (2006), pp. 385 388,
p. 387.
2 Ursula Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness in Susan Wood
(ed.), The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
(New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1979), pp. 155 159, p. 156. Originally

686
 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

published in Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace,
1969).
3 William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (London: Viking, 2003).
4 Editorial Introduction, p. 385.
5 Ibid., p. 386.
6 Ibid., p. 388.
7 William Gibson, Spook Country (London: Viking, 2007).
8 Bruce Sterling, Cyberpunk in the Nineties, n.p. http://www.streettech.com/
bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/CPInThe90s.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
First published in Interzone: Science Fiction and Fantasy, 38 (June 1990),
pp. 39 41.
9 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (London: Grafton, 1989).
10 Sterling, Cyberpunk in the Nineties, n.p.
11 William Gibson, Virtual Light (London: Penguin, 1993); William Gibson,
Idoru (London: Viking, 1996); and William Gibson, All Tomorrows Parties
(London: Penguin, 2000). Hereafter, all references to these texts cited paren-
thetically in the text, using VL, Idoru, and ATP, respectively.
12 Notable exceptions here are Ross Farnell, Posthuman topologies: William
Gibsons Architexture in Virtual Light and Idoru Science Fiction Studies,
25 (1998), pp. 459 480; Graham Murphy, Post/humanity and the intersti-
tial: a glorification of possibility in Gibsons Bridge sequence Science Fiction
Sudies, 30 (2003), pp. 72 90; and Tama Leaver, The Infinite Plasticity
of the Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment and Technology in
William Gibsons Interstitial Trilogy, Reconstruction, 4 (Summer 2004),
n.p. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/043/leaver.htm (accessed October 23,
2012). Farnell and Murphy both note the lack of critical material dedicated
to Gibsons 1990s output and do their bit towards cultivating scholarly reflec-
tion on the Bridge novels.
13 Lance Olsen, Virtual Light, Postmodern Culture, 4.2 (1994), n.p.
14 See, for instance, the interview with Bruce Sterling, originally published in
Interzone (Spring 1986), in which he is asked, Do you think that SF, far
from being a vision of the future, is a reflection of the present?. Sterling
responded with vehemence to the implication that SF can be reduced to the
status of allegory, seeing that move as part of an ongoing attempt to reduce
SF to a sub-branch of mainstream literature (cited in Tom Shippey, Semiotic
Ghosts and Ghostliness in the Work of Bruce Sterling in Tom Shippey and
George Slusser (ed.), Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative
[London: University of Georgia Press, 1992], pp. 208 220, p. 219).
15 It is worth noting here that Le Guins insistence in 1969 that science fiction is
not predictive was not made in the name of distinguishing between prediction
and the work, say, of extrapolation or of imagining the future. Indeed, she
explicitly argued that science fiction isnt about the future (Introduction to
The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 158), and in this sense prediction stood
(and still stands) in for everything that might if the thought could ever be
entertained make SF in some way about the future, rather than simply
and purely about the present.

