Neuromancer-Part Six

The Novel & the Romance

In April 1926, Hugo Gernsback opened his new science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, with an essay--a manifesto--entitled "A New Sort of Magazine." He wrote:

It is entirely new--entirely different--something that has never been done before in this country.

And:

a magazine of "Scientifiction" is a pioneer in its field in America.

And:

By "scientifiction" I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story--a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. [Boldface added.]

And this:

It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. Two hundred years ago, stories of this kind were not possible. Science, through its various branches of mechanics, electricity, astronomy, etc., enters so intimately into all our lives today, and we are so much immersed in this science, that we have become rather prone to take new inventions and discoveries for granted. Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations--impossible 100 years ago--are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.

Science fiction, then, was an innovation in 1926, a type of literature that would not have been possible one hundred years before. (1) That wasn't just hype on Gernsback's part. I think we have to accept it as fact.

Science fiction in 1926 was a fusion of romance and science, as well as a kind of fiction focused on the future instead of the past. That, too, was an innovation.

Even though science fiction is a fusion of romance and science, it would seem to have introduced discontinuity into the pulp genres and into literature as a whole, for all other genres originated in the pre-science past, whereas science fiction breaks from the past. All other genres are continuous with each other. As a genre, science fiction--pure science fiction--stands alone. Another innovation.

There has been a very long discussion regarding the differences between the novel and the romance in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne made the distinction. Edgar Allan Poe may have made it before him. American literary scholar Joel Porte (1933-2006) wrote on the subject in The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James, published in 1969. I don't have that book available to me, but Charles N. Watson, Jr., of Syracuse University wrote a review of it. Entitled "The American Romance and Its Critics," his review appeared in Poe Studies in December 1971 and is available online at the following URL:

https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1971218.htm

Please note that Watson repeatedly referred to authors in his essay as "romancers," just as Hugo Gernsback called nascent science fiction authors "new romancers."

The upshot is that, in America at least, the romance is a separate genre than is the more realistic novel. In other words, there are two types of stories or books, the romance and the novel. The novel is realistic and is bound to the world as it is. The romance is not tightly bound to the world; its landscape is that of the human heart. Even the words tell us about these two forms, for romance refers to the historic (and pre-science) past, while the root of novel is "new." The word Gothic of course also refers to the past, and there is a clear connection between Gothic and romantic or Romantic. Sometimes, in fact, they are joined and the Gothic romance emerges.

If this distinction holds, then Gothic novel, romance novel, and romantic or Romantic novel would seem self-contradictions. So would romantic or Romantic science fiction and Gothic science fiction. And yet we have the scientific romances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) We also have Neuromancer, a possibly new kind of romance written by a new romancer, William Gibson (1984). Hugo Gernsback predicted Mr. Gibson in his manifesto of 1926. Or maybe William Gibson self-consciously applied Gernsback's term to his own new romance of nearly sixty years later. 

British and French authors of the nineteenth century typically wrote novels. The most well-known and well-liked American authors of that same century more often wrote romances. Here is William Dean Howells, an American realist, on one difference, at least in American literature:

  Yet every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story; "no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.

If there are parallels in the pulp genres or in genre fiction, then the older genres, or genres that are oriented towards the past (as well as on descent or decay)--weird fiction, horror, adventure, historical romance--can be seen as romances, whereas science fiction, being bound to science and the real, material world, takes as its proper form that of the novel. These aren't perfect parallels, of course, and we should never let ourselves be hidebound by our scholarly ideas, categories, or theories. In any case, certain other genres are or may be realistic--Westerns, detective stories, war stories, railroad stories, sports stories--but these genres were probably more often romanticized in the pulps rather than allowed to remain in a purely realistic mode. For example, Hungry Men by Edward Anderson (1935) is a very realistic novel about hobos riding the rails and looking for work in Depression-era America. It could have been in a pulp magazine such as a railroad story magazine (I don't think that it was) except that it was probably too realistic for that kind of publication. The lives of the men in the story are in no way romanticized. They are in fact somewhat grim. (Grimness can be romanticized, too, and often is.) (3) To use examples from the cinema: with its weird atmosphere and apparently supernatural manifestations, High Plains Drifter (1973) is clearly a romance or a Gothic story in the American mode. In contrast, another of Clint Eastwood's Westerns, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which is really astonishing in recapturing the feel of the historical past (in our nation's bicentennial year no less), is far more realistic. I'm sure you can come up with your own examples.

One point of all of this is that new romance, more particularly Gothic science fiction, would seem contradictions in terms. How can these two seeming opposites be forced together? In his story "The Gernsback Continuum" (1981), author William Gibson used a like expression "raygun Gothic." Does that work? Can there really be a Gothic science fiction? Not only can there be, I guess, but there really is such a thing, or at least people have tried it.

A final point for today: if there was going to be a science fiction magazine with stories written by "new romancers," could it have happened anywhere else but in America? I'm not sure that it could have, and I wonder why Hugo Gernsback, born in Luxembourg, emphasized that his magazine was new for "this country," the United States. Could there have been a previous magazine of science fiction or new romances published in Europe or elsewhere? Could he have been familiar with and referring to the German magazine Der Orchideengarten, first published in--when else--1919?

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) One hundred years before--in 1826--John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, men of the eighteenth century and among the last of the revolutionary generation, reached their ends.

