Things Are Things: The Resigned Pessimism of the Pseudo-Dystopia

In this chapter, I acknowledge how common it is to use terms like ‘dystopian’ and ‘dystopia’ to characterize William Gibson’s Neuromancer; however, I contend the novel isn’t a dystopia but a pseudo-dystopia. Using the lens of Utopia and Anti-Utopia genealogies, I provide an exploration of “The Gernsback Continuum” and “Burning Chrome” to lay the critical foundations. First, I characterize them respectively as belonging to the Anti-Utopia genealogy; specifically, “The Gernsback Continuum” is an anti-utopia, and “Burning Chrome” is a pseudo-dystopia. Having established this illustrative groundwork, I turn to Neuromancer as a prominent example of the resigned pessimism common to the pseudo-dystopia. This is not a matter of semantics because, as I’ll show in the conclusion, understanding Neuromancer as a pseudo-dystopia helps us better understand the novel’s ongoing appeal 40 years after its initial publication. This appeal ties into the next chapter’s discussion of capitalist realism.