I finally finished Fredric Jameson’s collection of essay on science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. I actually bought it something like three or four years ago, but only recently settled down to systematically plow through it. Like any good fan of science fiction, Jameson resists the urge to classify even the best science fiction writers as purveyors of high literature. He does not argue that there is a valid case to be made for the inclusion of writers like Philip K. Dicks and Ursula K. LeGuin, but rather that we should, instead judge writings within the genre primarily on criteria specific to the genre. Of course, when I read Jameson telling me how to judge a literary work, I always think of the gymnastics he performed on Ulysses to explain how it could of any value using the criteria set forth in his book, Political Unconscious (I love Ulysses and have admired Jameson since reading Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, but the two, clearly, just don’t mix very well).

That was a long a digression just to say, while reading Archaeologies, I came across his review of William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition. Jameson rates Pattern far higher than I  do. I consider it better than, say, his two sequels to Neuromancer, but I also consider most of what Gibson has written since Neuromancer to be disappointing anti-climax compared to that novel.

But reading Jameson on Pattern Recognition did remind me of how much I love Neuromancer. Jameson does hit upon part of the genius of Gibson.

The branding.

The naming of objects, styles, and things in Gibson is wonderfully evocative. The tendency to use brand names and cataloging the create atmosphere is not uncommon on contemporary fiction – think of the lists of possessions in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, or the use of period signifiers in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho or the obsessive lists of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (and though I don’t watch it, could the meticulous use of period detail in the television show Mad Men also qualifiy?).

Gibson’s innovation is to use brands that don’t exist, yet which still perform the function of evoking a time and place (though a time and place that doesn’t yet exist). The image evoked is also, necessarily, unique for each reader, because it is unlikely that our minds have filled in the same outlines around these made up brandings.

For example, in Neuromancer, he describes a bar as being a combination of “Japansese traditional and pale Milanese plastics” and a girl as being dressed in “French orbital fatigues.”

The “Milanese plastics” may refer to an actual style – I’m wondering if it doesn’t refer to the Mod interior design style of 1960’s Italian furniture – but I can’t be sure. In the absence of commonplace commercial passenger space flights, I am pretty sure that “French orbital fatigues” is not actually a style of clothing I just missed.

Either way, it sets a mood and allows the brain the fill in details from half remembered images to create a unique environment in which the reader’s mind can populate the book.