(2) I have just learned about a book called The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance by British author Christopher Priest (1943-2024). It was published in 1976, or Year Zero in the punk music calendar. The Space Machine is set in Victorian England and is of a piece with the science fiction novels or scientific romances of H.G. Wells. Christopher Priest's first science fiction story was published in 1966, that essential pop-cultural year. He was influenced in his work by J.G. Ballard. On April 23, 2026, Bloomsbury Continuum published his study of Ballard's work, The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, a posthumous collaboration with his wife, Nina Allan. Note the word in the publisher's name: continuum.

(3) Edward Anderson (1905-1969) also wrote Thieves Like Us (1937), which was made into a movie in 1974. His title is the source of the song title "Thieves Like Us" by New Order. This is how circles are made. I have been writing about New Order and Joy Division. I'm planning to write more.

By the way, Edward Anderson had five stories in pulp magazines during the 1930s. Thieves Like Us appeared in its entirety in the pulp magazine Speed Mystery in December 1945. That title mixes the Italian Futurists' speed with the romance of mystery. (Notice how once a word is set in italics it seems to move forward and with greater speed.) Maybe American stories of cars and the road are also made by new romancers. Maybe they belong next to science fiction as realistic romances. Astoundingly enough, Edward Anderson also had three letters in Astounding Stories in 1931-1932. When his first was published, he shared a letters page with Gertrude Hemken (1912-1992) of Weird Tales fame.

A final by-the-way: when I read Thieves Like Us, I found out that the word Hoosier can be used as an insult, as in "Those guys are a bunch of Hoosiers," meaning "a bunch of amateurs." Today we would say "losers." Then, when I worked in Missouri, I heard people use Hoosier in the same sense. I felt like my cultural heritage was being insulted. Do I have to remind everybody that Steve McQueen, Bill Blass, Robert Wise, Twila Tharp, Edith Hamilton, Connie Booth, and Scatman Crothers were or are all from Indiana? There are more where they came from--literally. You know what else was from Indiana? Weird Tales.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Five

Manifestos

Manifestos are the work of intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals), artists, and theorists, at the very least of people who see themselves at the leading edge of forward-evolution, progress, and new, fast-moving or fast-arriving developments. Manifestos precede action. Very often the action never arrives, but at least there is the manifesto.

One of the most famous--or infamous--of manifestos is Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, issued in 1848, or one hundred years before George Orwell wrote his dissection of socialism and the socialist's unceasing quest for ultimate power. (In Edgar Allan Poe's story, M. Valdemar's nom de plume is Issachar Marx. Ironically, given the context, one meaning of Issachar is "hired man.") Communism, or scientific socialism, is supposed to be about the future and the "force" of History. It is actually more nearly about the past. Marx's manifesto begins with a demonstrably false proposition regarding human society and historical events. What Marx proposed was actually a new-old class structure, with him on top and everybody else below him--preferably with his boot stamping on their faces forever.

Charles Fort wrote a kind of manifesto in the opening paragraphs of The Book of the Damned (1919). Like the Manifesto of Futurism, it reads as the work of a visionary, either that or a man gripped by fever. Alternatively, it's the work of a crazy person, or as H.G. Wells described Fort's writing, like that of a drunkard. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting by Umberto Boccioni (1910) declares: "That the name of 'madman' with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honor." It also stated: "Nothing is immoral in our eyes," a statement anticipating the moral relativism of the twentieth century. And, like Fort, it argued in favor of continuity among all things, or in a lack of barriers between one thing and another.

Otis Adelbert Kline wrote "Why Weird Tales?" as a kind of manifesto. It came at the first ending of "The Unique Magazine," in the first and only quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. In The New Weird (2008), editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (not Valdemar) introduced their work with a kind of manifesto. Theirs takes the form, more or less, of a corporate mission statement and is just as obscure. It uses words, but together they have little or no meaning. At least there is poetry in Martinetti's manifesto. By the way, both his surname and Marx's are from the god of war. Five years after Martinetti wrote, in the year that the Great War began, Gustav Holst wrote "Mars, the Bringer of War." A theme from "Mars" is almost repeated in the attack on the Death Star by speedy X-Wing fighters in Star Wars, which was released in 1977, or Year One of the new punk calendar. I will add that The New Weird was published by Tachyon Publications. Tachyons are for speed. And I guess I might as well add that Star Wars was retitled A New Hope. There must always be new things.

I don't know whether there was ever a New Wave manifesto. If there was, Michael Moorcock would seem its logical author. (Like William Gibson in "The Gernsback Continuum" [1981], Michael Moorcock made a connection between fascism and science fiction of the Golden Age in his essay "Starship Stormtroopers," from 1977, or, again, Year One.) I also don't know whether there was ever a punk manifesto, at least at its beginnings. There were, however, post-action punk manifestos. ("Why Weird Tales?" was a kind of post-action manifesto, too.) Again, a proper manifesto comes before the action and as a guide to action. It has to be thought out. It should be the work of a writer, a poet, or an articulate thinker. Punk rock rises to the anger necessary for a proper manifesto, but it seems to me inarticulate. It seems to me that it wasn't and isn't an intellectual or artistic movement. But there are punk songs and punk lyrics that might be interpreted as like a manifesto, for example "Anarchy in the U.K." (1976) or "God Save the Queen" (1977), which closes with these words:

No future
No future
No future for you
No future
No future
No future for me
No future
No future
No future for you
No future
No future for you

Instead of the Soup Nazi, the singer sounds like the Future Nazi: "No future for you!" he cries. His lyrics could almost be sung to "Mars, Bringer of War" by Holst. In any case, they are not the lyrics of science fiction, for they turn from the future and deny the future. They are not hopeful but despairing. They are apocalyptic, as in an irrational and violent disaster-fantasy, a Romantic or Gothic work taken to the extreme, or the climax of an epic weird tale.

