Gibson's Neuromancer Research Articles

Literary Visions in Gibson's Neuromancer and Cyberspace

This paper discusses the development of the cultural transformation in the reception of AI and how the conception of the killer machines has changed into a more optimistic human view on science fiction and the way in which cyber effect overcomes the boundaries between the real and the virtual worlds. The Neuromancer by William Gibson is a novel published in 1984 and its popularity has been very much associated in the cultural change of our human conceptions of AI. As a result by 2007 it had sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide in addition to receiving many esteemed awards. This paper examines the novel literary and cultural influences in evolving the cyberpunk genre.

Beyond Humanity: Unveiling Posthumanist Themes in Charles Stross' Singularity Sky and its Literary Nexus

Posthumanism stands as a complex and interdisciplinary intellectual movement that challenges and broadens conventional notions of human identity and existence, particularly in light of advancements in science and technology. It emerged in response to the swift evolution of technology and its profound impact on our understanding of what it means to be human. Within the realm of literature, there exists a myriad of works that defy traditional concepts of human identity and explore the transformative effects of advanced technology on humanity. Notable examples include William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), all of which signal a departure from conventional views of the human experience, pushing boundaries and challenging established norms. Charles Stross, in conjunction with these literary giants, enriches the landscape of speculative fiction by providing narratives that transcend conventional boundaries and delve into profound questions regarding humanity's relationship with technology. Embarking on a posthumanist inquiry, this research delves into the rich fabric of Charles Stross' Singularity Sky (2003), meticulously unraveling the complexities of human transcendence amidst advanced technology. The narrative intricately incorporates futuristic elements, and the objective of this study is to unveil the nuanced layers of the author's exploration of posthumanist ideas. The analysis explores the dynamic interplay among characters and their technological surroundings, emphasizing moments where the amalgamation of humanity and cutting-edge technology acts as a catalyst for transcendence.

Life in Altered Reality: A Post-Humanistic Approach to William Gibson's Neuromancer

Life in Altered Reality: A Post-Humanistic Approach to William Gibson's Neuromancer

After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly

Reviewed by: After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly Anna McFarlane Posthumanism Before Posthumanism. Thomas Connolly. After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin. Liverpool UP, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2021. viii+ 227 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 558] The relationship between posthumanism and science fiction is well established. The project of posthumanism—to rethink the figure of the "human" and to find something that might come after that figure—has now developed into a critical posthumanism that does not simply try to think of what comes after the human, but thinks of posthumanism as a critical tool for deconstructing the human historically and aesthetically. Science fiction has never been far away from these developments. Donna Haraway famously drew on speculative fiction in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1984), taking inspiration from authors such as Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy. N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999) contains a critical reading of embodiment and transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). While this relationship between science fiction and (critical) posthumanism is suggestive, the tendency has been for scholars of posthumanism to draw upon contemporary sf texts, only occasionally recognizing the longer history of posthuman forms in the genre, perhaps through texts such as James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) or Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953). In After Human, Thomas Connolly seeks to redress this oversight with a study of posthumanism in sf from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. He uses posthumanism as "a hermeneutical principle aimed at assessing the ideas, values, and notions that surround the human or non-human in these works" (21), a move described as analogous to Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function or Tom Moylan's concept of the "critical utopia." Connolly uses the figure of the Oncomouse™ as a way into the knotty terrain of critical posthumanism and its stakes. The Oncomouse™ is a genetically mutated mouse, created by a Harvard research laboratory and designed to produce tumors at an accelerated rate, allowing scientists to quickly produce cancerous growths for experimentation under lab conditions. This lifeform was trademarked upon its creation in the 1990s and became a focal point for cultural critics, who tended to view the Oncomouse™ as either "a Frankensteinian threat to the sanctity of human life, or as a locus of subversive resistance to the very techno-industries that created it" (12). Connolly aims to pave a third way that allows the relationship between "nature" and "culture" to be navigated in a more nuanced fashion. He begins by clearly mapping out the terrain of critical posthumanism in exceptionally clear writing. This is a contested and developing academic field, and Connolly is adept at honing in on the most important issues at stake and introducing readers to some of the key thinkers in the field, including Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. He then undertakes something of a whistlestop tour of some of critical posthumanism's philosophical forebears, with a particular focus on the appearance of techné and technicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thinking. Situating critical posthumanism within a longer philosophical tradition is clearly important to Connolly's project as he seeks out posthumanism avant la lettre in his chosen texts, and some of these figures doubtless loom large, particularly Martin Heidegger. Others, however, such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, are less significant for Connolly's study, [End Page 559] although name-dropping them here perhaps opens future lines of research in establishing the roots of critical posthumanism. Connolly's introduction is particularly strong in its description of the role that "new" or "vital" materialism has come to play in critical posthumanism. In Connolly's narrative, posthumanism becomes a tool for moving beyond the linguistic turn, for recognizing the importance of materiality and entanglement, becoming a place to query distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the individual and the "environment." Connolly's understanding of science fiction, then, as a literature habitually preoccupied with technology (17), allows him to weave sf and...

