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Understanding William Gibson
\"Gerald Alva Miller Jr.'s Understanding William Gibson is a thoughtful examination of the life and work of William Gibson, author of eleven novels and twenty short stories. Gibson is the recipient of many notable awards for science fiction writing including the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's iconic novel, Neuromancer, popularized the concept of cyberspace. With his early stories and his first trilogy of novels,Gibson became the father figure for a new genre of science fiction called \"cyberpunk\" that brought a gritty realism to its cerebral plots involving hackers and artificial intelligences. This study situates Gibson as a major figure in both science fiction history and contemporary American fiction, and it traces how his aesthetic affected both areas of literature. Miller follows a brief biographical sketch and a survey of the works that influenced him with an examination that divides Gibson's body of work into early stories, his three major novel trilogies, and his standalone works. Miller does not confine his study to major works but instead also delves into Gibson's obscure stories, published and unpublished screenplays, major essays, and collaborations with other authors. Miller's exploration starts by connecting Gibson to the major countercultural movements that influenced him (the Beat Generation, the hippies, and the punk rock movement) while also placing him within the history of science fiction and examining how his early works reacted against contemporaneous trends in the genre. These early works also exhibit the development of his unique aesthetic that would influence science fiction and literature more generally. Next a lengthy chapter explicates his groundbreaking Sprawl Trilogy, which began with Neuromancer. Miller then traces Gibson's aesthetic transformations across his two subsequent novel trilogies that increasingly eschew distant futures either to focus on our contemporary historical moment as a kind of science fiction itself or to imagine technological singularities that might lie just around the corner. These chapters detail how Gibson's aesthetic has morphed along with social, cultural, and technological changes in the real world. The study also looks at such standalone works as his collaborative steampunk novel, his attempts at screenwriting, his major essays, and even his experimental hypertext poetry. The study concludes with a discussion of Gibson's lasting influence and a brief examination of his most recent novel, The Peripheral, which signals yet another radical change in Gibson's aesthetic\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction
Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction.
Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to “self-cultivate.” Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault’s biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience.
Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.
eBook
Autonomous
Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack's drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?
BOOK
From Punk to Cyberpunk: History, Time, and Nostalgia in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and The Candy House (2022)
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is a highly self-conscious, often playful, postmodern literary romp that nevertheless takes on some serious issues. Of these, the one that is most central to the text is the issue of time and the ways in which time ultimately takes us all down. However, the novel is no mere meditation on aging and mortality; it inserts its exploration of a seemingly universal human experience into a very specific historical context spanning roughly from the 1970s into the 2020s. Meanwhile, its coverage was extended with publication of a 2022 sequel in The Candy House, which also overlaps with Goon Squad in ways that make it as much a companion as a sequel. Indeed, it makes sense to read The Candy House less as a sequel and more as a new installment in what is becoming a long-term serial novel. Still, The Candy House is much more critical than Goon Squad of the nostalgia with which aging and the passing of time tempt us all, while tilting generically much more toward science fiction. In particular, the punk rock music around which Goon Squad revolves is replaced in The Candy House with a cyberpunk emphasis on new technologies that offer dramatic new possibilities for human experience while also threatening to erode human experience altogether.
Journal Article
The future of control/The control of the future: Global (dis)order and the weaponisation of everywhere in 2074
In this article, I am going to suggest that questions of societal and political control will be fundamental to the challenges humanity faces in the next 50 years, a continuation of the political and social problems of modernity but playing out in a range of political contexts and with a range of technological ‘tools’. Technicians of security will attempt to manage the disorder and insecurity that results from the potential weaponisation of everything, to use a phrase from Mark Galeotti, and the weaponisation of everywhere, a condition where the state will be seeking to control a range of emerging terrains and domains. But at the same time, while societies in 2074 might be confronting conditions that are an intensification of modern political problems, there is the possibility that the impact of climate emergencies and other ecological/technological dangers might produce global disorder unlike anything experienced in modernity, radically transforming (or mutilating) the ‘material’ foundations of international politics, presenting us with problems unlike anything encountered before. At this point, as Bruno Latour suggested, we might have to depart (for our own survival and the survival of others) from the ideas about politics and economy that we have ‘inherited’ from modernity.
Journal Article
(Dis)embodied Labour?: Assessing the Body under Capitalism in William Gibson’s Neuromancer
Science fiction writer William Gibson is widely recognised for revolutionising the field as he is often considered to be the father of the sub-genre called cyberpunk. He had a significant cultural impact and his seminal novel
has been lauded for the use of ‘cyberspace.’ The concept of ‘cyberspace’ posits the notion of disembodiment, which postulates the probable dissolution of the duality between the mind and the body and the subsequent transgression of this binary. It promises a space beyond the mortal flesh, but it also reinstates the power relations that we get to experience in the real world. The novel offers an insight into transgressions of the limitations of the flesh; however, in Gibson’s narrative there seems to be no overcoming the relentless assault of capitalism onto the bodies. In other words, the power relations of the real world are also implicated in the virtual space of
’s characters. This article will look into disembodied labour and how the body of the worker becomes the site that the capitalists manipulate and control for their own profit, and almost always at the expense of the well-being of the worker.
Journal Article
Here Be Dragons: The Evolution of Cyberspace from William Gibson to Neal Stephenson
The article focuses on the evolution of cyberspace from a myth-critical perspective: the presence of irrational and fantasy elements in seemingly rational and scientific cyberpunk as a subgenre of hard science fiction. Our research primarily focuses on two significant works: William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (1984-1988), an icon of early cyberpunk, and Neal Stephenson’s
(1992), a switch to postcyberpunk. Moreover, we consider the other works of a broad genre of cyberpunk including
movies and conclude that the cyberpunk of the 1980s and 1990s presented cyberspace as an enchanted
and blurred the line between rationality and irrationality, technology and magic. Emerging as a way of escaping the real world, as hope for immortality, transcendence or transgression (Foucault), the cyberpunk ‘matrix’ followed in the footsteps of fantasy, myth, religion, and utopia. In our view, the postcyberpunk ‘Metaverse’ of the 1990s is more ironical and ‘realistic’ as it appears, and the more familiar and routine the cyberspace became to people, the less romantic and mysterious it turned out to be. Nevertheless, the nostalgic attempts to return to the old, fantasy model of cyberspace were made in postcyberpunk almost immediately after its emergence.
Journal Article
Techno-Religion and Cyberspace Spirituality in Dystopian Video Games
Once a niche part of the cyber community, video games today represent one of the major industries and “the combination of technology and spiritualist narratives”. In the cyberspace dedicated to video game trivia, we can find intimate reports of players who claim that video games impacted them spiritually or that they felt unity with the spirit of the universe. By analyzing three video games (Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Cyberpunk 2077, and Death Stranding), the author aims to explore how spirituality and cyberspace interact in narratives that follow the mentioned games and the interface that pulls the player deeper into the storyline. These games vary in styles and approaches and do not tend to support a view of one true God or any mainstream religion. Therefore, an intricate relationship between cyberspace, algorithmic patterns, and spirituality make these games different and exciting for examination. The author demonstrates the unique perception of spirituality and ideas that influenced the creation of these new spiritual cyberspaces within video games, especially New Age concepts of technopagans such as singularitarians and transhumanists.
Journal Article