That leaves cyberpunk. So was there a pre-action cyberpunk manifesto? According to American science fiction author Bruce Sterling (b. 1954) in an online essay entitled "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (originally in Interzone #48, June 1991):

"The New Science Fiction" [in Interzone #14, Winter 1985/1986] was the first manifesto of "the cyberpunk movement." The article was an analysis of the SF genre's history and principles; the word "cyberpunk" did not appear in it at all.

Note the emphasis again on newness.

The author of  of "The New Science Fiction" was also Bruce Sterling, writing under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas. His "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" is also something of a manifesto, but it was a post-action manifesto. Like the manifesto of the Italian Futurists, it predicted the artistic decline, demise, or replacement of its own members: "The Nineties will belong to the coming generation, those who grew up in the Eighties." In other words, I guess, Generation X, those who would go on to create the so-called "New Weird."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Four

The New Romancers

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

--from Manifesto of Futurism by F.T. Marinetti (1909)

It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. [. . .] Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations--impossible 100 years ago--are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.

--from "A New Sort of Magazine" by Hugo Gernsback

in Amazing Stories #1 (Apr. 1926)

Science fiction: the work of the new romancers!

And could there be this equation as a result:

New romancer ≈ Neuromancer

Is that where William Gibson got the title for his seminal cyberpunk novel first published in 1984?

The operative word in science fiction is science. It would seem in opposition to romance, and yet science fiction began as a kind of romance. Long before the term scientific romance was applied to stories of this type, what we can call proto-science fiction was the work of artists with a romantic (and conservative) cast. Hugo Gernsback wrote:

Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of "scientifiction." It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread. [Boldface added.]

Gernsback included "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Although Poe's story is proto-science-fictional, it is more nearly a weird tale or horror story. Today we might split genres even more finely and call it a tale of body horror. (The narrator's description of Valdemar's bodily plight reads like the details of a post-mortem medical examination.) But then it was written before there were pulp genres, and so it slides easily from one genre to another along a continuum. In other words, it crosses the boundaries that were constructed only after the twentieth century began, just as the mesmerized Valdemar crosses boundaries between life and death.

Speaking of genres and sub-genres, cyberpunk is supposed to have been a successor to the British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s. The leading New Wave magazine was of course New Worlds, the plural of the new world identified by Hugo Gernsback in his manifesto in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Note the roots of later magazine titles, too: Wonder and Fantastic. Also note that the mathematical symbol that lies between the two expressions shown above, and that signifies their relationship, looks like waves on the ocean. New waves would seem to have thrown cyberpunk upon the shores of science fiction like Odysseus washed up in Scheria, from which seagoing ships of unsurpassed speed sail forth. The Italian Futurists sought speed--the speed of the automobile, "a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot." In science fiction, there is the speed of super-light-speed tachyons, of rocketships driven by anti-acceleration, the warp speed of starships, and the instantaneous speed of psychic communications, jaunting, subspace radio, and the real-world force of gravitation, which bends light and allows travel through time by way of the trusty slingshot effect. The inhabitants of Scheria are the Phaeacians. Like Slans and the other superior men of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, they possess psychic powers--or else their ships do, for their ships understand what they are thinking and know where they want to go. Are they alive? Or is some strange and mysterious science or technology at work here? How have the Phaeacians built machines of such wonder that they can read their minds and respond to their wishes? The Phaeacians must surely be among the first science-fictional people in our literature. Their science is so fantastic that it would seem indistinguishable from magic.

The Italian Futurists issued their manifesto in 1909, at the outset of a century of speed and violence and aggression. Their emphasis was on newness, youth, and the destruction of the past and of all old things. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback offered his own much gentler manifesto in the introductory pages of Amazing Stories. He emphasized newness, too, even if he turned to the works of the past to fill his pages. But there was speed in his magazine as well, exemplified in H.G. Wells' story "The New Accelerator," from 1901. That inaugural issue closes, however, with "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a Gothic tale of death and decay, one told in extremis. It is slow rather than fast, decadent rather than ascendant, focused on ultimate limits and the failings of life and the human body rather than on limitless futures. Unlike the Phaeacians and their ships, the "science" of mesmerism, in operation between two minds and two wills in Poe's tale, is unequal to the task. The whole thing breaks down, ending with a quite literal breakdown in the subject's body. There is no superior man, nor any superior science here. There is only the descent of the weird-fictional character into the most gruesome of endings. Ironically, Valdemar's name is a compound of "power" and "fame."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Three

Gernsbackian Innovation & Gothic Reaction

I have been working with the idea that what I call genrification began at around the time of the Great War, definitely by 1919 when some of the first specialty pulp titles were published. Some other events of that seminal year included the Eddington experiment, which set the stage for moral relativism as the central concept of twentieth-century politics and belief systems, and the arrival of J.C. Henneberger (1890-1969), future co-founder of Weird Tales magazine, in Indianapolis, that magazine's first home.

