Week 11: Fragments of a Hologram Rose

Fragments of a Hologram Rose is the first published work of William Gibson, a man who many consider to be the father of the Cyberpunk genre. I did a little research into the origin of this short story, and apparently Gibson wrote it in 1977 for Unearth 3, a science fiction magazine. He was only paid $27 for it. This story, while brief, gives us a look into a bleak future through the eyes of a downtrodden man living in the sensory recordings of his ex-girlfriend.

The main character, Parker, was indentured to a Japanese megacorporation when he was fifteen. Despite the promises of stability and security this job provided, he decided to escape and never look back four years into it. Now thirty, Parker lives in an America that has crumbled. Any sense of unification is gone, and people live lawlessly in slums and shantytowns. There are scattered remnants of a war around, such as the image of a burning tank that exists in Parker’s memory.

In this world, there exists a form of media known as ASP, which stands for Apparent Sensory Perception. It allows people to experience what are essentially tape recording of people’s memories, with all five senses included. It is not far off from the technology being developed around virtual reality today, although it is more advanced. Parker’s girlfriend has left him. Like Parker leaving indentured position as a teenager, Angela never looked back when she decided to go. However, Parker still had some of her tapes, and eventually he becomes dependent on them to fall asleep.

This is a very melancholy story, and like the title indicates, the narrative jumps around through different fragments of reality, recordings, and memories. It is somewhat hard to follow at first, and there is benefit to rereading the beginning of the story with full context once you finish. This story raises many interesting questions about how technology like this would affect our world and relationships. Would we become dependent on it like Parker? At one point he ponders if watching Angela’s memories makes him closer to her, or her more real. This work examines the blur between what is true and genuine and what is artificial. “But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle…” The holographic rose Parker destroys becomes a symbol for this blending of his life with technology, as every individual shard comes together to define who he is and what he has experienced. It is all a part of him now, the tapes, the memories, and his current existence.