University of CAPE TOWN

The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University AN ANALYSIS OF SELECTED "CYBERPUNK" WORKS BY WILLIAM GIBSON, PLACED IN A CULTURAL AND SOCIO-POLITICAL CONTEXT. MATHEW BLATCHFORD Town Cape Thesis presentedof for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English UNIVERSITYUniversity OF CAPE TOWN January 2005 2 Abstract. This thesis studies William Gibson's "cyberspace trilogy" (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). This was an extremely interesting and significant development in 1980s science fiction. It was used to codifY and promote the "cyberpunk" movement in science fiction at that time, which this thesis also briefly studies. Such a study (at such a relatively late date, given the rapid pace of change in popular culture) seems valuable because a great deal of self-serving and mystifYing comment and analysis has served to confuse critical understanding about this movement. It seems clear that cyberpunk was indeed a new development in science fiction (like other developments earlier in the twentieth century) but that the roots of this development were broader than the genre itself. However, much of the real novelty of Gibson's work is only evident through close analysis of the texts and how their apparent ideological message shifts focus with time. ThisTown message is inextricably entwined with Gibson's and cyberpunk's technological fantasias. Admittedly, these three texts appear to have been, broadly speaking, representations of a liberal U.S. world-view reflectingCape Gibson's own apparent beliefs. However, they were also expressions of a ofkind of technophilia which, while similar to that of much earlier science fiction, possessed its own special dynamic. In many ways this technophilia contradicted or undermined the classical liberalism nominally practiced in the United States. However, the combination of this framework and this dynamic, which appears both apocalyptic and Universityconservative, appears in some ways to have been a reasonably accurate prediction of the future trajectory of the U.S. body politic -- towards exaggerated dependency on machines to resolve the consequences of an ever increasingly paranoid fantasy of the entire world as a threat. (It seems likely that this was also true, if sometimes to a lesser degree, of the cyberpunk movement as a whole.) While Gibson's work was enormously popular (both commercially and 3 critically) in the 1980s and early 1990s, very little of this aspect of his work was taken seriously (except, to a limited degree, by a few Marxist and crypto-Marxist commentators like Darko Suvin). This seems ironic, given the avowedly futurological context of science fiction at this time. Mathew Blatchford January 2005 Town Cape of University 4 Acknowledgements. I should like to thank all those who encouraged me to complete this thesis even when I wanted to abandon it after years of neglecting it: my beloved wife Felicity Wood and her parents Bob and Van, my long-suffering supervisor Professor Lesley Marx, the administrative staff at the University of Fort Hare who gave me a semester off to work on it again, my therapist Margaret Anema, and everybody who ever asked how the thesis was going, no matter how I scowled at them. Town Cape of University 5 Contents Page Introduction. Problematising Cyberpunk, Introducing William 6 Gibson. Chapter 1. Neuromancer: The Maturing of Gibson's Cyberpunk. 52 Chapter 2. Count Zero: The Trilogy Takes Shape. 107 Chapter 3. Mona Lisa Overdrive: Conclusion or Deferral? 159 Conclusion.After It Changed: Post-Cyberpunk and Late Gibson. 203 Bibliography 251 Town Cape of University 6 Introduction. Problematising Cyberpunk, Introducing William Gibson. Science Fiction and the Origins of Cyberpunk. The appearance of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), harbinger of the science fiction genre which rapidly came to be called cyberpunk, seemed to promise a fundamental change in science fiction much like that initially promised by the 1960s "New Wave". Neuromancer was widely praised for its stylishness; it also dealt with technologies neglected by most science fiction writers of the period. It appeared to make a political intervention by challenging many conservative trends in Western society around the time of its appearance. It was entertaining, carefully crafted, and even incorporated social and literary issues which most popular fiction, and particularly science fiction, then ignored. Furthermore it appeared when science fiction seemed intellectually stagnant. While all these points appear to contain truths, cyberpunk's actual nature