Virtual Reality As Plot Device: Cyberspace to Metaverse
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194 VIRTUAL GEOGRAPHIES ½¾ potential of virtual reality emerges when it is used as a plot device, as part of a stage setting, or as a virtual dream state. Cyberspace as plot device enables role-switching (Cadigan) and slipping into other characters’ points of view (Gibson). Stephenson is most explicit about the metafictional aspects of cyberspace, which sets Snow Crash at a remove from genre roots in science fiction but in closer proximity to the mainstream. Cyberpunk will undoubtedly be remembered as an important moment within the development of science fiction, as well as an im- portant step in the evolution of the postmodern. Cyberpunk shows close connections with postmodern issues through its punk attitude, which imported a new self-consciousness into science fiction. Its postmodern features can be traced to its innovations in plot device, which promise to provide a source of cross-fertilization between many other genres and media in years to come. Last but not least, cyberpunk shares semantic fields, images, and models with recent scientific theories as well as postmodern think- ing. They coincide around the notion of non-linear, dynamic, and complex structures which emerge as a metanarrative of the post- modern, no matter how fervently Lyotard may try to deny the exis- tence of such a common denominator. The notion is embedded in different discourses, contexts, and disciplines, pointing to the value of complexity and new concepts of order arising out of chaos and disorder. Non-linear complexity is part of a different conceptual- ization of our environment, its interdependencies, and the more humble role we humans must learn to play within it. The sudden appearance of order in a new perception of pattern and structure is also the dominant discourse underlying the emergence of artificial intelligence. Virtual Reality as Plot Device: Cyberspace to Metaverse [...] the genre of science fiction must be defined by its unique fic- tional world or worlds. (Malmgren 2) ½¾ Conclusions: Postmodern Intersections 195 “Despite its many shortcomings [...], ‘cyberspace’ was unsurpassed as a narrative device tailored to the needs of sf,” writes Ross Farness in his evaluation of Gibson, and he is one of the very few critics to state explicitly this important contribution of cyberpunk to the genre of science fiction (461).1 Inset virtual worlds can in turn contain other worlds.2 Drawing attention to the rules and processes involved in the creation of these worlds implicitly reflects the construction of science fiction worlds in general.3 If one agrees with Malmgren, who also sees science fiction’s “generic distinctiveness [...] not in its story but in its world, the constant reference to the construction of worlds also reflects on the genre as a whole” (7). The absence of explicit self-referentiality should not be interpreted as a lack of quality or as a weaker version of postmodern fiction but should prompt consideration of science fiction’s changing self- understanding as a genre. Dominated by the goal to entertain, by action and adventure plots, science fiction cannot be neatly fitted into concepts like extrapolation, subjunctivity or fabulation. These critical concepts may account for a certain group of works within science fiction but not for the genre as a whole. The peculiarities of science fiction are threefold: semantic processes of construction, and inventions of new fictional worlds are only two elements, which the reader must synthesize into a coherent whole. In most discus- sions of science fiction the critical role of the reader is neglected. 1 Others who have talked about Gibson’s cyberspace have used it as a symptom of “postmodern spatiality” in the same way that Jameson has raised hyperreality to the trope for postmodernity (Johnston American Fic- tion 250). In this sense, cyberspace exemplifies postmodernity and reflects the world that we live in. In my analysis, cyberspace is discussed as figura- tive space, since it emerges from the interaction of metaphors forming semantic networks. 2 John Johnston has also singled out the importance of “spatial multi- plicity” or the “heterogeneity of the spaces depicted” in Neuromancer as one of its most interesting aspects (190). 3 Kerman argues the same for the representation of virtual reality in film where the “synthetic images suggest viscerally the possibility that the space inside the computer might contain a model of the world, or even a separate real world operating by its own laws” (192). .