The first science fiction magazine was Amazing Stories, and it was first published a century ago, in April 1926. The editor and publisher was Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967). I don't think Gernsback was a trained scientist and perhaps not even a trained engineer. He seems to have been "self-taught," a descriptor applied to old-time weird fiction authors by a more recent member and theorist of the so-called "New Weird." (The implication is that writing is better left to academically trained authors.) Gernsback used his own word, Scientifiction, as a label for the kind of fiction that he published. The term science fiction wasn't used in print until 1929.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have lasted from 1938 to 1950 or so. That age began when John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) assumed the editorship of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell and Astounding were known for their so-called hard science fiction. (Say what you will, psychic powers are not science fiction, let alone any hard science fiction.) Gernsback and Amazing were forerunners of Campbell and Astounding, but science fiction wasn't fully formed in the 1920s and probably not in the early 1930s, either.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then the British (or Anglo-American) New Wave of the 1960s may have been the first sub-genre of science fiction to come along after the Golden Age. There have since been other sub-genres, including cyberpunk, which is supposed to have grown out of or succeeded New Wave science fiction. The roots (or, to use a mechanistic metaphor, wiring) of cyberpunk can be traced to New Wave. William Gibson (b. 1948) and his novel Neuromancer (1984) are exemplars of cyberpunk. Coincidentally, Mr. Gibson was born in the year in which George Orwell completed 1984 and published his novel in the year in which 1984 is set.

Previous to Neuromancer, Mr. Gibson had a short story, "The Gernsback Continuum" in Universe 11 (1981). It was later reprinted in other magazines and books. "The Gernsback Continuum" is an essential story, at least for my purposes. It's a fascinating meta-science-fictional work, a science fiction story that is fully aware of the history, imagery, and culture of science fiction. The "Gernsback" part of the title refers to the editor of Amazing Stories and--in part--an association that the first-person narrator of the story makes between Gernsbackian science fiction and the historical imagery of Nazis and fascism. He in fact has visions of what are called "semiotic ghosts" caused by his knowledge and acute awareness of American popular culture, art, and design of the past.* The "Continuum" part of the title refers, I assume, to an unbroken link made within the story between fiction and fact, or between the science fiction of the past and the in-story real world of the present. During these past several weeks, I have been using the concepts of continuity and continuums in a different sense, but these are close enough for my purposes.

There's another phrase used in "The Gernsback Continuum." This one is "raygun Gothic." I don't associate the bright, new, shiny, perfect, futuristic or forward-looking imagery of Gernsbackian science fiction with anything at all Gothic. "Raygun Gothic" would appear a non sequitur, an oxymoron, or a self-contradictory phrase. Science fiction and Gothics (my pretty new word) don't seem to go together. The rayguns and rocketships of the science fiction novel would appear anachronisms among the rattling chains and ruined castles of the Gothic romance. And yet here they are together in a single phrase. Now recall that one of its reviewers called Neuromancer "decadent," a descriptor that we would think of as exactly opposite of science fiction. Gernsbackian and Campbellian science fiction are ascendant in our imaginations and not at all decadent. It is in weird fiction, supernatural horror, and related genres or sub-genres that we encounter decadence. If there is decadence--if there is an emphasis on the past--if there are Gothic or Romantic elements in a science fiction story, they would seem out of place in that ascendent genre. So is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction possible?

To be continued . . .

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*Maybe semiotics was in the air: Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, which includes a lot on semiotics, was published in 1983.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Two

Golden Ages & Afterwards

In one way or another, that question--Is science fiction dying?--has come up again and again in the past sixty-six years. The fact that it's still being asked makes the whole thing kind of ridiculous. After all, what else is there that takes sixty-six years--and counting--to die? Science fiction is obviously not dying. It's obviously not in trouble. People keep reading and writing it. I'm sure all of that will go on until there are no more readers in the world, a development that will probably come along at around the same time that the last of the pre-Internet, pre-smartphone generations die out. Science and technology--science-fictional developments manifested in the real world--may finally kill off science fiction.

Science fiction in the classic sense is future-oriented and ascendant. In contrast, weird fiction tends to be decadent and looks to--or obsesses over--the past. The weird-fictional protagonist is bound by the past. His science-fictional counterpart is unbound. There are no limits for him. He may achieve godlike powers. He may jaunt among the stars.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then did it afterwards decay, like uranium into lead? In the 1960s there was New Wave science fiction and by the 1980s cyberpunk. There were still hard science fiction and adventure science fiction, but I have the impression that those sub-genres were seen as old-fashioned and possibly looked down upon by the cool people in science fiction. The place to be as a science fiction writer--the leading edge of the whole project--was in a different kind of writing in which elements of weird fiction, horror, Gothics (my new word), and so on were injected into science fiction. I don't say that to state a fact, only to hypothesize or to apply an interpretation.

I have been using examples from the work of J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). We read his stories for our weird fiction/science fiction book club in April of this year (2026). Ballard is supposed to have been an author of the British New Wave. He is in fact considered a science fiction author. But stories such as the Poesque "Now: Zero" (Science Fantasy, Dec. 1959), the romantic/mythological fantasy "The Garden of Time" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Feb. 1962), and the Kafkaesque  story "The Concentration City" (New Worlds Science Fiction, Jan. 1957) are as much--or more--weird-fictional than they are science-fictional. In particular, "The Concentration City" reminds me not only of stories by Franz Kafka (the protagonist is named Franz--ironically "free")* but also of 1984 by George Orwell (1949) and the short story "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942), less so "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941), both by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

One of the primary differences between science fiction and weird fiction is that the science-fictional hero is or becomes powerful and triumphant--very often he is nearly perfect--whereas the weird-fictional protagonist is weak, flawed, cursed, insane, or otherwise mortal and human. You can hardly call him a hero. While you might identify with or aspire to be the science-fictional hero, you should be careful about his weird-fictional counterpart, for he often fails and is usually humiliated and defeated. Sometimes he even perishes.

