In William Gibson’s short story ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1981), a photographer (the narrator) is commissioned to illustrate a coffee-table book about North American architecture of the 1930s, to be published under the suggestive title The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.¹ Excavating the architecture of the so-called ‘American Streamlined Moderne’, full of chrome surfaces and buildings inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the narrator is haunted by what he calls the ‘semiotic ghost’: hallucinations of unrealised futures — an airplane that was ‘all wing, like a fat symmetrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places’ or ‘fifth-run movie houses like the temples of a lost sect that worshipped blue mirrors and geometry’.² Gibson used this concept to describe the science fiction imagery that permeates Western culture — that is, ‘bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own’. More precisely, Gibson’s some-what satirical criticism drew both on various modernist movements (which he labelled ‘futuroids’) and on the 1920s-esque fake technology featured in sci-fimagazines such as Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. Gibson’s version of a futuristic pop ghost echoes that ‘old-fashioned future’ that Bruce Sterling, Gibson’s cyberpunk peer, coined in the title of one of his books to describe the time-space shifts that tend to present the past as science fiction and science fiction as past.³ ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, as a hilarious compilation of sci-fitropes, also managed to short-circuit the categories historically assigned to the genre, and functioned as a critique of its own aesthetic clichés. For this and other reasons, the story is seen as inaugurating