SOURCE: Schroeder, Randy. “Determinacy, Indeterminacy, and the Romantic in William Gibson.” Science-Fiction Studies 21, no. 2 (July 1994): 155-63.

In the following essay, Schroeder discusses the ideas of postmodernism and literary romanticism in Gibson's fiction.

It is tempting to think of postmodernism as an indeterministic and antirealist worldview or aesthetic, positioned explicitly against traditional positivist, materialist, and realist positions. But I believe this argument misses the mark, for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it is impossible to characterize postmodernism as a monolith, except in the most polemic of views. Second, and more important to this paper, such a characterization of postmodernism subtly reinscribes the terms of argument that postmodernism apparently rejects: exactly those traditional western metanarratives which formulate all our questions about “reality” through such binaries as realist/antirealist and subject/object.

A convincing rejection of this kind of thinking is to be found in the work of Richard Rorty...