It feels very appropriate that Pseudopod would get to a William Gibson story in the same month that the two competing virtual reality headsets for the PC have been released to the public as consumer products for the first time, and lots of articles in the mainstream press are starting to talk about augmented reality as well. I recall first reading about augmented reality in one of Gibson's stories, and it seemed like such a strange concept to me, that he might as well have been describing magic. Only all these years later, and with the appearance of the actual technology in our lives, do I finally "get it" enough to understand more of what he was writing about.
Hinterlands debuted a bit before my time, but I read it many years after it was first published in an anthology, and it immediately became one of my favorite stories by Gibson. No surprise there, as it happens to also be one of his stories that is most like a weird tale, for all its science fiction trappings. We never do find out what lies beyond the gate of the story, and the finger of night he describes might as well be supernatural in both its nature and implications, from a human perspective. The feeling that the gulfs beyond the stars make playthings of humanity and can drive one to madness is all very Lovecraftian too.
Movies, and even video games with a similar setup, often get people referencing "Event Horizon" as their likely inspiration these days, but its pretty obvious that this story had a big influence that predated that movie, and the game versions of such concepts.
But for all of the author's prescience in some areas, we get some very typical Gibson, and outdated 1980's, stuff too - a presumption that the Soviet Union would always be there, published less than ten years before it would start to crumble, and we just happen to have a nationality trio for a Gibson story from that era of American, Japanese and Russian characters and/or related backgrounds, (all people from the presumed to be steadily ascendant cultures of the 1980's) complete with some rather Gibsonian females, in that they are always described as thin and relatively young, and he even lets us know just how attractive poor St. Olga was. And drugs are everywhere, as befitting a story written by a former hippie who was inspired by the beat writers.
When it comes to Gibson's earlier stories, I tend to get the feeling that I'm reading something from a time capsule of a specific era with its own peculiar presumptions and tropes, in a way that I don't always get from speculative fiction by other sci-fi greats. In comparison, many stories by authors like Ray Bradbury or Robert Silverberg could have been written yesterday, even if they include some of their own peculiar hangups.
Of course, at the time these stories were published by Gibson, they were part of a deliberate and controversial literary movement that was trying to get beyond broad and optimistic traditional sci-fi themes and down into some gritty details that were supposedly more realistic. So perhaps this was intentional, to some extent.