Neuromancer-Part Seven

A Gothic Science Fiction

It has taken a lot of writing to get here, but my idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction, also a science fiction of decadence rather than of ascent. Romanticism and Gothicism are about the past. Very often they are about decadence and descent, as in weird fiction. Both science fiction and weird fiction descended (no pun intended) in part from the Gothic and Romantic works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. But I think the Hugo Gernsback/John W. Campbell, Jr. type of science fiction is more nearly an innovation. It is, I think, a break with the past and is discontinuous with other types of genre fiction.

My idea is that Gothic or Romantic science fiction is an attempted return to the past, to a time before there were discontinuities in fiction or literature. Again, science fiction is an innovation. Rather than evolutionary, as conservative institutions are or tend to be, science fiction is more nearly revolutionary, as modern science is in the real world. In contrast, a Gothic or Romantic science fiction would appear reactionary. Reaction is one way of being conservative.

If there are spectra, then Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe are, in this interpretation, on the conservative side of the spectrum. Scholar Lee Sterrenburg opened his essay "Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein" (in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher and published by the University of California Press, 1979) with what reads like a conclusion:

     Mary Shelley was the daughter of two of England's foremost intellectual radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. For a number of reasons--not all of which can be considered here--she rejected her utopian and radical heritage and opted for a more conservative and pessimistic view of the world. [Boldface added.]

As for Poe, American conservative author and poet Peter Viereck considered him among our culturally conservative authors. I won't argue.

I have written on these topics before. Here are titles and links to three entries:

• "Pipe Dreams and Premonitions-Part Three" (Aug. 9, 2015)

• "Skilled Destroyers" (May 20, 2017)

• "Frankenstein: A Monster of Gothicism and Science" (Aug. 11, 2015)

The last of those entries was supposed to have been the lead-in to the current series on Neuromancer and William Gibson. Well, better late than never. Besides that, I have brought in a lot of topics that I would not have had I written in 2015. This series is better--though longer--for it, I think.

I imagine there are other authors of Gothic and Romantic science fiction. Maybe William Gibson took the lead. If there is a category of Gothic or Romantic science fiction, then maybe its authors are like the Pre-Raphaelites in British art, i.e., a somewhat conservative or reactionary movement, or an attempted return to the past, before change and innovation had set in. The paradox is that the Pre-Raphaelites were not evolutionary. I don't know whether they ever published a manifesto--maybe their official publication The Germ was it--but their movement was conscious and intellectual, and it had a set beginning. In a way, it was revolutionary, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, a year of revolution in Europe and the year in which Karl Marx issued his regrettable and disastrous Communist Manifesto.

By the way, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites was William Morris. He was also a socialist, though utopian rather than "scientific" as in Marx's case. As we have seen, socialism is an essentially reactionary movement rather than an innovation, for socialists seek a restoration of the feudalistic past in which there are only two classes of men, the few on top and the very many below. They also of course seek complete stasis, as in the feudal ideal, with everyone fixed in his current status and no change permitted. In one sense, Nazis were more forward-looking and less reactionary than were their communist counterparts. One thing that Nazis and Bolsheviks shared is their hatred of the Jewish people. If you doubt that Marxism began with anti-semitism among its strains of thought, read what Marx had to say about Jews and the so-called "Jewish question" in the 1840s. (Why is there always a "Jewish question" but no equivalent questions regarding other groups?) Remember, too, that the worst villain in 1984 by George Orwell (completed in the centennial year of The Communist Manifesto) is named Emmanuel Goldstein and was undoubtedly based on Leon Trotsky.

In 1926 when the first issue of Amazing Stories was published, science fiction was an innovation. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, its various authors, artists, editors, and fans developed science fiction into a specific type--or two types, the hard science fiction type of Astounding Science-Fiction and what I guess you could call the adventurous or romantic science fiction or science fantasy of Planet Stories, Fantastic Adventures, etc. If there were two types, hard science fiction was the respectable one, at least in literary terms. It was or became the mainstream type. For example, in 1947, Robert A. Heinlein broke out of the pulps and into mainstream slick magazines with "The Green Hills of Earth," published in The Saturday Evening Post. (It's a story about music by the way.) Meanwhile, in 1947, the Shaver Mystery, a shabby chronicle based on the ravings of a real-life madman, was still the rage in Amazing Stories and related titles. Astounding Science Fiction started going the same way in May 1950 with the publication of "Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind" by L. Ron Hubbard. Maybe a process of decay had set in and the Golden Age of Science Fiction was thereby ended.

