SOURCE: “Global Economy, Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tension in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy,” in Minnesota Review, Nos. 43 & 44, 1995, pp. 182-97.

In the following essay, Moylan examines contradictory views of future sociopolitical events in William Gibson's writing.

I

In 1990, in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, George Bush invoked the utopian figure of the millennium as he called for a new world order, an order of peace and prosperity that would remove the darkness of the Cold War.¹ In 1980, Ronald Reagan invoked another utopian figure: the “city on the hill” that recalled the dream of a New World that would inspire everyone with its harmony and enterprise. However, in the years between Reagan's imagery rooted in the local history of the Americas and Bush's image that envelopes the globe, neither humanity nor the environment has benefited from these utopian gestures. Indeed, and increasingly, since the beginning...