I can think of two obvious examples of American science fiction authors who introduced New Wave or weird-fictional elements into their stories. They are Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) and Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024). I regret not having observed the passing of Barry Malzberg in 2024, but I didn't know until this year that he had died. By the way, he wrote a book called The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties. Unfortunately, it was published in 1982, before Neuromancer by William Gibson came along in that most appropriate of years, 1984.

To be continued . . .

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*Update (June 11, 2026): I have been watching videos from the 1980s this evening and have learned that there was a post-punk band called Josef K, named of course for the protagonist of Kafka's novel The Trial (1925). I have never read The Trial, but the movie version from 1962 has its Gothic and surrealistic elements. The publication of The Trial was arranged by Kafka's literary agent and friend Max Brod (1884-1968), who had a story, "Death Is a Temporary Indisposition," in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales. Ian Curtis of Joy Division was inspired to write "Colony" by reading Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony." For those who would like to read only about Weird Tales, its authors, and its stories, well, good luck trying to separate these things from all of culture.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part One

Introduction

Beginning with my blog entry of April 6, 2026, I have brought back some writing that has been until now only in draft form. That writing was from 2017, and it involved all kinds of things, as you have seen. I have written mostly about the so-called "New Weird," but I have also brought in, among other things, Charles Fort, the subject of continuity and what I call the genrification of fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, H.P. Lovecraft, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, digital British temptress Amelia, and British music of the 1970s and '80s. I have also brought in William Gibson and his 1984 science fiction novel--or Gothic romance--Neuromancer.

Many years ago, I had planned to write a series on Neuromancer. I thought I might have had an original idea about it and its place in the history of science fiction. We should always remember, though, that there aren't that many original ideas left in the world. Mostly what we do is rehash what others have done before us, even if we don't know about them and their work. But in the interest of further cleaning up my draft essays from the past, I give you the first few paragraphs of part one of this series on Neuromancer, originally from 2015. The rest of today's entry, plus the remaining parts of this series, will be original material from 2026, even if it and they are based on ideas from the past.

* * *

A few months ago [on October 23, 2014], in an article called "Fantasy Killed the SF Star," I posed a question: Just what happened between 1979 and Gary Numan's "Cars," and 1996, when The Prodigy issued their song "Breathe"? One video is futuristic and science-fiction-like. The other is horrifying and filled with images of decay. Now I have an answer to that question.

Neuromancer happened.

That's kind of a flippant answer, but it bears some consideration. Neuromancer by William Gibson was published in 1984 [a fitting year for what amounts to a vision of dystopia]. Critics love the book, and it has proved extraordinarily popular. The New York Times called it "freshly imagined, compellingly detailed and chilling." The Chicago Sun-Times was less restrained: "Unforgettable," the reviewer wrote. "The richness of Gibson's work is incredible!" Other reviewers used the same kind of language, describing it "remarkably well-visualized," "rich, detailed, and vivid," "exceptional texture and vision," "fully realized," and so on. Then comes that word from the Washington Post: "kaleidoscopic, picaresque, flashy, and decadent." 

Emphasis added.

So: decadent science fiction? Is such a thing possible?

[And now my draft ends and new writing begins.]

My reason for asking that question is that we think of science fiction as being clean and pure, strong and lively, always forward-looking and future-oriented, always reaching towards and exceeding limits. Science fiction, then, is ascendant. If there are genres of descent or decadence, then surely weird fiction must be among them, for weird fiction is about the past and about limits imposed by God, law, doom, fate, and weird, also by family, culture, curse, guilt, custom, and tradition. In weird fiction, we are bound by the past and, like Jay Gatsby and friends, ceaselessly borne back into it, carried by this great flowing river without banks to our ocean of origin. In contrast, we look to the future with great hope and positivity. We believe that science and technology will solve all of our problems and make everything better. In the future we will be free and happy and unbound. Life will be good. Science fiction gives us an unfailing instrument by which we can beat against the current, a piece of technology to carry us forever forward.*

Or at least that those were the promises of science fiction during its first several decades.

The so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have ended in about 1950, at the beginning of the decade in which, coincidentally or not, pulp magazines also came to an end. (The last pulp magazine is supposed to have been the Western title Ranch Romances, which rode off into the sunset like Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder at the end of Blazing Saddles, and in the same year, 1974.) In the late 1950s and certainly by the early 1960s, there came a feeling that science fiction was dying. In fact, in 1960, science fiction fan Earl Kemp published a fanzine called Who Killed Science Fiction? Just because somebody asked that question doesn't mean that science fiction had died, or was dying, or soon would die. But something had obviously changed by the time Kemp wrote. Maybe he was a canary in the coal mine of his favorite fiction.