Technological Dominance, "Discarnate Men," and the Vestiges of Humanity in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In their respective texts, William Gibson and Philip K. Dick both envision the place of humanity in a world dominated by technology, and both perceive and illuminate the dystopian possibilities that may result from the exponential development of technology. By invoking Marshall McLuhan’s observations regarding technological dominance and the resulting “discarnate man,” this essay will aim to show how the numbed interiority of the characters depicted in Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream? is the result of their interactions with technology which has massaged them into new forms of being. Furthermore, this essay will show how, by using AIs and replicants as doubles (or doppelgangers) of the human characters, both novels depart from conventions of science fiction by turning the focus away from the non-human, and back towards human emotion, touch, and empathetic response.

Transgressive Truth Telling

Transgressive Truth Telling

Reflected Spaces: “Heterotopia” and the Creation of Space in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Michel Foucault's concept of is finding a welcome place among twenty-first century theoreticians who are concentrating increasingly on space in relation to social, cultural, and political arrangements. The widespread use of Foucault's in literary and cultural theory stems from the popularity of a lecture titled Des Espace Autres, 1 given in 1967 but not published until 1984, only a few months after his death and the same year, coincidentally, as the publication of science fiction writer William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. This essay will argue for a renewed look at heterotopia, both in and outside of Foucault's writing, as a contextually and theoretically situated concept, using Gibson's Neuromancer as a literary backdrop for the theoretical mise-en-scene.2 As a potent theoretical tool (Foucault sometimes referred to his texts as providing toolkits), can be deployed more productively by resituating it into Foucault's broader and continually evolving theories on space (especially in relation to social technologies/regimes of knowledge). Such a resituation is important for critical discourse today-not only in literature, but also in conversations ranging from political philosophy to digital humanities-because the theoretical investigation of space has re-entered the dialogue in force. That such theorization is receiving renewed importance can be seen in contemporary analyses of a wide array of (from all eras)-for example, the city, the prison camp, the brothel, the sex club, the restaurant, the department store, the resort, etc.-as well as in concerns over the new digital or virtual spaces constantly emerging and bringing with them political, social, and legal questions. Many of these (both of the past and present, real and virtual) may too easily be construed as special, deviant, and free, and be idealized under what I will argue is the ossified version of heterotopia as any other or heterogeneous disconnected space. Yet the designated in Foucault's work is not simply an other, deviant space, but, as a real or virtual instantiation of a utopian ideal, heterotopic space carries the potential for abuse, for the violent rounding of real comers that refuse to conform to the ideal, or merely for ignoring the parts of the instantiation that do not fit. More importantly, these spaces, and the violence that accompanies them, function to maintain the network of places that constitute normal space.Neuromancer is an excellent vehicle for elaborating the complexity of Foucault's heterotopology, as well as the difficulties that can emerge from attempts to deploy it theoretically. Not only was it composed and published in the same theoretical milieu (i.e. with similar concerns about space and life in a late capitalist world) in which Different Spaces came to prominence, but it also reflects many of the spatial arrangements that Foucault posits. Both the text itself and the critical writing around the text can serve as examples for describing Foucault's theories and the ways in which critics deploy such theories by applying them to relevant or popular cultural productions. The body of literature surrounding cyberpunk and Neuromancer in particular3 offers a unique example of repetition and fashion in theoretical terminology. As the bulk of this criticism dates from the late eighties and early nineties, the conversation often comes back to the idea of networked space, global connectivity, and the dominance of so-called postmodern themes in science fiction.4Literature, in this case Neuromancer, serves as an object-anchor, something that can be returned to, speculated upon, something that gives shape to the theory at hand. It is, strictly speaking, unnecessary in the theoretical domain to bring such an object to the fore. However, for my purposes here, it is beneficial to have an objective counterpoint to the abstraction of theorizing spaces-in-relation. …

