Fathers and Sons

[Stuart Moulthrop]

_Gravity's Rainbow_, "Heart-to-Heart, Man-to-Man (Viking 699):

"Maybe there is a machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us
through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there
forever with all the other souls it's got stored there.  It could decide
who it would suck out, a-and when.  Dope never gave you immortality.  You
hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly _meat!_  But _We_
can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld --"

Can you say "Neuromancer?"

The point is not so much the lineage as the _swerve_ Gibson makes away from
the earlier text.  In GR, this fantasy of the future (Tyrone talking to his
dreamed-of Tyrone, Jr.) indicates yet one more turn of the preterite wheel.
I.e., you can feel the creepiness behind "clean, honest, purified, etc."
Electroworld is techno-fascism, just another dark dream.  No transcendence.

On the other hand, Gibson's Neuromancer is the happy hunting ground or
dreamtime, the ultimate technological overcoming.  Eternal Virtual Life!
Sure, this paradise fragments into the loa in the sequellae, but look --
deity is deity.  And note the effects:  Slothrop breaks down and scatters;
Case gets unified through duplication, copied off into the Matrix where he
dwells forever at the writehead of god.  With his old girlfriend, no less.

No wonder Pynchon remains obscure while Gibson gets the Wild Palm.
_Gravity's Rainbow_ makes you feel the apocalypse in your bones.
_Neuromancer_ tells you there is better living through science.

Myself, I think we always been at the movies.

Stuart