Pulp magazines faded in the 1950s. In 1960 came the question Is science fiction dying? (That same year, Astounding Science Fiction became Analog Science Fact & Fiction. Name changes in popular culture often indicate trouble.) I wonder whether the British New Wave of science fiction was the first sub-genre of the post-1950s or post-Golden Age. Cyberpunk followed the British New Wave. I wonder whether it was the second. Anyway, were New Wave and cyberpunk reactionary? If so, does that mean that they were or are conservative in some way? Were the authors of New Wave and cyberpunk in particular attempting a return to the past, to a time before the innovations of hard science fiction, before the innovation of science fiction itself, or even before the splitting of fiction or literature into recognizable and nameable genres and sub-genres? Finally, was that past Gothic or Romantic in its orientation, themes, and so on?

My idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson and perhaps cyberpunk in general is a kind of decadent, Gothic or Romantic science fiction, oriented on the past and returning to the Gothic and Romantic origins of science fiction in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, before genrification set in, and when there was still continuity in literature. Neuromancer was a new romance and the work of a new romancer, a phrase from Hugo Gernsback's introductory essay of 1926. Mr. Gibson was fully aware of Gernsback and his brand of science fiction, for before there was Neuromancer, there was his story "The Gernsback Continuum," from 1981, in which there is talk not only of Gernsbackian science fiction--illustrated by Frank R. Paul--but also of Nazis and what a character in the story refers to as "raygun Gothic."

Innovations and revolutions very often begin with a gnosis or a priori systems of thought, very often expressed in a manifesto. Manifestos are very often intellectualized works, or they are pseudo-intellectual, as in Hubbard's "Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind." (Again, if we're looking for an end date to the Golden Age of Science Fiction, we might set it to May 1950 when "Dianetics" was published.) They are often visionary and sometimes seemingly mad and full of fury. They are often angry, aggressive, incoherent, or inarticulate. Science fiction is a field in which a pre-action manifesto was put forth in Hugo Gernsback's essay "A New Sort of Magazine," published in Amazing Stories in April 1926. Gernsback afterwards enacted his ideas. Unlike with other manifestos and the actions based upon them, nobody died as a result. Karl Marx had his manifesto, too. It was the basis of what he called "scientific socialism." Countless millions have died as a result of that idea. Nice work, Marxists. Marxism in general has been a model and an inspiration for science fiction authors since then, for example, Isaac Asimov and his  concept of "future history." A more immediate manifesto in the arts was the Futurist manifesto of 1909 with its emphasis on speed, newness, youth, technology--and destruction of the past and all old things. Italian Futurism is supposed to have influenced Italian Fascism. If it did, that wouldn't be much of a surprise to me. We should always remember, by the way, that Mussolini was a socialist.

I have been writing about music in parallel to science fiction. Cyberpunk was obviously named after punk music and punk culture. Did punk have a manifesto? I don't know. A more interesting question is this: was punk an innovation, or was it a reaction? If Neuromancer is an example of cyberpunk; and cyberpunk is or was an attempted return to the past; and cyberpunk took after punk music and punk culture; did it then depart from punk by being a reaction? Or did it actually follow punk, which may have also been a reaction? If it followed punk, does that mean that punk was also an attempted return to the past, a kind of Pre-Raphaelite movement except that it was Pre-Beatle-ite? In British music of the 1970s and 1980s, there were punk, New Wave, Goth, and New Romantic strains or genres. (Bauhaus, a British goth band, was named for the revolutionary and futuristic Bauhaus movement in art and design, founded in--when else--1919. Bauhaus had its manifesto, too, written by Walter Gropius.) The same strains and genres seem to have been in science fiction. Nothing stands alone in the arts. Music and science fiction must have fed off of each other during the 1970s and '80s. And it all makes for the most fascinating of ideas and speculations.

I have a coda still to come, and now something else has come up, too, so I'll have another coda after that. In the meantime, I would like to say: Happy 100th Anniversary to Pulp Science Fiction and Happy 50th Anniversary to Punk Music!

Amazing Stories, September 1928. The framework of the mechanistic logo of Scientifiction must be from the inside of a spaceship, but it takes a shape approaching that of a Gothic arch, and the planet-and-star studded blue background looks like a wizard's hat. Maybe the gears driving the writing pen should include "ROMANCE" and "MYSTERY."

And speaking of Gothic arches, a Gothic arch is a negative space. The positive shape that might fill it is the rocketship standing on its launchpad, ready to blast off, or on the surface of a distant planet, already having arrived on a new world.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley