[In the following essay, Christie examines the elements of both traditional science fiction and postmodern experimental fiction in Gibson's Neuromancer and John Crowley's Engine Summer.]

Is there a postmodern science fiction? To a question posed as broadly as this, the answer has to be, yes and no. Yes, because science fiction as a fictional genre is most often placed in a notional future, and therefore attempts to be ‘post’ whatever modernity happens to be current. And no, because it retains the conservatism of most genre fiction, slow to change or to break with the structures and formulae which bind alike the writerly goals and readerly expectations of generic performance and consumption.

There is additionally an issue of clarification to be undertaken for the term postmodern. Without the addition of a suffix, the term has an unfixed status. Postmodern could refer to an era, the period which has succeeded the age of modernity, or it could refer to a cultural and critical category, picking out those aesthetic endeavours which somehow place themselves beyond the aesthetic paradigms of the various modernisms, of architecture, art, film, and literature. The question of science fiction and the postmodern therefore becomes a double question. Has recent science fiction, the science fiction of the 1980s, exhibited particular signs of adaptation, firstly to what economists, sociologists, and others discern as an age of postmodernity, and secondly, to what cultural commentators and literary critics call postmodernism? Despite the inertial conservatism of popular genre writing, its reliance on the boundaries which traditionally limit plot, structure, character et al., science fiction does indeed show signs of positive adaptation, both to the global postmodernity of historical process, and the postmodernism of literary and other cultural media. It does so, moreover, in ways which allow the critic to grasp at least some of the senses in which a postmodernist culture can be understood to express the preoccupations and represent the processes of an age of postmodernity.

Perhaps the ‘boundaries’ of genre writing, so useful for criticism's mapping exercises, are less like hermetic barriers than like the borders of territories. For it is a property of borders that, as well as demarcating, they are regularly crossed. In 1980s science fiction, I suggest, one may glimpse two processes at work. There is a quite traditional function of science fiction being quite normally fulfilled: namely the fictive exploration of emergent futures as indicated by novel technological, scientific, political, and social elements of the contemporary world. It is thus less than surprising to find science fiction's fictive discourse coinciding at certain points with the diagnostic and prognostic discourses of ‘intellectuals’. Then, more significantly for the critic's interests, and perhaps more surprisingly, there is a specifically literary process whereby some science fiction writing takes on the ideological preoccupations, the stylistic registers, the formal dislocation, which might be held to characterize cultural postmodernism. It will prove possible to argue, on the basis of certain science-fiction texts, that the coincidence of subjects and themes derivative of particular perceptions of postmodernity with a literary postmodernism is not occasional and contingent, but structural and causal. If this case holds, it will validate the category of a ‘postmodern science fiction’, by demonstrating the integration of both connotations of postmodern, the historical postmodernity with the aesthetic postmodernism.

Part of the difficulty of this exercise is of course the lack of any consensus over what constitutes the postmodern, either historically or aesthetically. It is a much used term, whose increasingly rapid velocity of circulation tends to devalue it as linguistic currency.¹ As a historical category, nonetheless, there seems broad agreement that it marks a relatively new developmental phase of capitalism, as capitalism makes new inroads on the geopolitical globe to incorporate the Third World and now even Communist nations within its markets, and as it frees itself from two major historical constraints, the nation state and human labour. In the formal, discursive terms of political economy, postmodernity is also and obviously marked by the official adoption of a fourth order to supplement the classical triad of land, labour, and capital, to wit, information. Information in turn provides the name for the characteristic technological dimension of postmodernity: it is an age where information technology increasingly dominates archival, productive, and communicative processes, and binds them increasingly within a unifying and global network. The debates over postmodernity occur within this broad definitional consensus. Does it indicate a further turn of the oppressive screw of capitalism, or does it offer liberatory potentials? Does it presage a society rendered communally rational by the universality of its information and communication, or one where individuals become little more than information terminals, nodes for sending, switching, and receiving messages? These and other, comparable arguments between philosophers and cultural critics such as Habermas, Lyotard, and Jameson all tend to take place on the assumption that significant, perhaps fundamental shifts in economic, social, and political formations have recently occurred, whose ramifications bear strongly upon cultural practice and human subjectivity. The arguments themselves focus on the nature and implications of the change, not upon whether it has occurred.

On the cultural front, postmodernism generates a wide variety of definitions, dependent often upon which field of cultural practice is under consideration.² In general terms, postmodernism tends to be seen as a cultural formation where representation itself becomes established as an autonomous realm, an independent economy of signs whose power is such that it breaks down the epistemological barrier between representation and the world, between signs and referents. The image, the sign, become simulacra, no longer secondary or derivative, but primary and self-determinative, forming a surface without depth which constitutes the cultural consciousness of the age. This lack of depth, of affect, induces fragmentation, of individual and cultural identity, and the great explanatory endeavours and orderings of modernity and modernism no longer exert their powers of coherence and unification. Marx's historicism and Freud's psychoanalysis, each positing a depth of underlying powers which, when grasped, conferred intelligibility and coherence upon the epiphenomenal chaos of history, civilization, and human character, no longer command the kinds of positive and critical deference which once they did. They no longer inform cultural imagination and analysis as master-codes of understanding and practice, but rather as codes tout court, subsisting fragmentarily alongside other and equally plausible systems of representation, usable but not demanding to be used. Equally, postmodernism is held to leave behind modernity and modernism's primary demand, prevalent in both economic and cultural spheres, namely to make it new, to produce the novel out of the never-failing well-springs of human creativity and ingenuity. Postmodernism substitutes instead the total system of existing representational signs and forms, and seeks to create not novelty or progress, but difference; this it achieves by collage, bricolage, selecting, recombining, borrowing, plagiarism, pastiche—the usage in different fashion of what is already there, rather than original, de novo creation.

Postmodernism therefore appears to constitute itself as a series of lacks, abandonments, and absences: causal explanations, human originality, history, psyche, all recede. Or rather, the forms in which they subsisted and generated orders of meaning recede. As signs, they all persist, capable that is of producing meaning, but not under their old forms. In postmodernism, they generate meaning in the new, synchronic, and surface economy of differential signs, rather than in the old, diachronic order of human development and its deep sources. As with postmodernity, attitudes towards this cultural set can vary and polarize. A building which may mix Palladian, rococo and twentieth-century functionalist styles, and which may be, for all one can tell immediately, a bank, hotel, factory, or museum, or perhaps some combination of all of these, may strike one as a monstrous abandonment of historical, aesthetic, and social order; or it may seem an elaborately programmatic, highly erudite and self-conscious, politically liberated piece of architecture. Comparable attitudes may be taken on music which mixes the forms and instrumentation of classical and rock, or on novels which mix authenticated history and fiction, which deploy then deny sub-generic conventions, which use characters and scenes from other novels, and so forth. Postmodernist practice, in other words, can appear not just as a denial of older orders of meaning, but as a wilful, nihilistic, monstrous, or fatuous abuse of those orders. It can equally appear as art raised to hitherto unachieved levels of rigorous self-consciousness, sceptically self-questioning, aesthetically liberated, playfully ingenious. But once again, and as with all debates which are not simply a clash of incommensurables, there is a discernible level of agreement as to just what it is that receives contrary evaluations.

On the basis of the foregoing characterizations of postmodernity and postmodernism, a closer approach to the question of science fiction and the postmodern can now be made. There are a number of authors and works well-suited to such an enquiry, the most notable being Philip K. Dick. Dick, a science fiction writer of central importance and great popularity in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, was one of the select few to break out of the ghetto of regular science fiction readership to reach a wider audience. His fictional world, a world of schizoid, autistic, paranoid, and megalomaniac personalities, of fragmented culture, of simulacral artefact replacing nature, is one which could be held to have invented much of postmodernity and postmodernist literary practice decades before their eventual recognition and canonization by academic analysts and cultural commentators. Although his death is reliably certified by a Times obituary, appropriately enough for the author of such an oeuvre, Dick continues his existence now as a fictional entity, appearing as a character in other science fiction, and even having one novel devoted entirely to him—Michael Bishop's ironically titled Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas (1988). His semiotic character persists well beyond his fleshly incarnation, a usable sign now incorporated in other codes and representational systems, subsisting there to invoke Dick's own precarious world of collapsing personalities and continually metamorphic appearances. It is, one might say, a peculiarly postmodernist fate to persist as a fictional sign mobilized in other texts, rather than to possess that immortality which conventionally arrives with literary fame. It is nonetheless a fate entirely consistent with the intent, character, and direction of Dick's work, and therefore one which, in all reason, he would have found difficult to disavow.

To provide a satisfactory treatment of Dick's fiction, even within the limits imposed by this essay's topic, is not realistically possible, so large and variegated is the body of his work. His semiotic fate can perhaps stand as one sort of complex postmodern effect within the generic field of science fiction, while his work supports a familiar science-fiction critical claim, to the effect that what general literary culture only now recognizes and expresses also rehearses the science fiction of two decades ago. Rather than treat Dick's work inadequately, therefore, this essay will examine two works of the 1980s, both well-received by readers, critics, and other science fiction authors, both indicative of science-fiction adaptation to the postmodern, in ways which both overlap and diverge, so that they indicate both the focus and the range of themes, techniques, and attitudes which inform this dimension of contemporary science fiction writing. The works under discussion are William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer (1984), and John Crowley's third novel, Engine Summer (1979).³

Along many lines of comparison, these appear to be deeply antithetical works. In tone and style, Gibson's writing is a densely packed and hard-edged third-person naturalism, whereas Crowley's is a discursively rambling, warmly hued first-person, softly-toned realism. Gibson's plot is a pulp-book or popular film caper, Crowley's a traditional quest-romance. Gibson's characters are stereotypical science-fiction cardboard cut-outs, Crowley's are idiosyncratically individualized and sympathetically portrayed humans. Gibson's setting is a near-future world where the nation state has withered away and power lies with multinational corporations, where the leading edge of development is in the East not the West, and where electronic information technology has come not only to dominate forms of life recognizable to us, but to create new and increasingly unrecognizable forms of life as well. Crowley's tale is set by contrast in a relatively far, post-holocaust future, largely pastoral and inhabited by small and idiosyncratically variegated local communities.

Beyond these contrasts, however, exist common features. Both Gibson and Crowley have young male protagonists, undergoing strenuous trials and adventures, moving thereby to some kind of maturity, a standard science-fiction plot line held in place by the predominantly young male readership of science fiction. The difference between the two here is merely generational. Gibson's protagonist generates the romantic appeal of 1980s street culture, of outsider criminality, whereas Crowley's protagonist, on a quest of mythic proportions for lost and powerful objects named in the legends of his commune, inflects a hippy sensibility of the late 1960s. Even the drugs each hero uses follow this half-generational difference, Crowley's inducing tranquillity, the painless passing of time, inner clarity, whilst Gibson's requires nerve-blasting speed stimulants. To the comparability of protagonists may be added an overriding common concern to explore the significance of what one could call artefactual persons—human/machine electronic interfaces, Artificial Intelligences, machine-recorded personalities—and through this to rethink the relations of human nature and culture, of history, memory, and subjectivity. Although their methods, styles, and conclusions differ markedly, Gibson's and Crowley's novels are united in their focus upon the capabilities of this new technological interface for radically transforming the hitherto human subject. It is just this theme, namely the technologically induced mutability of subjectivity itself, which is the characteristic preoccupation of postmodern science fiction in the 1980s.

Gibson's exploration is commendably direct. He assumes a future whose two primary elements, the twin domination of a multinational capital and information technology, are by now conventional items in the listings of postmodernity. An internal feature of this environment, namely ‘cyberspace’, is then shown as constituting its deep structure. ‘Cyberspace’ is the visual image produced when one dons a headset linked into the now universal information network. In cyberspace are represented all electronic data stores, colour-coded, varying in size and brilliancy according to the density of information each contains. As a map of information, it is also a map of power and wealth. Case, Gibson's protagonist, is a new kind of criminal for this new environment. He has learned how to penetrate the defences of the data stores, and hires himself out to steal from them. At the outset, Case is in exile, his nerves biochemically burned out by employers he cheated, unable to pursue his trade. Restored to working order by a mysterious benefactor with opaque purposes, Case is able, tears streaming down his face, to achieve once more ‘his distanceless home’. Cyberspace, the electronic matrix, is in other words where Case lives, moves, and has his being, a subjectivity whose essential features are formed in this human/electronic interface.

Thereafter, the plot of Neuromancer concerns Case's mission to liberate into autonomous existence a powerful Artificial Intelligence. In this he is aided by Molly, a razor-nailed woman of militant ferocity, Armitage, a controller and organizer, Riviera, a bio-engineered illusionist of deep perversity, Finn, an old computer expert, and Dixie Flatline, an electronic cassette recording of the cynically amusing personality and abilities of Case's one-time criminal mentor, now dead. Few of this cast's intentions and actions are of their own volition. They have been assembled by one still enchained half of the AI, who has plotted the actions necessary to unite it with its other half, thus creating the first free AI, a new form of electronic life, the first born native of cyberspace. The point about the plot is its literality. It is constituted simply by the AI's own plotting of the moves which will bring it to full being. The point about the characters is their puppet-like status, subjected to manipulation by the AI's judicious mix of inducement and compulsion. Not only are they puppet-like, they are stereo-typically recognizable for science fiction readers, preceded in memory by many analogous creations.

This, however, is by no means to enter a critical note concerning Gibson's derivative and flat methods of characterization. At one moment, Case comes upon comic-book caricatures of himself and Molly. Gibson wishes us, we may take it, to realize that his two-dimensional stereotypes are intended to be just that, and must as such perform some integrated function for the narrative. Discerning this function is a significant part of discerning the postmodernist composition of Neuromancer. To populate his electronic postmodernity, Gibson constructs characters which are themselves flat images, beings of no psychological depth, but whose interest and significance derive from their semiotic lineage, in comic, film, pulp crime fiction, and other science fiction. They are intertextual characters, drawn from a knowing acquaintance with a wide range of contemporary popular culture. To read them critically requires not an assessment of their psychological realism, their ‘humanity’, but a knowledge of their semiotic descent, their always already constituted being as signs, recognizable icons within mass-marketed Western culture. In other words, Gibson's superficiality is itself a quite meticulous compositional method, a part of his postmodernist aesthetic.

This aesthetic contains other key postmodernist elements. As Case nears the end of his mission, he finds himself amid the vast historical and cultural collections of the industrial clan of Tessier-Ashpool, at whose very heart is symbolically situated the mechanism, a jewelled, enamelled head, which will release the AI. In these collections is a library; but Case does not know what it is, for books are unknown to him, as indeed are all the historical and cultural treasures of the collection. Jumbled and juxtaposed, these artefacts of civilization are now only a residuum, recognizable for readers, but lacking meaning and content for the text's actors. In this sense, they are torn loose from history, from cultural memory, from depth of being, obliged by necessity to live in the perpetual present of electronic reality.

That reality exerts itself increasingly throughout the course of the narrative. Within it, the voice of the Dixie Flatline cassette has as much presence as the human actors, and at times more. Within it, human consciousness can be trapped within hallucinatory environments, meet and talk with electronically reconstructed dead people, with simulacral images who cannot be distinguished from their human counterparts. Cyberspace is therefore a world where image and original, sign and object, are indiscriminable, a powerful fictional representation of that dissolution of the epistemological barrier between representation and world which typifies the postmodern.

This postmodernist stance receives an intriguing modulation in Neuromancer's closing scenes. The AI has been liberated, and a powerful new being, quite different from any hitherto, is loose in the world. What are the implications of this apparently apocalyptic moment in human history? The following exchange occurs between Case and the AI:

‘So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?’

‘Things aren't different. Things are things.’

‘But what do you do? You just there? …’

‘I talk to my own kind.’

(p. 270)

We have here Gibson's distinctive version of the postmodernist aesthetic of difference. The apocalyptic difference, a new order of being represented by the AI, turns out to be of little significance for human culture, a non-event. It is not merely the case then that Gibson's postmodernism characteristically chooses the pursuit of difference rather than of depth out of which to create aesthetic order and meaning. More significantly, difference-as-meaning is itself abandoned, an abandonment which coincides with the emergence of a self-conscious, intention-formulating, language-using non-human agent.

Gibson's novel can therefore be characterized, for all its apparent formularism, as a work of extremist postmodern character in its bare-faced contemplation of a technologically determined world whose culmination may be meaninglessness. His version of the postmodern is actually a rigorous posthumanism, where there is no nature, where representation constitutes the effective real, where human character is determined by cultural icon, where inhuman agents dominate; but above all, where none of this matters very much, anyway.

Gibson's posthumanist cynicism with respect to meaning is a salutary extension for postmodernism generally. It can function as a reminder that writers such as Thomas Pynchon, often regarded as central for American literary postmodernism, are often prone reflexively to privilege literary representation precisely in order to preserve the realm of representation as a haven of humanized meaning over against the intrusive advances of science and technology within contemporary culture.⁴ Gibson by contrast, although on the evidence of his texts a Pynchon reader, pursues a more relentless course, constructing a minimalist paradigm of meaning through which to express the cultural implications inherent in his version of postmodernity. To his credit, there is no resort even to alienation, to characters who would be fully human if history would only allow it; his flattened characters survive if they have the skills and speed requisite in their harsh environment, where things happen too fast for regret and lamentation. Such moralized terms cannot persist in Gibson's lexical schemes, which thus complement the decline of meaning with a literal de-moralization.

Neuromancer achieves a high degree of consistency between subject, setting, character, and linguistic register. It is helped rather than restricted in this by its generically science-fiction form. Science fiction has always been written as if machinery were as or more important than persons. For science fiction, Gibson's is a familiar if extreme disenchantment; our tools and products unmake and remake us as we make them. Mainstream literature, for whatever reasons, and with odd and honourable exceptions, has found this reciprocity far more difficult to admit and express.

Engine Summer's ensemble of subject, setting, character, and style is apparently far gentler than Neuromancer's. For almost all of a first reading one is conscious principally of following an artful, involving, and often beautifully written tale. The hero, Rush that Speaks, details his early life in the community of Little Belaire. A warm, enclosed society, living in seasonal rhythms, its apparent simplicity overlays a deeply thought and sophisticated system of interpersonal relations which endeavours with some success to maintain the ideal of ‘truthful speaking’, where one says what one means, and means what one says. Crowley's tale more or less begins, therefore, at a position opposite to where Gibson's ended. It posits the practicality of full and transparent meaning in human communication and society, a culture fully known to itself, individuals constituted in lucid intersubjectivity.

Rush, enamoured of the stories of the Saints, the founders of his community, resolves to recover the fabled, lost, and apparently magic glove and ball. He sets out to do so, encounters and lives with a kind of hermit, renews his relationship with a girl member of a tribe of travelling medicinalists, lives with this tribe for a while, and proceeds eventually to locate the glove and the ball. Shortly after, but before he returns home to his own Sainthood, the story stops.

The narrative is far more complex than the above skeletal indication. In its course, we slowly learn of the unspecified catastrophe which brought down the preceding technological civilization, of the kinds of people who survived to found new communities, of the highly advanced technological artefacts which have survived, and of a City which floats in the sky, inhabited by Angels. We gain an increasing sense of the way in which Rush's quest is patterned by these elements. We have an underlying sense of unease as we come to realize that the scene of narration is the sky-borne City, and that an Angel is both listener to the tale and interlocutor to the teller. We are by no means certain why the book's sections are called Crystals, whose facets are chapters, and are not all clear about the book's title. But we are held by dense, allusive, and graceful writing of texture, subtlety, and depth very rarely achieved in science fiction, and not often outside it.

For the reader involved with the romance tale there is always more than enough incident and context to engross attention. For the hypothetically alert postmodern reader, arguably the book's main target, there is an additional level of involvement, for two elements are thematized from the outset: meaning and narrative. Such a reader follows the tale more as a subsidiary element in a highly involuted and reflexive narrative always aware of its own status as narrative, as generation of meaning through literary artifice. Little Belaire is recognized as a society constituted by its communally shared stories. Its Saints are Saints simply in having lived lives of a density and significance which generates peculiarly memorable stories: to be a Saint is to have a Story. Thus Rush, in seeking to emulate the Saints, is in quest of his story as well as his mythical objects. True meaning, though pursued, is not guaranteed, for it may be beset by psychological anxiety and lack of self-knowledge. There is therefore at this meta-narrative level more than enough to engross the attention of such a contemporary reader.

These readings are, however, deliberately induced and carefully controlled by Crowley. They are a series of beguilements, of narrative and meta-narrative seductions performed upon the reader the more effectively to betray her. The narrative closure of Engine Summer finally explains any lingering puzzlement concerning the scene of narration and interlocution in the Angels' City, and also the real nature of the glove, ball, and sphere encountered by Rush on his quest. In so doing, the closure performs a deep reversal of all the narrative expectations the novel has raised, so drastically recasting the significance of both tale and meta-narrative that re-reading from the beginning, which is no longer a beginning, is enjoined.

The point of the narrative closure is that Rush's quest, and therefore his Story, is stopped before it has finished. He is about to return home bearing his objects. Will he be a Saint? Will he meet the girl again? At this point an emissary from the City descends to claim the glove, whose donning has mechanically alerted the Angels to its continuing existence. With ball, glove, and sphere the emissary takes a recording of Rush's self, his memory, personality, and Story so far. Rush returns home, probably. The recorded Rush is taken to the City. There he can be interfaced by the Angels, whose (we gather) arid and tortured existence is enriched by interpenetrating with the recorded Rush's joyful and meaningful life-story. We have been listening to the artefactual Rush, not the person. It has been there for more than half a millennium. The closing lines enact a deeply chilling inversion of the end of the Bedtime Story. It is the listening Angel who says to the storyteller: ‘Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes’ (p. 182).

The frustration of the quest narrative is straight-forward, for we are denied the traditional triumphal return, and fulfilment of love. The quest reader has made a mistake in believing he was reading the life of a man. He was instead reading about how a particular machine, an engine, came into being, has heard one full playing of an oft-played recording of a self, switched on and switched off like any engine. The real-time of the narrative was actually the machine-time of the engine. The punning title of the novel is clarified: Engine Summer equals Indian summer, the last and deceptive warmth before the chill (the seeming narrative), and also equals machine-time, the true Angelic chill of the actual narrative.

For the meta-narrative reader the challenge is more complex. Increasingly alert, let us say, to the potential complexities inherent in the scene of narration, aware of a sophisticated reflexive dimension, she will not be surprised as traditional romance closure is refused. Has Crowley's narrative sophistication deconstructed romance by this refusal? It might be so, but such a reading would have to explain why Crowley might bother to produce such an elaborate set-up for such an out-worn end, and would further have to explain why the text in no way valorizes its non-completion, indeed seems to indicate its non-completion as tragic. Alternatively, is Crowley's doubled ending an example of that narrative freedom from definitive closure which postmodernist practice and criticism consistently advocates as beneficial, creating a free space for readerly involvement, refusing the representational authority of the writer? Nor can this be the case, for no such freedom exists. The master-narrative is that of the machine and its Angelic creators. This supervenes upon the romance, and definitively closes with the self-conscious machine's realization of its real and terrible condition.

It seems to be the case, therefore, that conventionally postmodernist expectations are invoked by Crowley only to be destroyed. Crowley has successfully mimicked a postmodernist textual surface of reflexive narrativity, has produced indeed a postmodern simulacrum, only to deny its validity with a genuinely tragic ending. It is a work which has produced this complex effect entirely through its structural and formal properties; but why has it done so? Crowley's focus on narrative itself is not undertaken for resolutely postmodern purposes. Engine Summer continuously indexes story to a series of positive human essences and values. Story, from first to last page, is equated with selfhood, with individual life, with cohesive cultural memory. It is less a literary artefact than a primary and definitional value of humanity. Put briefly, and too didactically, Crowley's point is that human lives, unlike the existence of animals or even hyper-sophisticated machines, are stories, with proper beginnings, middles, digressions, and ends; and that if this is so, if we lose or mistake our stories, or delegate them to other orders of being, we also lose our lives and their meanings. It is exactly this realization which constitutes the tragedy of the self-conscious machine narrator.

Still more abstractly put, Engine Summer can be seen to explore with both subtlety and rigour the proposition that human nature consists in more than the possession of language and self-consciousness, for the machine narrator has both these attributes, yet is not human. What it lacks, and what the original Rush possesses, is the possibility of a fulfillable narrative, a proper end.

Crowley therefore foregrounds narrativity for evidently humanist, indeed classically Aristotelian reasons, to turn the whole postmodern rhetorical apparatus of narrative and semiotic reflexivity against itself, and thereby insist that narrative is less significantly an artefact than a human essence; or rather that narrativity, the essence, is just what continually produces the artefact of narration. Crowley's technique therefore qualifies as an extremely sophisticated version of postmodern science fiction, while his adroit deconstruction of postmodern, anti-humanist expectations actually places him on classical ground.

Moreover, like Gibson, Crowley has singled out the artefactual human and the human-machine interface as the key figure of contradiction, the icon which fixes and focuses the postmodern gaze in contemporary science fiction. In their deeply contrasting styles, registers, and narrative tropes, each nonetheless expresses an equivalent concern over the emergent potentials of smart machines, and of how they might reconstitute human identity. That the two novels are among the very best of the last decade's science fiction testifies to the strength of postmodern subjects and categories in science fiction, as well as to their authors' abilities.

Notes

1. The following discussion of postmodernity draws upon the three-cornered debate between Jean-François Lyotard, Jurgen Habermas, and Frederic Jameson. Positions are summarized in Jameson's foreword to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester, 1979).

2. For postmodernism, see Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (London, 1971); Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St Louis, 1974), and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis, 1981); Hal Foster (ed), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, (Port Townsend, Wash., 1983); and the essays by Anderson, Moretti, Jameson, Ross, Pfeil, and Holland in section III of Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London, 1988).

3. Page numbers in the text refer to the following editions: William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York, 1984); John Crowley, Engine Summer (London, 1982).

4. See particularly Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia, 1966), and the discussion of Pynchon in ch. 6 of David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York, 1985).