263 GIBSON’S “DOUBLE VISION” OF REALISM AND ESTRANGEMENT Jaak Tomberg On the “Double Vision” of Realism and SF Estrangement in William Gibson’s BIGEND TRILOGY She turned on the bedside lamp, illuminating the previous evening’s empty can of Asahi Draft, from the Pink Dot, and her sticker-encrusted PowerBook, closed and sleeping. She envied it.—William Gibson, Spook Country (1) She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (1) Through this evening’s tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station’s airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg of some modest but moderately successful marine species.—William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties (1) CPUs for the meeting, reflected in the window of a Soho specialist in mod paraphernalia, are a Fresh Fruit T-shirt, her black Buzz Rickson’s MA-1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she’d worn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse-analog is an envelope of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay—if not actual Stasi-issue then well in the ballpark.—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (8) 1. Introduction. This essay is about William Gibson’s twenty-first century oeuvre, as epitomized in the above epigraphs. I will focus on the cultural, generic, and poetic analysis of a hypothesis that his BIGEND TRILOGY (also known as the BLUE ANT TRILOGY)—comprising Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010)—should be read as simultaneously realist and science-fictional. The sentences in these epigaphs, like the novels in general, represent a kind of perfected collision point where these apparently opposing generic tendencies approach each other to the closest possible degree. Gibson is mainly known as a cyberpunk extrapolator of the 1980s and 1990s, but in the twenty-first century he has turned to writing entirely contemporary novels in which realist motives and science-fictional motifs no longer exist quantitatively side by side in peaceful affinity. Unlike in slipstream or transrealist fiction, it is not a case of adorning a realist setting with a few closely extrapolated science-fictional elements nor, as with much of the sf of the 1990s, of trying to infuse a (near-future) science-fictional setting with as much realist plausibility as possible. 1 Rather, in these sentences the generic tendencies of realism and science fiction have qualitatively converged: one and the same text, and all of the motifs therein, feel both plausibly everyday and plausibly cognitively estranging. And so, in order to adequately describe this prose and to “explain away” the convergence of utter plausibility and utter estrangement, it is not sufficient merely to detect and interpret its particular poetic details as either “realist” or “science-fictional.” Rather, such a mode of writing has to be approached through a simultaneous “double vision” of generic registers.