Space and the Re-Purposing of Materials and Technology in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Virtual Light

Submitted by Grigorios Iliopoulos

A thesis submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English and American Studies.

Supervisor: Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou June 2020

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Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between space and technology as well as the re-purposing of tangible and intangible materials in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Virtual

Light (1993). With attention paid to the importance of the cyberpunk setting. Gibson approaches marginal spaces and the re-purposing that takes place in them. The current thesis particularly focuses on spotting the different kinds of re-purposing the two works bring forward ranging from body alterations to artificial spatial structures, so that the link between space and the malleability of materials can be proven more clearly. This sheds light not only on the fusion and intersection of these two elements but also on the visual intensity of Gibson’s writing style that enables readers to view the multiple re-purposings manifested in thε pages of his two novels much more vividly and effectively.

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Keywords: William Gibson, cyberspace, utilization of space, marginal spaces, re-purposing, body alteration, technology

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou, for all her guidance and valuable suggestions throughout the writing of this thesis. I would also like to express my gratitude to my parents for their unconditional support and understanding.

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Table of Contents Abstract ...... 2 Acknowledgements …...... 4 Introduction …...... 6 Chapter One …...... 14 Neuromancer: Aberrant Spaces and Malleable Materials 1.1. Space 1.1.1. The Visual Element as a Main Indicator of Space …...... 14 1.1.2. Simulated & Artificial Spaces …...... 16 1.1.3. Flesh as a Confining Space …...... 19 1.1.4. Fear of Empty Space ...... 22 1. 2. Re-purposing 1.2.1. Peripheral Spaces …...... 23 1.2.2. Upper Class Re-Purposing …...... 25 Chapter Two …...... 27 Virtual Light: A Bridge Between Spaces and Purposes 2. 1. Space 2.1.1. The Visual Element as a Main Indicator of Space …...... 27 2.1.2. Space as Valuable and Regulated Commodity …...... 29 2.1.3. Natural Anarchism and Organic Growth …...... 32 2.1.4. Fractal Geometries …...... 36 2. 2. Re-purposing 2.2.1. Peripheral Spaces …...... 37 2.2.2. Brand Names as the Feeble Anchors Against Re-Purposing …..43 2.2.3. Religious Assimilation and Mysticism …...... 46 Conclusion…...... 49 Works Cited …...... 52 Short Bio …...... 56

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Introduction

This thesis focuses on the relationship between spaces and the re-purposing of materials and technology in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Virtual Light (1993). More specifically, it explores the marginal spaces that can be found in the technologically advanced societies of the two novels and the material transformations these societies undergo. With cyberpunk constituting the theoretical framework the two novels under exploration emerge from, one can claim that the analysis provided in the current project serves as a lens through which marginal spatiality and re-purposing can be examined. Dani Cavallaro highlights this when she writes that “the cyber and the punk components of cyberpunk constantly interact to produce varying constellations of the relationship between the glossy world of high technology and the murky world of addiction and crime” (24). This “murky world” that Cavallaro mentions is the aberrant space that lacks limitations because it expands beyond central authority while it allows for continuous experimentations with the way technology and materials are combined.

As regards the “glossy world of high technology,” one can claim that this world can mirror the recently digitalized world of the 1980s, the period during which both Neuromancer and Virtual

Light were written in an attempt to shed light on the technological and socio-cultural changes already taking place.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published in 1984 and won the Hugo, Phillip K.

Dick, and Nebula awards. Apart from its critical acclaim, the work also sold millions of copies and consolidated the use of the term “cyberspace” which Gibson coined a few years earlier in his short story “Burning Chrome” included in his synonymous collection published in 1982.

Neuromancer is considered by most the work that defined the still-hatching digital world of the 1980s and gave birth to cyberpunk along with its accompanying aesthetics.

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To truly understand the special touch with the 80s reality that the novel explores one needs to note Ken McLeod’s perception. The science-fiction writer and computer programmer at the time of the novel’s publication, advocated that the novel “projected from, and reflected back on, the world [he] lived and worked in” (“Neuromancer by William Gibson, book of a lifetime: An intricate and forgettable plot”). However, the novel did not only manage to gain its popularity due to its connection with the field suggests, because it responded was also tuned of informatics because of its subject matter and plot, but also, as McLeod suggests, because it responded to the need of programmers to visually represent their work. Gibson provided readers with a separate realm where digits and the electronic realm can be visually depicted, while also providing a footing to reality through the geography of the novel that corresponds to the readers’ world. Gibson’s cyberspace was unique in its approach because it managed to merge the field of informatics with everyday-reality while it gave to the conceptualization of cybernetics a brand new complexity and synthesizing ability in its attempt to respond to and capture everyday crises and concerns on a socio-cultural and political level.