687
Textual Practice

16 Editorial Introduction, p. 388.

17 And, indeed, seemingly by no time at all in the case of Pattern Recognition and
Spook Country.
18 Farnell, Posthuman topologies, p. 465.
19 Ibid.
20 In both Idoru and ATP, as well as in the few commentaries of those novels that
have surfaced, Laneys gift is regularly attributed to his repeated exposure to
5-SB, and it would thus be easy to overlook the fact that when Laneys peculiar
knack is first introduced (Idoru, p. 25), the 5-SB exposure is presented as only
one contributing factor, albeit a significant one. The fact that Laney was
trained to recognize the nodal points by a team of French scientists
(p. 25), however, may also have some resonance within the context of cyber-
punks speculative dimension and the metafictional quality of Gibsons
writing, especially considering the relatively recent emergence of the field of
research both academic and commercial known as future studies. Simi-
larly, the fact that Laneys knack also hinges on an already existing concen-
tration-deficit may perhaps take on a new significance in the context of
Gibsons more recent novel, Pattern Recognition, whose protagonist, Cayce,
is able to intuit whether a proposed company trademark or logo will work.
Like Laney, Cayce is unable to explain how she can predict the effectiveness
of these marketing images, but the few vague explanations of her sensitivity
proffered by the narrative are couched largely in terms of pathology: Cayce is
allergic to fashion (p. 8), suffering a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity
to the semiotics of the marketplace (p. 2). In light of the facts that Cayces
pathology is tied to a cultural formation largely peculiar to our current, post-
modern age, while concentration-deficit (such as that suffered by Laney) is
likewise an historically recent affliction often blamed on high-level media
consumption, Gibsons depiction of these characters might be called upon
in order to consider the relation between SFs predictive functions (or predic-
tion more generally) and what John Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A
Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995) would call the symbolic
overload (pp. 216 218) which defines contemporary experience.
21 The conceptions of history put forward in this passage bear some relation, of
course, to notions of history pursued in contemporary theories of historiogra-
phy. The idea that history is simply a matter of interpretation may serve as a
simplistic (to be sure) but not completely unfair shorthand for certain post-
modern philosophies of history and historiography. By the same token (and
assuming that All Tomorrows Parties could be read as presenting an alternative
theory of history), those same postmodern philosophies would probably insist
on exposing, historicising and problematising both the spatial metaphor and
the frankly modernist image of totality which permeates the narrators
account of Laneys discovery. It is perhaps also a little interesting, if not
ironic, to see that Gibsons depiction of history-as-shape reproduces (or antici-
pates) a spatial image of history which corresponds with that used by the com-
mercial Centre for Future Studies:

688
 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

The Centre for Future Studies explores the geography of time. We scan
the horizon to identify the contours of change and their likely conse-
quences, five to fifty years ahead. We aim to give our clients a strategic
advantage by mapping the critical pathways to the future. (http://www.
futurestudies.co.uk [accessed October 23, 2012])

22 Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana and Chicago: University

of Illinois Press, 1979). Scholes sought to contrast metafictions potentially
alienating narcissistic self-scrutiny against the rebirth of a cosmic imagin-
ation in the popular narratives of SF (p. 210). However, a spiritual or aes-
thetic connection between those forms has been subsequently affirmed by
other critics who share Scholess concerns with what he calls Ye Olde Literarye
Historye (p. 210) and its idealist assumptions about aesthetic autonomy.
Larry McCaffery, Across the Wounded Galaxies (Urbana and Chicago: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1990) pursues the link between SF and metafiction in his
interview of Joanna Russ, albeit for McCaffery the self-conscious, metafic-
tional potential of SF (of any genre)

is likely to emerge only at a certain point in [the] genres develop-

ment namely, after enough traditions and conventions have
been established so the author can take certain readerly expectations
for granted in order to undermine these expectations, to play with
them. (p. 182).
In a similar but inverted fashion, Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) diagnoses fantasy
both as a mode of storytelling characterized by stylistic playfulness
[and] self-reflexiveness and as a formula for generating popular escapist
literature that combines stock characters and devices wizards,
dragons, magic swords and the like into a predictable plot (p. 1).
Attebery inverts McCafferys argument by implying that the fantastic
mode is reduced to convention and formula (as distinct from reacting
against convention and tradition) by the forces of commerce and the
desire for success (p. 9), and in doing so negates Scholess affirmation
of popular SF narrative as a cure for the excesses of metafiction. All
three writers differ in how they posit the relations between SF and
metafiction, in other words, but each affirms in his own way a spiritual
affinity between the two forms.
23 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(London: Methuen, 1984), p. 5; see also Gerald Prince, Metanarrative Signs
in Mark Currie (ed.), Metafiction (London and New York: Longma, 1995),
pp. 55 68.
24 Fredric Jameson, Progress vs Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future? Science
Fiction Studies, 9 (1982), pp. 147 158.

689
Textual Practice

25 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 152.