If science fiction was dying or already dead by 1960, then a new development seems to have come along just in time to save it. On December 4, 2022, in this space, I wrote:

The term New Wave as applied to British science fiction of the early 1960s was apparently an invention. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it was first used by P. Schuyler Miller "in his regular book-review column 'The Reference Library'" in the November 1961 issue of Analog. Miller is supposed to have been inspired by the French filmmakers' New Wave [originally Nouvelle Vague], but there may also have been inspiration in the title of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. 

I have been writing these past few weeks about the New Wave and New Worlds. If it's true that the New Wave saved--or at least reinvigorated or renewed--science fiction, then its British authors would seem to have done for American science fiction what the singers and musicians of the British Invasion did for American popular music and rock-and-roll at around the same time. And then they--the singers and musicians--did it again with punk, New Wave, and so on in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And then Neuromancer hit.**

To be continued . . .

-----

*To the politically minded person, science is progress and progress is a science.

**Since beginning this series, I have learned about British New Wave cinema from the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. I don't know who named it or when, but New Wave is obviously a translation of the French Nouvelle Vague of the same period. According to Wikipedia, "There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the angry young men" of British theater, and, I would add, of fiction. And if there were angry young men and new waves in cinema and mainstream literature, why would they not have crossed over into science fiction? The title of one British New Wave film, Hell Is a City (1960) makes me think of the conclusion of a totally unrelated story, "The Concentration City" by J.G. Ballard, which was first published in New Worlds Science Fiction, the New Wave science fiction magazine, in January 1957. Hell Is a City is set in Manchester, and New Wave cinema is supposed to have drawn attention to ordinary working-class life in northern England. There are and were, of course, plenty of bands that originated in Manchester, including Joy Division, its successor New Order, and The Smiths. They have been part of my writing lately, too. I'll close with a disclaimer: I am not British and never have been. I don't have any natural or native feel for British culture and society. All I know is what I read and see and what I'm capable of thinking about. My understanding of these things is necessarily incomplete, if not inadequate. So, a note to all British readers: please feel free to comment on everything about which I have written in these several series and to make corrections, explanations, and clarifications. I welcome your input.

[After writing the note above, I thought of the song and video "Life in a Northern Town" by the Dream Academy, from 1985. The video was filmed in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, not very far north of Manchester. That was more than forty years ago. I wonder if that time and place and way of life are equally as lost as that of the London of "West End Girls."]

Original text copyright 2015, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Amelia Calling

In "Reactions & Reactionaries-Part Two," from May 3, 2026, I  wrote:

By the way, earlier this year a British video game character named Amelia escaped from her creators to become a tempter of young men away from the State that wants to prevail over them. (If the society created by the overarching and controlling state is Eden, then let there be no Eve.) In that way, Amelia plays the same role as Julia in 1984, LUH 3417 in THX 1138 (1971), and I-330 in We (1924). There have since become German, Dutch, and other versions of Amelia. I wish them all success, even if they have faded from the news.

I have done some more thinking since then. Call the following an example of the Wikipedia-zation of research. Take the phone off the hook. This is going to take awhile.

Once Amelia escaped from her creators in January of this year, images of her proliferated on the Internet. These included videos, illustrations, and memes. In at least one of these images, Amelia wears a Joy Division t-shirt. I have written before about Joy Division and related topics. You can read what I wrote in the following two entries:

"Joy Connection" (Sept. 1, 2024)

"Joy Connection Revisited" (Nov. 13, 2025)

These have proved to be among the most popular of my postings in the past few years, if the number of visits to a posting is a measure of its popularity. I'm not sure why they are popular, but I like that they are. It's good to stick your finger in the eye of powerful people, including the entirely too powerful people who promote the cult of global warming. Maybe some of you like that idea, too. There will be more of that here, beginning in mere seconds and mere sentences.

I wonder about the significance of Amelia in her Joy Division t-shirt. I'm not British and never have been, but if I had to guess about any significance, it would be that there is something very British--if not uniquely British--about that group. If that's the case, then it's fitting (no pun intended) that Amelia the digital British rebel would wear the t-shirt of a uniquely British band. Maybe the t-shirt thoroughly identifies her as a Briton.

Another Amelia meme shows her lighting her cigarette from a flaming picture of the current prime minister, Keir Starmer. This was after a real-life woman, also in January, lit hers from a photo of the late Iranian leader, who proceeded in February to go up in flames. (Instead of a voodoo doll, hers was a voodoo photo.) Whenever I hear the prime minister's name, I think of Starker from the TV show Get Smart. But Mr. Starmer is no shtarker. On the contrary, he always seems to have a scared look on his face. He should have, for he's in over his head, I think. (He's more like a hapless No. 2 in The Prisoner. I hope there are plenty of prisoners on his island who continue to get his goat.) If he were an American, Two-tier Kier would be a Baby Boomer. Maybe he is in his native land, too. Like H.G. Wells, he's a Fabian socialist. As we know, there are only two kinds of socialists, the evil kind and the stupid kind. I don't think he's evil.

When I wrote about Joy Division in 2024, I made note of the fact that people have associated the group with fascism. I'm sure those same kinds of people will say that Amelia is also fascistic and that she is being used by fascists for their fascistic purposes. As we know, too, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist--no argument, debate, or analysis required. Amelia's wearing of a Joy Division t-shirt would seem to confirm her fascism.