The novel was the first of the Sprawl trilogy and it was followed by Count Zero in 1986 and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988. The trilogy explored the futuristic and cyberpunk world that Gibson created in short stories like “Burning Chrome,” “Johnny Mnemonic,” and “New

Rose Hotel” that were written before the publication of Neuromancer and were later assembled, along with other stories, in a collection also called Burning Chrome in 1986.

Virtual Light was published almost a decade later in 1993 and was nominated for a

Hugo award. The novel initiated the Bridge trilogy that was released during the 1990s with

Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties following in 1996 and 1999 respectively. Virtual Light explores another cyberpunk world: yet, this time this is a near-future setting that feels much more familiar to the reader than the one appearing in Neuromancer while maintaining its cyberpunk aesthetics.

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Much like with Neuromancer, Virtual Light was also seen by critics as a work of science fiction deeply connected to the present reality rather than escaping from it. Tuten writes in 1993 for the Los Angeles Times that the work is full of “assumptions about the future extrapolated from conditions of present-day life” (“Where Things Have Gone Kaput:

VIRTUAL LIGHT”). In Virtual Light, readers come across much more familiar settings of sprawling cities and inner city subcultures without the added complexities of cyberspace or outer space. This fits into Gibson’s writing that has attempted to bring his works closer to the present day reality, while still dealing with science fiction themes. Brian McHale has highlighted this relationship when he wrote that “[j]ust as postmodernism has borrowed ontological motifs from science fiction, so science fiction has in recent years begun to borrow from postmodernism” (Postmodernist Fiction 66), with Gibson’s works standing as a perfect example of the dialogue and intersection between these two areas of literary production.

Nevertheless, the critical response1 to the novel was not as unanimous as was the case with

Neuromancer and according to Ross Farnell there was a certain “silence” when it came to critics up until the publication of its sequel titled Idoru (459). This can possibly be explained by Gibson’s shift from the cyberspatial to the tangible fringes of cyberpunk culture. In addition, the fact that his first but celebrated trilogy had just been concluded may have created expectations to the readers for another Neuromancer, making it difficult for them to accept a novel that had moved away from the cyberspace Gibson had presented his readers with in the first three novels.

Since both novels are set in sprawling cities the element of space is prominent in both of Gibson’s works. Furthermore, with the introduction of “cyberspace” and the simulated

1 For a few more critical responses see John Leonard’s “ ‘Virtual Light’ is Mediocre, but Interesting.” and Lance Olsen’s “Virtual Light.”. Leonard suggests that “[t]he bad news is that Virtual Light is not as wonderful as Neuromancer (…) Virtual Light seems a bit thin after this prodigal inventiveness (…) The good news is that mediocre Gibson is interesting anyway.” (00:00:49-00:01:51) while Olsen after discussing all the positive aspects of Virtual Light also states that “ [t]he complex and deeply spiritual exploration of cyberspace that pervaded the Matrix Trilogy here gives way to very funny, if perhaps too easy, parody.” (ii)

Iliopoulos 9 experience of simstim technologies in Neuromancer other spatial realms emerge. Similarly, in

Virtual Light new dimensions of space are explored. Yet, as the Bridge trilogy inhabits a much more contemporary world compared to that of the Sprawl trilogy, its exploration of space has to do more with urban space and its transformative potential rather than the unlimited realm of cyberspace.

However, as I intend to prove in this thesis, the element of space is woven with the notions of re-purposing and customization as evidenced in the San Francisco Bridge in Virtual

Light and cyberspace in Neuromancer, both featuring as non-static and artificially constructed spaces usually located in the fringes of human society which allows them to be conceptualized from a radical point of view.