26 Ibid., p. 149.
27 Ibid., p. 153.
28 Ibid.
29 Even so, it would be wrong to read Jamesons reversal of the common-sense
position on the anticipatory nature of SF (p. 150) as confirming Le Guins
account of SF as allegory, for the formers argument does not at all hinge
on the question of whether SF is about either the present or the future. In
fact, the multiple mock futures of SF narratives are for Jameson neither con-
fidently predictive nor modestly allegorical; on the contrary, those visions of
the future recast our own present into the determinate past of something
yet to come, offering us the present moment not as it actually is, but
rather in the form of some future worlds remote past (p. 152). Thus
where opinion on SFs relation to the social history seems clearly divided
between the opposing functions of description and prediction, Jameson
finds SF serving the distinctly alternative function of transformation.
30 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 153.
31 Ibid., p. 156.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Bruce Sterling, Preface in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk
Anthology (London: HarperCollins, 1986), pp. vii xiii, viii.
35 Cited in Shippey, Semiotic Ghosts and Ghostliness, p. 219.
36 Hence Pattern Recognitions ready reception as SF. If that novel appears less
science-fictional on account of its present-day setting, its undoubtedly
the case that the novels style enables the narrative to be read, regardless of
its themes or content, in the context of cyberpunk and SF more generally.
Gibsons novel, in other words, reads like a Gibson novel, which, given
Gibsons status as our most influential SF artist, is perhaps enough to
ensure that it is received (by some readers at least) as a work of SF.
37 Sterling, Preface, p. xii.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., p. ix.
40 As noted in the SFS 100th issue Editorial Introduction, for instance, a second
phase of SF studies began with a trend towards treating SF more as a mode of
apprehension than as a collection of texts defined by the rules of a genre
(p. 386). To that extent, reflection on the question of prediction, qua contested
characteristic of SF, cannot limit itself to analyses of SFs relations to the future
or to the present, but inevitably extends as part of speculative engagement
with cultural discourses of futurity to the question of the future more
broadly. This is why it sometimes seems appropriate or productive in this dis-
cussion to cite non-fictional uses of prediction in the form of future studies
and, most significantly, the predictions made within SF studies itself with
regard to the future of SF.
41 Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, p. 8.

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 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

42 In doing so, Jameson rather surprisingly, if only on occasion, ignores the role
that the material processes of commercial publishing may play in shaping the
form of particular novels. For instance, Jameson argues that the merit of SF is
to dramatize on the level of plot itself the contradiction between the generic
demand for a future history without closure and the narrative demand for
completion, even if that ending is ingeniously organized around the structural
repression of endings as such (p. 148). Thus, he writes, Asimov has consist-
ently refused to complete or terminate his Foundation series (p. 148). And so
on Jamesons account and against his usual attention to the material
dynamics of culture the non-completion of Asimovs SF series is attributable
to the authors aesthetic insight rather than to the commercial logic of serial-
isation and its concomitant economies of labour, marketing and demand.
43 Sterling, Preface, p. xi.
44 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 156.
45 Sterling, Preface, pp. x xi.
46 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 153.
47 Sterling, Preface, p. x.
48 Sterling, Cyberpunk in the Nineties, n.p.
49 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 148.
50 Pattern Recognition throws this point into further relief in an exchange between
Cayce and Hubertus Bigend, a media strategist who contracts Cayce from time
to time for her predictive talents. How do you think we look . . . to the
future?, he asks Cayce, to which he himself responds:

Of course . . . we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants

of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the
sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully
imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in
which now was of some greater duration. For us, of course,
things can change so abruptly, so violently, that futures like our
grandparents have insufficient now to stand on. We have no
future because our present is too volatile . . .. We have only risk man-
agement. The spinning of a given moments scenarios. Pattern recog-
nition. (p. 57)

51 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 153.

52 Gibson has repeated this dictum (or variations on it) many times in his work.
While the statement is often sourced to Neuromancer (London: Grafton,
1986), it does not actually appear in that novel. Its first appearance in
Gibsons published works is towards the end of Burning Chrome (in
William Gibson, Burning Chrome [London: HarperCollins, 1993], pp. 14
36, 215). A variation on the maxim the street tries to find its own uses
for things subsequently appears in Count Zero (London: Grafton, 1987),
p. 102. Gibson reuses the original phrase in a non-fiction article on technol-
ogy (Rocket Radio http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/gibson_

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rocketradio.shtml, first published in Rolling Stone [accessed June 15, 1989])

and, in another non-fiction piece on his eBay addiction, Gibson iterates
the phrase when he writes that things have a way of finding their own uses
for the street (My Obsession Wired 7.01, n.p. http://www.wired.com/
wired/archive/7.01/ebay_pr.html [accessed January 1999]).
53 Scholes argues that metafiction assimilates all the perspectives of criticism into
the fictional process itself (Fabulation and Metafiction, p. 114). Insofar as
different critical perspectives may come into conflict, and to the extent that
the scene of that conflict is, in the case of metafiction, recognisably literary,
metafictions assimilation of criticism necessarily proceeds by way of what
Ihab Hassan would call a paracritical questioning of the frontiers of criticism.
54 Waugh, Metafiction, p. 2.
55 Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, p. 4.
56 Waugh, Metafiction, p. 40.
57 Farnell points out Virtual Lights reliance on conservative narrative modes
and the socio-political proximity of the novels diegetic world to our social,
political, economic and cultural present, factors which he suggests (citing
Claire Sponsler) curtail the novels radical potential (Posthuman topologies,
p. 462). In the same paragraph, he underscores (following Jameson) the novels
style of dirty realism, whose suffocating overabundance of aesthetic detail,
he argues, subsumes the novels possibilities of political, social and posthu-
manist critique (p. 463).
58 This is, of course, not an insignificant qualification. Indeed, it is not the least
bit controversial nowadays to take as given the fundamentally hybrid nature of
any and every cultural text. Derridas argument in Law of Genre is probably
still the most cogent account of hybridity as cultural condition, and this is true
not least of all for the way that it specifies such hybridity not as an internal
feature of texts but rather as an effect of the fact that genre designations
(the markers of genre) cannot be simply part of the corpus (The Law of
Genre in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature [New York and London:
Routledge, 1992], pp. 221 252, p. 230). Hybridity thus emerges from the
fundamental incompleteness of texts, which necessitates a texts (contingent,
qualified) closure or completion in the event of a (particular, determinate)
remarking (i.e. reading) of that text. Needless to say, it is by virtue of this neces-
sity that SF texts may be read as meta-fictional or, indeed, may be read as
SF even if the kind of interpretive techniques that may enable such a
reading can be shown as emerging only recently and on the basis of a specific
history. By the same token, that same necessity is what enables SF texts to be
read in terms of the conventions of genres other than SF or meta-fiction (see
Robert Briggs, Dont fence me in: reading beyond genre Senses of Cinema, 27
(July 2003), n.p. www.sensesofcinema.com [accessed October 23, 2012]). My
attempt to read Gibsons narratives as meta-science-fictional is thus an attempt
not so much to fix those works within the bounds of a specific genre as to
re-affirm a specificity to those narratives against prevailing accounts of SFs
potentially metafictional nature.

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 Robert Briggs The future of prediction

59 More transparently than much other SF, this book [LeGuins Lathe of Heaven]
is about its own processes of production. Jameson, Progress vs Utopia,
p. 157.
60 Jameson, Progress vs Utopia, p. 153.
61 Im thinking here of Adornos account of the culture industry and its puta-
tively deleterious effects on the consumers of popular culture, in The
Culture Industry Revisited in Robert Ashley (ed.), The Study of Popular
Fiction: A Source Book (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1989), pp. 52 59. Of course, the outrageousness of Torrances description
also serves to question the sincerity of that kind of criticism, such as
Adornos, which refuses to distinguish between the potential aesthetic value
of popular cultural forms and the intellectual and political competencies of
those who avail themselves of such cultural forms.
62 For readings of the Bridge sequence in terms of the production of new poten-
tialities and the emergence of new forms of existence, see Murphys discussion
of Gibsons glorification of possibility (Murphy, Post/humanity and the
interstitial) and Leavers argument that the trilogy facilitates a range of post-
human possibilities and outcomes which only become good or bad
depending on the specific circumstances of their deployment (Leaver, The
Infinite Plasticity of the Digital, n.p.). See also Frederik Pohls modest pro-
posal for the study of SF, where he identifies (among other things) some of the
ways in which SFs images of the future have led not just to developments in
scientific research, but also to real-world events, including an attempt to insti-
tute a new form of domestic arrangement (line marriage) first depicted in
Robert A. Heinleins The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Orb, 1966).
Frederik Pohl, The study of science fiction: a modest proposal Science
Fiction Studies, 24 (1997), pp. 11 16, p. 15.

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