"The Gernsback Continuum" is a 1981 science fiction short story by American-Canadian author William Gibson, originally published in the anthology Universe 11 edited by Terry Carr.

Kihn attributes the photographer's visions to what he calls "semiotic ghosts," the remnants of pop culture in the collective unconscious, and advises immersion in a diet of present-day (1980s) decay, such as pornography, violent television programs and depressing newspapers.

The photographer is greatly disturbed by these increasing visions, which he disparagingly compares to old Buck Rogers serials, Nazi Germany and Hitler Youth propaganda.

The saccharine and squeaky-clean aesthetics of his visions cause him to long for his familiar and preferred postmodern present, filled with pollution, gas shortages and disastrous foreign wars.

Things reach a head when the photographer drives to Tucson, Arizona and sees the normally small city as a vast and idealized metropolis, inhabited by physically perfect, blonde-haired, blue-eyed American citizens, whose haughty yet innocent demeanors push him over the edge.

Gibson's treatment of this theme is softer than, for instance, Michael Moorcock's or Thomas Pynchon's, but then his story is firmly set in the southwestern United States in the disenchantment following the oil embargo and Vietnam, rather than Nazi Germany... Twenty-six years later, we still live in a world where a great many pretend to know "nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel" or defeat in foreign wars – which may be another reason to think Michael Moorcock has a point when he says this kind of critique is becoming more rather than less relevant.