Literature After Ranciére: Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Gibson's Neuromancer

SummaryIn this article the implications of Jacques Ranciére's far-reaching notions of “the distribution of the sensible”, “dissensus” and the “three regimes of art” (particularly for literature) are explored. Kazuo Ishiguro's roman noir entitled When We Were Orphans and William Gibson's dark science fiction novel Neuromancer are examined to demonstrate the novelty of Ranciére's thought, in terms of which the cherished categories of literary orthodoxy are surpassed. Specifically, Ranciére challenges the usual distinction between premodern “representational literature” and modern self-referential literature, and introduces a radically historical manner of appropriating the art and literature of an era. His distinction between three regimes of art (the “ethical regime of images”, the “representative regime of the arts” and the “aesthetic regime of art”) are fundamental in understanding the capacity of art and literature to contribute discursively to the “(re)distribution of the sensible”, or the symbolic (re)configuration of social and political space, by disrupting the conventional space of the “sensible” through “dissensus”.

The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction

Abstract Novels and short stories written since the last decades of the nineteenth century and employing discourses of technology have contributed to shaping the idea of the “posthuman condition” in the West to such a degree that some critics already feel entitled to announce the Age of the Posthuman. This essay interrogates some of the embarrassingly quixotic proposals of posthumanism, taking H. G. Wells's Time Machine (1895), William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2004) as paradigmatic texts exploring patterns of mutation, virtuality, and bioengineering. In their concern for the apocalyptic and their sometime depiction of the glorious moment of Herculean victory over classical “human” man (or the “liberal subject”), these novels articulate the Western self's undaunted desire for the perfect Other, implying critical and even ironic gestures that question the propagation of a “new” human condition or the idea of absolute boundaries of the human.

The Dream of a Cyberpunk Future? Entelechy, Dialectical Tension, and the Comic Corrective in William Gibson's Neuromancer

We argue the comic frame, as described by Kenneth Burke, can serve as a vehicle for critical self-reflection and social critique. William Gibson's Neuromancer is a work of cyberpunk science fiction that details a future that closely resembles the present. The book exemplifies this process of encouraging self-reflection because it calls the trends of the present into question by imagining what kind of future they will construct. Gibson's future is simultaneously exciting and devastating. The dialectical tension between these oppositional ideas opens up a discursive space for audiences to begin the process of critical self-reflection about the technological trends of contemporary society. Gibson rhetorically constructs this tension through incongruity, irony, and casuistic stretching, thus fostering a corrective perspective.

The (D)evolution of the Cyberwoman?

In this paper, we examine Donna Haraway's idea of a liberating potential of cyborgization in the light of popular culture products related to organized work. We consider two different takes on this issue: women as technology and technology as women, and we start with the successive versions of Stepford Wives (the novel, the 1975 movie and the 2004 movie), and continue by tracing the evolution of the character of a cyberwoman, from William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Idoru (1996), to Trinity from the Matrix trilogy. We show that cyborgization does not automatically denote liberalization, and suggest that the much greater popularity of the Matrix films compared to the intellectual projects of William Gibson means that stereotypes and strong plots survive, finding ever new forms of expression. We end the paper by pointing out the relevance of popular culture models for work in contemporary homes and other workplaces.