Joy Division's first chart hit was "Love Will Tear Us Apart," which was released in June 1980, after lead singer Ian Curtis had killed himself the month before. If I interpret a quotation I found on Wikipedia correctly, drummer Stephen Morris said that the band was inspired in the composition of their song not only by Frank Sinatra and the American group Sparks but also by the song "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" by Sarah Brightman of all things. The video for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was shot in a dark, decaying place. The video for "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" is bright and science-fictional. The reference in the title of the latter is of course to Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, from 1959. People who see fascists everywhere, even under their own beds, believe that Heinlein was a fascist and Starship Troopers a really fascisticky book. This must be further evidence that Joy Division were fascistic. (1)

Joy Division is considered a post-punk or punk-inspired band. I can't go into punk music here. I don't know enough about it and there isn't enough space. I have already taken up enough in today's entry and will take up a lot more, as you will see. (I could split it, but I would like for all of what I write to be together.) But to me, punk is part anger, and it seems to me that it is descended in part from the Angry Young Men of 1950s British literature. I could be wrong about that. Let me know if I am and how I might better interpret these things. (2)

Keir Starmer was born in 1962, or about the time that the decade of the Angry Young Men ended and that of the unrelated or not-closely-related or maybe-closely-related decade of British New Wave science fiction began. Mr. Starmer seems weak and hesitant to me. Nonetheless, he seems to share in the Angry-Young-Man desire to tear down traditional British society and culture, only in a somewhat slow Fabian way rather than in a fast-motion radical way. He may not be capable of that himself, but he can import people who are, and that's probably good enough for him and his fellow-travelers. If his country falls after he dies--Mr. Starmer is an atheist after all--what does he care? Anyway, what he and people like him fail to understand is the same thing that the Mensheviks failed to understand about the Bolsheviks, which is that less ruthless people will forever fall prey to their more ruthless counterparts. Put another way, once the revolution is accomplished, the man-of-words- or man-of-ideas-type revolutionary is always the first to be stood up against the wall. The ruthless man-of-action-type revolutionary always wins out. The radical always shoots the comparative moderate. In this example, the Green will prevail in the Europeans' perceived Red-Green Alliance, and I don't mean Green of the radical environmentalist type, even if the two Greens are now forming alliances. (3)

Tearing down and overthrowing tradition is of course part of the socialistic or progressive program. But there are those who don't really care about building anything new in its place. Their anger and desire to destroy are everything that they have. Maybe some of the early punk rockers were like that. Angry people can tear down or undermine things in a fierce and angry way. They can also do it in a funny and angry way. The point is that prominent people who were once angry and destructive, or angry and funny, or angry and musically creative have since become what powerful people call fascists if only because they want to preserve their country for their own countrymen and culture. John Cleese appears to be in that category. So does Morrissey. I'm sure there are others. (4) J.K. Rowling isn't in the (extremely) angry or (at all) destructive category, but she has been called a fascist, too.

You don't have to be famous to be labeled a fascist, though. All you have to be is a lover of your own country and culture. (5) All you have to want is not to be deprived of your rights; to have your reputation or livelihood ruined; or to be oppressed, silenced, impoverished, imprisoned, attacked, molested, raped, stabbed, or murdered by the State or its imported myrmidons. If you were anti-establishment in 1976, you might have stomped on, torn up, or defaced the Union Jack. If you are anti-establishment fifty years later, you wave it. That or St. George's flag.

Maybe what we need is for great numbers of Americans continuously and systematically to discomfit, oppose, and offend the British government on behalf of its own people, whom it has silenced and subjugated, and who risk imprisonment just for speaking their minds--or the truth. (6)

We ought to overthrow those who want to overthrow everything--here, in the British Isles, in the rest of the English-speaking world--for the real revolution of the twenty-first century is against the revolutionaries who have finally reached the highest levels of power after so much striving. They used to be on the other side of things, or imagine that they were. Maybe they romanticized themselves that way. Maybe they were once angry young men, filled with punk-era fury. Now they seem tired, but not too tired to oppress the common people who disagree with them. I have read that we live in a post-democratic era in which the people get to vote, and yet their votes mean nothing. Any change cannot be permitted if the governing elite are to retain their power, prestige, and status.

Maybe what we need is a new punk music, a new punk culture, a new punk society, more powerfully anti-establishment than it was fifty years ago. Amelia is calling.

One last thing: Joy Division and New Order have finally made it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, such as it is. Their induction has been announced in the month that I write, April 2026, the same month in which King Charles III has made his happy visit to our shores. Joy Division was formed fifty years ago, in June 1976, so Happy Anniversary, Joy Division!

Notes
(Including two notes that are essays in themselves.)

(1) According to music journalist Jon Savage, Ian Curtis was interested in "romantic and science-fiction literature." One of the songs on the Joy Division album Closer (1980) is called "The Atrocity Exhibition" after J.G. Ballard's experimental novel of the same name published ten years before. Five of its chapters were first in New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock. The title story "The Atrocity Exhibition" was originally in New Worlds in September 1966, so sixty years ago. Mr. Moorcock's essay in that issue was "Why So Conservative?" That's an intriguing title, given today's topic. Unfortunately, I can't read it in any source available to me.

Anyway, on the other side of things, record producer Martin Hannett described the Joy Division sound as "dancing music with Gothic overtones." And now I think: could there have been a Gothic/science-fictional convergence in Anglo-American culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Could New Wave-type science fiction, with its Gothic, Romantic, or weird-fictional tone, themes, imagery, protagonists, and so on have been a forerunner to such a convergence? If there was such a convergence, it seems to have happened not only in literature but also in music. Whatever might have happened, a new sub-genre of science fiction emerged at that time. Named after a short story by Bruce Bethke (1983), exemplified by a novel by William Gibson (1984), and popularized by Gardner Dozois, it is of course cyberpunk, and so now we're back to punk music . . .

