IN 1996, AMERICAN EXPATRIATE William Gibson--the "father" of cyberpunk, living in British Columbia after moving to Canada to evade the Vietnam draft (1)--wrote an introduction to the re-release of the novel Dhalgren, originally published in 1974, written by Samuel Delany, often described as a precursor to or inspiration for later authors of cyberpunk. (2) In his introduction to Delany's eight-hundred-page opus, Gibson writes that he "place[s] Dhalgren in history," a history he then specifies: Gibson implies, or intones, that Dhalgren is a novel not just about American civil unrest, but that it is an encapsulation of that unrest, "the unmediated experience of the singularity [...], free of all corrosion and nostalgia" (xiii). Gibson thus places Dhalgren at the crux of memory and nation, suggesting that what Toni Morrison has elsewhere called the "national narrative"--the "official story [that] obliterates any narrative that is counter to it" (xvi, xviii)--has either intentionally "forgotten" the civil unrest of the 1960s or rendered it nostalgic, while Dhalgren stands not just as a final testament to, or reflection of, but a nearly magical incarnation of those events. Delany's postmodern, circuitous, self-reflexive, exploration of the fictional city of Bellona represents, for Gibson, the recent radical, if not revolutionary past which has been subsumed by the "long Slough" (xiii) of the national narrative which, in turn, is created for and by what is so often referred to as "middle America." Little wonder, then, that Gibson revisits issues of amnesia, denial, and their relations to American national identity (again figured by him as "shorthand for something else; perhaps [...] the American Century" of globalization) in his 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, possibly the first literary, fictional exploration by an (ostensibly) American author of the position of 9/11 within an American and global history--and future. (3)
