Nancie's Electric Car

Jun 19, 2007 23:09

"Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode.
When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it's peripheral; mere fragments of
mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was
that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost
translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways
discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane monsters
I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none
of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single
wavelength of probability..."





"...Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local
station. You'd sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk,
and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A
Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around
with this big old Nash with wings, and you'd see it rumbling furiously down
some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off.."



"...They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep
cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like
the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.
But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of
the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important
thing is not to worry about it..."



"...The air was thick with ships: giant
wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver
shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join
the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were
gyrocopters..."



"...That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous
about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest
newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis
and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to buy a plane ticket for
New York.
"Hell of a world we live in, huh?"..."But it could be worse, huh?"
"That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect."

All excerpts from "The Gernback Continuum," by William Gibson
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