All the above highlight that space constitutes a very important element in Gibson’s works and especially in the two novels that this thesis is concentrating on. In both Neuromancer and Virtual Light, space is an integral part of the plot. In Neuromancer a great deal of the plot takes place in the cybernetic world of computers with some characters being computer programmers or hackers themselves hence cyberspace natives. Following the same pattern,

Gibson creates another parallel spatial realm in his later work only this time it is not electronic.

In Virtual Light, this new emerging space coexists and interacts with the mainstream world of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge which has turned into a vibrant even though marginal community. Both parallel spaces are very different from the known physical world in

Neuromancer or the city of San Francisco in Virtual Light. It is my claim that these peripheral spaces are there to highlight emerging realities that are yet unfamiliar to the rest of the world.

The main characters of the novels dwell into these marginal spaces which showcases their multi-dimensionality and organic power if viewed alongside mainstream society. Cyberspace or the Bridge is the way their inhabitants utilize materials and technology without being subjected to any centralized source of control.

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As regards the plot in the novels, in Neuromancer the reader explores a futuristic world of powerful and innovative technologies. People are able to inhabit cyberspace connected to machines, dolphins are able to communicate with people through brain augmentation, and even life can be extended with the use of cryogenics. The main protagonist is Case, a member of the underworld of Chiba City in Japan. As a “space cowboy” Case conducts illegal jobs in cyberspace due to which he is now punished by his former employer whom he tried to take advantage of. His punishment has incapacitated his access to the virtual space of the internet and hence has left him unemployed. Without his main talent, Case drifts to self-destructive behaviors until Molly Millions, a hired assassin, meets him and makes him an offer. Working for a shady ex-officer, Armitage, Case recovers his ability to go online and along with Molly and a few others plan an attack on the orbital Villa Straylight which is owned by the powerful

Tessier-Ashpool family. As the plot moves on, Case realizes that their real employer is an artificial intelligence program called Wintermute and its ultimate purpose is to merge with another AI called Neuromancer which goes against the existing laws that aim at restraining AIs and their autonomy.

Virtual Light is concerned with the unique case of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay

Bridge which had fallen in disuse and was later occupied by the underclass of San Francisco.

The reader should keep in mind that the novel was published in 1993 and it is set in the near future of 2006. In Gibson’s future, the gap between the two existing classes is vast which opens the novel to very different perspectives as these emerge from the two opposing sides.

Chevette and Rydell are the main characters of the book and none of them belongs to the ruling elite of San Francisco. Chevette is an orphan that grew up on the autonomous community of the Bridge under the protection and cold care of Skinner, an old, grumpy, and bedridden man. She works as a bicycle courier in the City of San Francisco and through her job she comes into contact with the elite of the city when she makes a delivery to an up-class

Iliopoulos 11 party. There she steals a pair of sunglasses from an annoying stranger only to discover later that the glasses contain the corporate plans of a big conglomerate for the city and its future which turns them into an extremely valuable as well as dangerous acquisition. The Sunflower

Corporation through its subsidiary, IntenSecure, hires people to hunt down Chevette in order to recover the glasses and it is at this point that Rydell, the other main character in the novel, enters the narrative. He is a former policeman who has left the force after an unfortunate incident with a drug-ridden shooter to be later employed by a private security firm called

IntenSecure. Another unlucky incident due to a hacker’s attack costs him his post with the particular firm. His supervisor offers him a post with Lucious Warbaby, an affiliate of the company, in San Francisco where he goes to help him track Chevette. Even though Rydell does not originate from the San Francisco underworld as Chevette does, he realizes that they both share similar experiences due to their unintended involvement into something sinister. Hence, he ends up helping Chevette in her attempt to evade the hired men of Sunflower Corporation with the help of his fanatically Catholic friend, Sublett, and a group of disaffected hackers.

In the chapters that follow an attempt has been made to locate the importance of space, as a concept, and the repurposing of materials and technology in Neuromancer and Virtual

Light. Moreover, the connection between marginal spaces and re-purposing is also elaborated upon. In particular, Chapter One focuses on Neuromancer and it is divided into two subsections, one concerning space and the other one concerning re-purposing. Chapter Two deals with Virtual Light and it is also divided in the aforementioned manner.

Chapter One deals with Neuromancer and the importance of visuality with regard to the conceptualization of space. Examples from the novel are provided where Gibson uses detailed visual descriptions in attempting to display different configurations of space.