Shifting Realities? Changing Concepts of Religion and the Body in Popular Culture and Neopaganism

This article focuses on the analysis of the way in which ideas about religion and the body—in its relationship with technological innovation—are portrayed in some significant science-fiction books and films since the 1980s and on similar ideas in Neopaganism. I aim to show that, while in some cases we can trace a direct influence of popular culture on Neopaganism, it is possible to observe a relation between changes in science-fiction works and changes in Neopaganism: both reflect and express changes in society at large. By examining ideas of the body, technology and religion in Gibson's Neuromancer, David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, the article shows how new ideas can be used in a counter-cultural way or to strengthen existing power structures. The second part of the article considers whether there is a direct relationship between changes in popular culture and changes in Neopaganism or whether we can talk of a convergence of themes; it does this by examining how Neopagans have used and re-shaped ideas found in science fiction and fantasy. Finally, three key changes in Neopaganism are highlighted, changes that correspond to those found in significant popular culture works.

A Possibility of New Subject in Posthumanism and William Gibson's Neuromancer

A Possibility of New Subject in Posthumanism and William Gibson's Neuromancer

Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology by Daniel Punday (review)

748 Reviews Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology. By Daniel Punday. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2003. x + 234pp. ?42.50. ISBN 1-4039-6241-3. Daniel Punday announces that 'After a decade of suspicion about language's ability to referto anything beyond itself,the body has emerged as a site where the power and problems of reference play themselves out' (p. 1). He argues that narratology, with its insistence on abstraction, 'has had difficultydealing with the concrete historical object of the human body', while new historicism 'has made no attempt to generalize its analysis of the body in these narratives beyond the particular historical moment that it studies' (p. 9). His own approach uses the body as a catalyst for a combination of elements from both; the resulting synthesis should be taken into account by any serious student of critical theory, especially if the body is a main focus of interest. Punday briskly summarizes the views ofa host oftwentieth-century critics,with every point clarified by a well-chosen illustration from a wide range of Western narrative, discursive, and dramatic literature, extending fromclassical Greek epic and tragedy to modern science fiction. Such an erudite scholar need not fear that plain speaking will incur loss of academic dignity. Consequently, the reader finds the following down-toearth items on the critical agenda: 'we can ask how the body is used as a component of stories', and 'a corporeal narratology can ask how the body contributes to our ways of speaking about and analyzing narrative' (p. ix). Punday's theory, though expressed with admirable clarity, is sophisticated and complex: not every body can be a narrative body. He claims that 'one of the essential conditions for meaningful narrative is to sort bodies from nonbodies' (p. 58). This point is explicated by a contrast between the status of Polynices' corpse in Sophocles' Antigone, 'endowed with cultural and familial significance', and that of corpses in 'most contemporary popular action films and adventure stories', where, 'once the characters are dead, their bodies are inanimate and thus, narratively at least, no longer bodies at all' (p. 59). Punday shows how, in Marge Piercy's He, She and It, the heroine's, and consequently the reader's, attention is directed to the problematic nature ofthe body by her interest in a 'very human-like robot' (p. 58). And what can we make of a novel like William Gibson's Neuromancer, where a character 'is wired with virtual reality technology so that he can share in the physical experiences of another character' (p. 122)? Much of Narrative Bodies1 interest lies in the exciting critical and narrative possibilities that arise from the difficultyof defining the term 'body'. On some rare occasions, an even wider range of reference might have filled gaps or removed obscurities. The philosophie difficultyof 'making truthfulclaims' (p. 20) about fictitious characters provokes a laborious analysis of possible-world theory, in which the statements 'I hope that it stops raining this afternoon' and 'I could bake a cake if I'd stopped at the grocery' (pp. 20-21) are ofTeredas parallels to the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes lives in London' (p. 19). Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry could have saved a lot of trouble, with its reminder that the author of fiction 'nothing af? firms,and therefore never lieth'. It would also be interesting to see how discussion of Tristram Shandy might enrich the argument, especially in Chapter 1, 'Conceiving Modern Narrative', where developments in fiction from the early eighteenth century onwards are intimately related to changing theories about fertilization and embryology . At least, its absence should have been explained. Even without Sterne's help, however, Punday has created a convincing argument?or rather,as he says of Foucault and Butler (p. 109), constructed a very good 'plot'. University of Reading Carolyn D. Williams ...

