"The Gernsback Continumm" by William Gibson is one of my favorite science fiction stories. It's one of Gibson's early works, written in 1981 back before he became the official "God of Cyperpunk", and it has nothing and everything to do with Cyberpunk.

There was a period in science fiction dominated by images of sleek silver space ships, blued eyed super men carrying cool ray guns battling savages on Venus and Mars. It was "Buck Rogers", "Flash Gordon", and "The Lensmen". We were all going to have flying cars, wear white togas and clear plastic sandals, and eat food pills. We would live in bright gleaming cities with towers three miles high.

In "The Gernsback Continuumm", the main character is given the assignment of photographing the remnants of that lost dream. He found it in movie theaters and diners covered in chrome and neon and bright colors. In old car lots where there were cars with fins that kept getting larger and larger as though by virtue of extending them long enough eventually they would just start taking off into the air by themselves. The covers of the old pulps themselves, with giant V-winged airplanes, sixteen propellers, and ballrooms for dancing seen through oddly placed windows on their exterior.

It was the common dream of a future that never happened. But for the people living then, it seemed like a natural extrapolation of what had happened during their lifetimes. They had seen giant buildings raised to the sky. They had seen us go from a time of horse and buggy to sleek highways and automobiles that suddenly everyone drove. Within the period of a few decades we went from nothing in the sky to flights daily from New York to London. Suddenly, there were boxes brought them live images from everywhere. It only made sense that the wonders would continue. Buildings would get bigger and sleeker. Cars would fly. Airplanes would turn into space ships. And we would go from transmitting images instantly to transmitting people instantly. It was a time of miracles, and the science fiction writers of the day assumed that the miracles would continue.

The wonderful thing about story "The Gernsback Continuum" was of course that at the same time Gibson wrote it he was about to become the main figure in a entirely different vision of the future. It might even be called "The Gibson Continuum". Looking back twenty years, those edgy, gritty, cynical stories about people with computer jacks in their heads and razor claws have a dated, slightly embarrassing feel about them.

A year or so ago, I discussed "The Terminal Beach" by J.G. Ballard, another story about a future that never was. The links are here and here. There a man walked through the artificial landscape of a nuclear holocaust. A bombing test range on a south seas island with cinderblock houses and half melted manniquin inhabitants. In world peace had been declared, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust had dissappeared. But the loss of his wife and child in car accident that he was partially responsible for were like like a personal nuclear holocaust, and the world's artificial future that never was matched the real state of his mind.

For some strange reason, I ended up reading "The Gernsback Continuum" to the woman I've been most involved with over the course of the last year. She's not really into science fiction or fantasy. In fact, she's barely into reading at all. And in a lot of other ways we don't have a heck of a lot in common. She just got divorced after a more than twenty year marriage. She's into New Age thinking, real estate, and she likes to jog. On the other hand, there are some levels at which we really seem to connect. She gets my bizarre sense of humor. We like the same sorts of music, and she is close to being as much of a slob as I am. We both like cats.

I think that both of us are aware that long term it's probably not going to work. Which is why she pushes me away for weeks or months at a time, and none of her kids know about me, and why I end up dating other women. But when we are together, it's usually pretty nice.

So anyway, I don't know what impulse caused me to read "The Gernsback Continuum" to her. Like I said, she's not a science fiction person, and there weren't any romantic elements to the story. But when I explained it to her, she made an instant connection to what was going on in her life.

Like I said, she and her husband had been together for more than twenty years, and they probably would have continued together until one or the other of them passed away. She tells me now that they weren't ever in love; that it was just that they were both people with a lot in common who had children together. But I'm not so certain that the events of the last few years may not have colored her perception. They were both from similar backgrounds - both moderate Christians from semi-rural towns. Both of them loved running. She was a housewife who handled the day to day management of their bills and shopping and what not, and he was a computer programmer who made very good money.

Then her mother died after a very long struggle with cancer. She went to be with her in Florida during the illness. It was an agonizing period for her. This woman who had been such a pillar for her was now reduced to this writhing bundle of pain who couldn't even clean herself anymore. And it dragged on for months.

And when it was over, my girlfriend (although obviously this was before I met her) decided that her life had to change. She needed more for herself than just being a wife and a mother. She wanted a career and a larger circle of friends and other new interests. So she took her inheritance and she bought a condo in Florida, and she signed up for classes. Her oldest daughter was down there already, with a very serious boyfriend and going to classes at the University of Florida. She tried to convince her husband to come with her. He had a job where he could work from home, and home could be anywhere.

Somehow though, he wasn't at the same place with her. He liked his life in the local rural area. His family was nearby. He liked to fish and camp, and he liked the community he was already in. He had been supportive of her when her mother was dying, but he wasn't the one there every day doing the caring. It wasn't his mother that had died. He hadn't been changed the same way she was. He wanted the life had been living already, and he wanted her in the role that she had been in for two decades. It was that "couple growing old in the woods" continuum. So their paths diverged. She wanted a new life, and he wanted the old one.

So he secretly found someone else to continue the old life with him, and then he filed for divorce. Maybe that would have been fine except they had a ten year old daughter, and there was no way the courts were going to give my girlfriend custody if she stayed in Florida. If they had moved down there as a family it would have been fine. But in a divorce context, him staying in the same area gave him an advantage in the custody arena. He also had the plus that he was working from home, while my girlfriend (It sounds weird attaching that label because we did not meet until the divorce was finalized) was taking classes and would likely be working outside of the home. She did have the advantage of having been the primary taker for all of their children for more than two decades.

So my girlfriend chose her daughter over the new life. She came back up here, found a local job, and settled back in. It's not where she wants to be. There aren't anywhere near as many opportunities. She can't walk along a warm beach in the late afternoon, or hang out with her friends at the condo, or be close by her other adult daughter. She will be in her fifties by the time her younger daughter is grown, and she doesn't know that she will have the energy to re-uproot herself again at that point.

So for Christmas, she has go to Florida and pack up the condo, and contact a real estate agent, and say goodbye to the dream of a future she once had for herself. "The Florida Continuum". Remnants of that dream - brightly color clothing made for warmer weather, pictures of her friends, and her text books from the classes she had started taking - will linger on.

That's not quite all though. You see, four months ago (a few months after the divorce was finalized), her ex lost his job. He worked for that big old dinosaur IBM. They used to have a lot of facilities around here. And there are a lot of ex programmers in the area, and not a lot of jobs for them. I saw them a few years ago when I was briefly unemployed. I went to this job hunting thing that was mandatory, and 49 out of the 50 people there were these ex IBM employees who couldn't bring themselves to leave the area. Some of them had been looking for two years or more. I see one or two of them at my hiking club. People who have chosen staying here instead of their careers, and are doing menial work like clerking in a library. And I've seen relocation cases in court. Where some of these people have gone elsewhere. The jobs are out there. They just aren't in this area. They're good paying jobs, but they are on the coast, near the larger metropolitan areas. My girlfriend's ex has been out of work for four months now. With his benefits package and unemployment that will come afterwards, he has maybe a year. I'm betting that the "Couple in the Woods" continuum is going away anyway, even with the new, more dream friendly girlfriend. If he does end up having to move to find work, my ex gets to move too - after he's left already and had surrender joint custody. It would definitely suck for their daughter at that point. Don't get me wrong. For her daughter's sake, my girlfriend is hoping that it doesn't happen. But there would be a wonderful irony in it. The future is rarely what we expect.