I have noticed how romantic much of the British music of the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is, for example "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982), "Thieves Like Us" by New Order (1984), "Be Near Me" by ABC (1985), and "I Melt with You" by Modern English (1982), even if the last alludes to nuclear war. (In the video, singer Robbie Grey wears a Nazi-like hat. One of the members of Depeche Mode wears a similar hat in a video for "New Life.") Now I find that there was supposedly a reaction to punk music among musicians and singers called the New Romantics. (I try not to put much stock in what I have called genrefication, either in literature or music.) Their name echoes that of Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer, or vice versa. Spandau Ballet and Roxy Music are associated with the New Romantics. Like Joy Division, the name Spandau Ballet is connected to Nazis and concentration camps. Meanwhile, Bryan Ferry got himself into trouble talking about Nazis. Both he and Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet, are conservative. I guess all of that makes them fascistic, too.

I tell you, once you make a start in the Wikipedia-ziation of your research, you'll find that there is no end. And once you start calling people fascists, there's no end to that, either, because nobody is ever going to agree with you on everything, and like I said in a previous paragraph, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist.

(2) There are lots of confluences between punk music and things about which I have written lately, including 1976 as "year zero" in punk music, as well as anarchistic, nihilistic, leftist, and utopian strains in that music and culture. Remember that Michael Moorcock wrote an essay called "Starship Stormtroopers," dated 1977. If it had been a punk song instead of an essay on science fiction, "Starship Stormtroopers" would have come to us from Year One.

(3) At a march of the religion of pieces in East London late last year, a young leftwing British numbskull said to one of the marchers, "We're on the same side, bro." The man, dressed all in black, including a mask, replied, "No we're not," and marched on.

(4) I don't know anything about the politics of Pet Shop Boys, if they have any politics, but their song and video "West End Girls," from the mid-1980s, seem impossible now. That world from only forty years ago has disappeared as if it never existed. The video seems to have come from another planet. Any of the concerns of the pre-invasion 1980s--the concerns of British singers, musicians, and fans; of all of those East End boys and West End girls; moreover of every young Briton of the past, including of the punk scene--have been completely wiped away, displaced by new concerns, that is if young people are aware enough to have them, which is what Amelia and her appeal are all about, I think. Maybe the young people of today have been called to action against the betrayals of the older generations. And, yes, Boomers, you're among the older generations now, and, yes, many of you have betrayed young people in the worst way.

The music of the past is still young and new. The records and photos and videos from those times are like the figures on Keats' Grecian urn:

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

Ian Curtis and the voices and images of all who lived on will be "for ever young" and they will be forever for the young. In contrast, the image of pudgy leftist Boomer Anthony Albanese in a Joy Division t-shirt is comical, ironic, and cringe, all at the same time, especially considering that he is now powerful, now part of the establishment, now an oppressor. Amelia wears it much better. She may be made only of electrons, but she represents real human beings. She represents youth. For older people to wear youth like a costume is an offense. In the language of the left, it's an act of cultural appropriation. Wearing youth like a costume is an especial offense considering that the establishment is against youth, for it wants to take away young people's freedoms. In 1981, Triumph, a Canadian band, sang, in the voice of the listener, "I'm young now, I'm wild now, I want to be free." A half generation before, The Monkees, an American band, sang their part: "We must be what we're goin' to be/And what we have to be is free," and: "(In this generation)/We gotta be free." Both songs link youth to a yearning to be free. Young people will forever sing such songs, and too many older people will forever do their best to deny them. When you're a traitor to youth, you don't get to claim youth. Take off your Joy Division t-shirt. It's not for you. Once you begin oppressing, brutalizing, exploiting, mutilating, raping, and murdering babies, children, and young people, or once you countenance those things, you have given up on your youth. You have thrown it behind you in rags. You are undeserving of everything that rightfully belongs to the young.

By the way, some people describe Amelia as "goth." That fits in with what I have been writing about and will write about in terms of Gothic and Romantic reactions. Look for more of that in the series to follow.

Update: After I wrote this entry, above and below, the United Kingdom had its local elections. Labour was pretty much slaughtered. Amelia made another appearance a couple of days after that. In a video, she has Prime Minister Shtarker dressed up like a British schoolgirl and delivers him to the type of men who have preyed upon British schoolgirls for many years now, the same type of men who are protected--if not encouraged in their predations--by the British establishment at its various levels. I don't like AI anything, but sometimes it can be useful.

I write these things and Americans talk about them not because we are against the British people but because we are for them. They--you--have given us so much and have so much more to offer the world, not least of which is your music. We do not wish you to be destroyed or for you to destroy yourselves. We want you to turn back another invasion from the Continent. We want you not to make a shameful conquest of yourselves. We want your history, culture, and nation to be preserved and to thrive. We want you here with us instead of our standing alone in the world. We want you not to become Airstrip One or a new caliphate.

(5) If you think that culture is a Nazi codeword, please get a grip, and I don't mean on your revolver.

(6) Update: Now I find that the U.S. government is setting up a website for just that purpose. We'll see how it goes.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley