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1| They sat against a rock bluff high in the Franklins. . . . To the south the distant lights of the city lay strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweler’s blackcloth. —Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (1998) All the lights of the city were on now, a vast carpet of them stretching down the slope to the south and on into the almost infinite distance. —Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (1949) William Gilpin and William Gibson: the first was a failed politician and moderately successful land speculator of the mid–nineteenth century . the second is a popular and innovative science fiction writer whose career took off in the 1980s and was still going strong in the early years of the twenty-first century. Apart from their look-alike names, what can they possibly have in common ? the answer is a vision of the future in which the cities of western north America stand at the center of a global economy. Writing in the 1860s and 1870s, William Gilpin enthusiastically proclaimed that Denver was destined to grow into the great city of north America and the pivot for trade among europe,America,andAsia.Fast-forwardmorethanacenturyandfindWilliam Gibson constructing a fictional future that revolves around Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, tokyo, and other cities of the Pacific Rim as the sites of economic and cultural change. introDUCtion All Roads Lead to Fresno | introDUCtion 2 Let’s start with Gibson, an American who relocated to Vancouver and helped to launch the “cyberpunk” movement in science fiction. Along with other writers such as neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling, he has imagined an information-rich world of intense twenty-first-century capitalism.1 the “cyber” part of the genre refers to the shared interest in information technology , human–computer interactions, virtual realities, and artificial intelligence . the “punk” part refers to a hard-boiled style adapted from detective stories and noir gangster movies. in the backstory against which these writers draw their neon-buzzing pictures of things soon to come, it’s a world that revolves around the Pacific ocean and assumes the interpenetration of north American and Asian cultures and economies. it’s a world in which empire has taken its course westward from continental America to the rim of the Pacific and Seattle and San Francisco stand for the future of the American experiment as the places of economic power and cultural creativity, the pivot points for the twenty-first-century world. Gibson’s novel Idoru (1996) typically blends several plot lines. one is the story of Chia Pet McKenzie, a fourteen year old from Seattle whose devotion to an Asian pop music group takes her adventuring to tokyo to check out troubling rumors. Chia gets pulled into a second high-energy story line about data theft and betrayal among American, Japanese, and Russian criminals. Hovering in the background is a moral tale about the meanings of celebrity, as a computer-generated singer first becomes a popular culture idol (idoru) and then takes on a life of her own. Gibson published Idoru fifteen years after he burst onto the science fiction scene with a handful of brilliant short stories, followed by the “Sprawl” series of Neuromancer (1984); his work quickly became the public face and epitome of “cyberpunk.” Raised in South Carolina, Arizona, and Virginia, he moved to Canada in 1968 with the acquiescence of his draft board and ended up in Vancouver, where he decided to try writing rather than graduate school. He entered the field of science fiction at the same time that Vancouver was turning cosmopolitan: “My wife was born in Vancouver and we moved out here in 1972. . . . At that time Vancouver was a kind of backwater. . . . in the meantime it has become sort of post-modern Pacific-rim and an endlessly expanding urban scene.”2 Vancouver was indeed becoming a multicultural city, where 25,000 Asian immigrants were arriving annually by the early 1990s and only 60 percent of residents used english as a first language by 1991. it was a setting that made Pacific cities and Pacific futures central to Gibson’s speculative imagination. Gibson, himself an expatriate, has made boundary crossing a central feature of his fiction. in Idoru, characters come together in tokyo from Seattle, tacoma, San Francisco, and taiwan. Chia encounters a group of Japanese skateboard punks who call themselves the oakland overbombers, after a California soccer club. in the sequential Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s [18.119.131...

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