Moreover, the variety of artificial and simulated spaces is also examined in the same chapter with references to Brian McHale’s and Timo Siivonen’s arguments. Finally, the fear of empty

Iliopoulos 12 space is presented as the major reason behind the dense descriptions and the crowded interiors found in the novel. Attention in the same chapter is also paid to the concept of re-purposing as it is evidenced in the descriptions of the peripheral spaces found in Neuromancer. In addition, emphasis is placed on the examination of re-purposing in relation to the activities of the upper- and middleclass communities appearing in the novel.

Chapter Two deals with Virtual Light and the connection that there is between visuality and space as regards the dense descriptions evidenced in the novel. With insights offered by

Elisabeth Sinn, Tatiani Rapatzikou, and Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory of fractals and fractality, the discussion that follows attempts to shed light on the anarchic environment of the Bridge and its independent growth alongside the discussion of the other autonomous spaces all of them featuring as examples of spatial configuration that Gibson conveys to the reader through his fictional narrative. The discussion is further supported by Dani Cavallaro’s observations about the simulacrum and Gibson’s own non-fiction writings, and Gilles Deleuze’s points about the interrelation of the copy and the original. The analysis continues with emphasis places on

Gibson’s visualization of the Bridge located in the city of San Francisco with reference to

Michel Foucault’s views about heterotopias. The chapter ends with attention paid to religion and mysticism as these feature in the pages of Virtual Light.

From all the above, it is clear that vision plays an important role in both works with regard to how place is approached and represented. Any of the peripheral spaces appearing in the two novels resort to re-purposing, as highlighted by the numerous reconfigurations they undergo in the course of the narrative. The chapters to follow attempt to bring various conceptualizations of space to the readers’ attention, pointing out at the same time the dynamic and imaginative potential of Gibson’s writings.

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Chapter One

Neuromancer: Aberrant Spaces and Malleable Materials

Neuromancer introduces readers to a new and electronically-driven spatial dimension, that of cyberspace. However, even if this is the most obvious innovation by Gibson it is not the only one. Gibson attempts to examine the possibilities and risks that emerge when technology fuses, in the world of the novel, with the human flesh and sphere of action rendering them malleable hence subjecting them to multiple alterations and transformations.

1.1. Space

1.1.1. The Visual Element as a Main Indicator of Space

In Neuromancer, William Gibson attempts to capture a realm that has never been explored before through the utilization of pioneering language, as is the case of “cyberspace,” or through the arrangement of words on the page.

A very clear example of how paramount the use of visuality is in Gibson’s

Neuromancer has to do with the digits that appear in the following page of the novel:

“CASE:0000

000000000

00000000” (210).

The columns of digits and words that appear for example here as well as in a few other pages of the novel (see pp. 211,218) constitute a different spatial alignment in contrast to the ordinary textual arrangement one encounters throughout the novel. Gibson could have made the very same words and zeros part of the usual page set up but he chooses a disruptive arrangement instead. This enables him to showcase the different orientation and spatial arrangement of the world of computers through the print medium of his novel bringing in this way the digital and the print in close proximity with one another.

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However, it is not only readers who are drawn to the visual quality of Gibson’s writing but also characters, as in Neuromancer, who experience their surroundings, whether it concerns their actual and physical space or their surrounding artificial cyberspace, through their vision.

Gibson provides a telling example of this when the main character, Case, asks Dixie to give him details about a certain defensive computer program and inquires specifically about “[w]hat did it look like, the visual?” (126).What matters in this example is the use of the word “visual” alongside the word “look”. There are certain other instances in the novel where Case “gaze[s] into the void of the matrix” and Dixie talks to Case about the previous defensive program that it “[doesn’t] look much, does it?” (127-128). A great deal of the characters’ understanding of their world directly derives from their cyberspatial experience, with vision serving as the sole steady point of reference in a new and wholly unpredictable cyberworld within which the physical and the electronically-generated space collide.

Another problem that Gibson must have faced when writing Neuromancer in the 1980s was the description of a computer virus. At a time when informatics was still taking its first steps Gibson resorts to visual effects for the effective communication of the characteristics and threatening nature of these complex computer programs. Gibson writes about a “Chinese virus

[that] was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void” (185).