deserves close scrutiny, partly becauseTown so many claims have been made on its behalf The New Wave had been linked to (and had seen itself as emerging from) socio political ferment in Britain and the United StatesCape in the 1960s. Various British writers, like Michael Moorcock, Langdon Jones andof M. John Harrison, incoherently supported Situationism and the student radical movement. However, when these groups dissipated in the early 1970s, the British New Wave was left with apparently obsolete ideals and no constituency. Much of the U.S. New Wave endorsed similar movements in the U.S., (although generally less obviously radical ones, such as the Civil Rights or anti-Vietnam WarUniversity movements). These similarly ceased to be novel or even fashionable among most middle-class white intellectuals in the early 1970s. (Likewise, when feminist science fiction arose, using the space opened by the New Wave but aggressively condemning the New Wave's often rampant sexism, it carne to face comparable problems in the 1980s.) Thus New Wave science fiction seemed limited by time, space and dogma. 7 Cyberpunk, by contrast, seemed on a firmer footing, partly because it was technologically-oriented as well as socially-based. Its name was quickly coined - allegedly by Bruce Bethke, author of the cyberpunk satire Headcrash (1995) - suggesting its internal consistency. Its genesis-mythology is outlined by the theorist Larry McCaffery: The cyberpunk SF "movement" first came into prominence in 1984, when William Gibson's Neuromancer was published .... the seeds of its development were actually planted several years earlier, when Gibson and other writers later associated with cyberpunk began publishing stories and novels that had a different edge from other SF works dealing with similar issues .... In their works and in numerous, highly contentious public debates that took place at SF conferences and conventions, the cyberpunks presented themselves as "techno-urban-guerrilla" artists ... Town (McCaffery, 1994: 11-12) These emphatic declarations imply a value-systemCape to organise around and even an opponent to be challenged. The reference toof "a different edge" makes the genre appear novel -- often a vital quality for science fiction. Many of the stories in Bruce Sterling's seminal anthology Mirrorshades (1986) share a similar world-view: Tom Maddox's "Snake-eyes", Pat Cadigan's "Rock on", Marc Laidlaw's "400 Boys", John Shirley's "Freezone", Paul Di Filippo's "Stone Lives", are all chiefly about corporate or totalitarian rule resistedUniversity by the young or weak, links between technology and the body, and all but Laidlaw's are set in a plausible near-future. This unity of purpose implies that cyberpunk embodied a fairly coherent world-view -- although a distinctly monotonous one. Sterling argues that "it's possible to make broad statements about cyberpunk and to establish its identifYing traits" (Sterling, 1988: ix). suggesting that "[tJhe work of the 8 cyberpunks is paralleled throughout Eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop . cyberpunk is its literary incarnation" (Sterling, 1988: xi-xii). This claims cyberpunk as part of a broader culture, but fails to explain the links -- suggesting a desire rather than a reality. He adds, somewhat confusedly, that "[t]he advances of the sciences are so deeply radical ... that they can no longer be contained" (Sterling, 1988: xii), implying that science itself somehow threatens the socio-political establishment, rather than being its product. This supposed threat, or promise, must be acknowledged by cyberpunk writing, where "central themes spring up repeatedly .... of body invasion .... mind invasion . radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self' (Sterling, 1988: xiii). This implies that technological change was making the world fascinating, dangerous, and perhaps unpredictable. Sterling'S reference to a "hacker underground" where "a new alliance is becoming evident: an integration of technology and the Eighties counter-culture" (Sterling, 1988: xii), an idea laterTown used by technological publicists like Douglass Rushkoff, suggests a political dimension to cyberpunk - assuming that such a counter-culture existed in the form which Sterling implies. Yet Sterling locates this in the future; once again it isCape a desire rather than an observation. The title of his collection significantly ofrecalls his claim that "[m]irrored sunglasses have been a Movement totem since the early days of '82" (Sterling, 1988: xi). Darko Suvin notes sardonically that "mirrorshades

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