Corporate Publishing and Canonization: Neuromancer and Science-Fiction Publishing in the 1970s and Early 1980s

Since its initial publication as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1984, William Gibson's Neuromancer has been established as one of the most influential and respected novels in the history of its genre, as well as in mainstream literary culture. It won the three major awards in the science-fiction field that year—the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick awards—and has since gone on to receive critical treatment rarely accorded to novels that were initially marketed as genre science fiction. Indeed, it is ostensibly responsible for spawning an entire subgenre—cyberpunk—and has become standard fare on syllabuses for literature courses of all varieties. 1 It has been translated into languages from Magyar to Japanese to Danish, and has been published in numerous printings and editions—from a Gollancz hardcover published in London in 1984 to a Phantasia Press limited hardcover "collector" edition in 1986, from a tenth-anniversary deluxe edition to a graphic novel. A partial explanation for this attention is the skill with which Gibson maps the dystopic spatial scenes of a late capitalist culture increasingly familiar to the audience that received and continues to receive his work. Neuromancer is often read as a potent example of the kind of postmodern fiction that attempts to address late capitalism and the increasing presence [End Page 187] of corporate power within our global landscape. 2 In fact, in his influential description of his vision of the postmodern cultural scene, Fredric Jameson calls Gibson's cyberpunk fiction "the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself." 3 The novel's plot involves Case, a strung-out computer hacker who is hired to perform a task he does not understand for a force he is not allowed to identify. He hooks up with Molly, a gunslinger with optical implants and retractable talons, and together they embroil themselves in a monumental hack of the Tessier-Ashpool corporate enclave, involving Molly's physical might and Case's fearless travels through "cyberspace." The complex machinations of the plot pose a challenge to even the most astute reader, yet Gibson's map of a future determined by corporate power continues to be a major draw for those interested in his articulation of a rift between corporate monopoly culture and the criminal underclass that is forced to position itself both within and against it. Indeed, critical readings of Neuromancer continually explore the ambiguous relationship between the book's corporate upper culture and its deviant, displaced subcultures. What I will argue here is that the general championing of Gibson's text is intimately related to its situation within a particular print environment. Specifically, the initial critical success and continuing interest of Neuromancer have much to do with the situation of science-fiction publishing in 1984, when the novel was first released by Ace Books as part of editor Terry Carr's Science Fiction Specials Series. I want to explore the relationship between Carr's series, the ethos of Gibson's novel, and the complex world of science-fiction publishing in which both the series and the novel were situated, in order to argue that the science-fiction community that initially received Neuromancer with high praise was particularly ready to embrace the sort of underclass, subcultural challenge to corporate might that it evokes. I hope to show that the relationship between the corporate book marketplace and the subculture made up by science-fiction writers and readers is analogous to the relationship within the novel between the world of Case and his deviant companions, and the corporate world of the dystopian cityscape and the Tessier-Ashpool monolith that vies to control it. Throughout the 1980s, the science-fiction subculture articulated itself both as aware of increasingly stratified divisions between its own self- identification and the demands of corporate culture, and as ironically incapable of resisting the necessity of strapping itself into the machine...

The Postmodern Imaginary in William Gibson's Neuromancer

The Postmodern Imaginary in William Gibson's Neuromancer

Fleshing Out the Maelstrom

Fleshing Out the Maelstrom

Flesh

Flesh

This may Look like Science Fiction, But...

This may Look like Science Fiction, But...

The contemporary space of the border: Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and William Gibson's Neuromancer

(1998). The contemporary space of the border: Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and William Gibson's Neuromancer. Textual Practice: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 429-442.