Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson

Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson DANI CAVALLARO THE ATHLONE PRESS CYBERPUNK AND CYBERCULTURE This page intentionally left blank CYBERPUNK AND CYBERCULTURE SCIENCE FICTION AND THE WORK OF WILLIAM GIBSON DANI CAVALLARO THE ATHLONE PRESS London & New Brunswick NJ First published in 2000 by THE ATHLONE PRESS 1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG and New Brunswick, New Jersey © Dani Cavallaro 2000 Dani Cavallaro has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 485 00412 7 HB 0 485 00607 3 PB Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested Distributed in the United States, Canada and South America by Transaction Publishers 390 Campus Drive Somerset, New Jersey 08873 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead To Paddy, with love This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface ix A brief guide to the book xvii Introduction: Science fiction and cyberpunk 1 1 Cyberpunk and virtual technologies 23 2 Cyberpunk, technology and mythology 41 Technology and mythology: origins 41 Cyborgs 44 Myth and religion in cyberpunk 52 Fiction, theory and the language of science 63 3 Cyberpunk and the body 72 The cyberbody 72 Idoru: the body as personality construct 79 The ghost 83 The stranger 88 Burning Chrome and Mona Lisa Overdrive: the body as commodity 92 The doll 105 4 Cyberpunk, gender and sexuality 109 Technologies of the gendered subject 109 Gender roles in cyberpunk 121 Virtual sex 126 5 Cyberpunk and the city 133 Science and space 134 Digital maps: ON/OFF 140 Venice 146 Space and narrative structure 150 6 Cyberpunk and the Gothic 164 CONTENTS The uncanny 167 Layering and architecture 172 Families 184 Fashion 193 Time zones 198 Epilogue: Cyberpunk and memory 204 References 215 Guide to further reading 237 Bibliography 241 Index 251 viii PREFACE CYBERSPACE – A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the bank of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding. (William Gibson)1 Messiness, not order, is the basic stuff of the universe . and there is nothing these entities which used to think of themselves as human beings can or will ever be able to do about it. (Nick Land)2 The ‘memory’ of loneliness is the fear of future loneliness. (David Punter)3 In contemporary western and westernized cultures, people are sur- rounded by an increasingly wide range of tangible products that seem to impart a sense of solidity to their lives. Objects such as mobile phones, computers, portable physiotherapy units, personal stereos, microwave ovens, video recorders and fax machines (to mention but a few examples) are integral components of many people’s everyday existence. Often, they are regarded not merely as useful tools for the accomplishment of practical tasks but actually as defining aspects of people’s identities, lifestyles and value systems. PREFACE They thus become comparable to prostheses, the artificial supports used by medical technology to complete otherwise lacking physical organisms. However, the aura of solidity surrounding those com- modities and their human users is something of an illusion. Indeed, technologically mass-produced objects and their consumers are incessantly caught in cultural operations – centred on advertising, the media and the information industry – that are not so much con- cerned with tangible products as with images, fashions and styles. The material CD player or laptop PC one happens to own, for example, is far less significant than the immaterial images or ideas of such objects promoted by designers and advertisers. Moreover, those images and ideas keep shifting, being constantly modified by the introduction of minimal differences that rapidly consign even the most attractive products to obsolescence. It would therefore be pre- posterous to view the sense of solidity conveyed by certain products as anything more than a fantasy. William Gibson’s classic definition of cyberspace quoted above highlights the fantastic quality of many of our quotidian experiences. The solidity of many of the products we consume is, by and large, a hallucination – something delusory, illusory, mirage-like. Yet Gibson’s definition also suggests that our illusions and mirages form the basis of a kind of consensus by being continuously shared by large groups of people. This sharing is achieved by transforming individual experiences into collective representations. Advertising, the media and the information industry capitalize on the translation of people’s subjective desires, emotions and fantasies into images of ideal and desirable products. Such images bypass individual tastes and preferences by being presented as universally appealing. They thus create a curious notion of commonality, based on the assump- tion that belonging to a culture amounts to desiring the same com- modities desired by virtually any other individual inhabiting that culture. In this illusory community, people are often little more than anonymous strangers to one another: all that connects them is an abstract network of representations. They are characters in a narrative, or actors in a play, who roughly know the plot without being familiar with the rest of the cast. The consensus produced by contemporary technoculture is always a product of contingent trends and is accordingly open to ongoing redefinition. It is clearly not founded upon the values of the Enlightenment. In its western conception, that philosophy grounds x PREFACE the possibility of intellectual and ethical agreement among humans in the principles of reason, progress and common sense, supported by the idealization of science and technology as unproblematically rational discourses, by the demonization of the body as inferior matter, and by the discrediting of myth as superstition. Cyberpunk foregrounds the provisional status of all definitions of value, ration- ality and truth in a radical rejection of the Enlightenment ethos. It amalgamates in often baffling ways the rational and the irrational, the new and the old, the mind and the body, by integrating the hyper- efficient structures of high technology with the anarchy of street subcultures. This book explores the issues outlined in the preceding paragraphs in two ways. First, it assesses the impact of postmodern science and digital technology in terms of both their current relevance and their relationship with older structures of meaning, such as mythology. Second, it investigates the interplay between specialized forms of technological expertise and everyday discourses pertaining to the urban setting, the fashion and health industries, approaches to sexuality and gender, education, and entertainment. As to the choice of Gibson’s work as a lens through which these issues may be exam- ined, the following rationale obtains: Gibson is referred to in legion articles, essays, chapters in books and websites. However, analyses of his work tend to be cursory, often superficial and almost invariably repetitive. If Gibson has, as many argue, indeed become a cult figure or guru, it would seem worth investigating in depth both his work and the reasons behind his gaining such a status. At the same time, it is necessary to study Gibson’s cyberpunk in relation to other authors who have likewise engaged with the fate of advanced technocultures and directly or indirectly helped to shape cyberpunk as a genre. Cyberculture, an environment saturated by electronic technology, and its fictional representation in cyberpunk compel us to reassess drastically ideas of time, reality, materiality, community and space. The gap between the present and the future becomes narrower and narrower, as the futuristic fantasies of classic science fiction turn out to be integral parts of the here-and-now. As Bruce Sterling has observed, ‘The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction, but in a truly science-fictional world.’4 The here-and-now, moreover, can hardly be called real, since it is more a product of media-based images and simulations than a tangible state of affairs. It is the xi PREFACE transient effect of an abstract play of data that insistently blurs the distinction between human memory and electronic memory, material space and virtual space. The reassessment of conventional notions of reality is fundamentally brought about by cultural changes initiated by technology. However, the rhetoric through which these changes are narrated and charted reverberates with images drawn from older traditions and belief systems. Classical mythology, voodoo, spiritualism, neo-Christian cults and a whole theology of artificial intelligences constantly interact with modern and postmodern technologies. Cyberpunk has not only redefined current understandings of science fiction. It has

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