Seeing the virus through the characters eyes, readers can acquire information about the nature of the program in a dense and vivid manner. With such a description Gibson immerses readers within cyberspace and familiarizes them with its own space and analogies. For example, one can assume that in the world of computers a human is much smaller than a “protean, enormous” virus that sucks all available space due to its suffocating expansion. This is an image that does not directly correspond to the realm of physical space that we inhabit. Therefore, such a visual

Iliopoulos 15 description further highlights the differences of the two realms and the pioneering aspects of the new spatial cosmos that the cyberspace represents.

1.1.2. Simulated and Artificial Spaces

The examples of artificial or simulated spaces in the novel are many with cyberspace and the simstim, being the system which allows the user to experience the sensory stimuli broadcasted, being the two most prominent examples. However, the simulation of the senses of the users and their broadcasting online is not a newfound idea. In the short story titled “Baby,

You Were Great”2 by Kate Wilhelm, the reader comes across a very similar apparatus that is used as a means of entertainment. As Wilhelm puts it, “[t]he gimmick was simple enough. A person fitted with electrodes in his brain could transmit their emotions, which in turn could be broadcast and picked up by the helmets to be felt by the audience” (411-412). The only difference between Gibson’s and Wilhelm's conceptualization of the electronic realm has to do with the former’s utilization of a subtle tiara instead of a chunky helmet : “He knew that the trodes he used and the plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cybermatrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim instead struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input”(Neuromancer 62).

Simstim and cyberspace are, according to Gibson, very similar in nature and function with the former focusing on the physical element and its experiences compared to the latter

(62). Even if simstim is more easily explained, cyberspace is a little more complex. Gibson describes it in Neuromancer as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators...[a] graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity” (59). This complexity is able to create

2 First published in 1968 in Orbit 2 magazine.

Iliopoulos 16 spatial occurrences and phenomena unfathomable in the physical space as we know it but possible in the future world depicted in Neuromancer. That is why Myers suggests that cyberspace is “an attempt at postmodern cartography” (888), since it details previously unknown spaces. Gibson presents in the novel a “room that folded upon itself through a dozen impossible angles like an origami crane” (192). Origami structures, apart from being an element of Nipponism3 common in Gibson’s works, are also typical of an alternative configuration of space. Paper folding techniques, known as ‘origami’ in Japanese, present a defiance of the stereotypical geometrical dimensions and pinpoint the ability of objects to readjust themselves as regards their spatial measurements. Cyberspace in Neuromancer constitutes the most obvious alternative, even though technologically generated, to physical space, with computer programs and AIs manifesting themselves visually as I have mentioned above. However, the artificial spaces of the novel are not limited to the intangible and sensory but expand into the tangible realm as well.

A major part of the plot of Neuromancer takes place in Freeside, an artificial habitat.

Freeside is mentioned in the novel as a “spindle” that orbits Earth (85) which also has a zero- gravity axis in its center (120). The description of this cylindrical construct presented in the novel has been probably influenced by the megastructures known as O’ Neil cylinders that were first suggested by the physicist Gerard K. O’Neil in the 1970s.4 The structures, much like the ones appearing in Neuromancer, are cylinders rotating around a central axis serving as artificially designed enclaves that can house buildings, lakes, forests and human populace.

Gibson also mentions a certain “Lado-Acheson system” that collects light from the outer part

3 The term “Nipponism” refers to Japanese words or phrases used in English, admiration and use of Japanese cultural elements and it can even be linked to Japanese nationalism when it is used within the context of the politics of the Far East. 4 More information on O’Neil’s proposals concerning the colonization of outer space and other such structures can be found in: O’Neil, Gerard. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. Collector's Guide Publishing, 2000.

Iliopoulos 17 of the cylinder space which is used for the needs of the human-inhabited interior. This method of procuring energy is also vital for O’Neil’s cylinders. These similarities do highlight, in my view, the connection that there is between imaginative spatial constructions and Gibson’s own fictional concepts. McHale in his study entitled Constructing Postmodernism (1992) also refers to similar artificial spaces and suggests that such extraterrestrial structures are common within cyberpunk writing and are strongly linked to postmodernism since they are synthesized by disparate materials and inhabited by people without assimilating into one homogeneous category (250-251).

The artificial space of Freeside occupies the existing void in order to provide more space for the ever-growing humanity that populates Neuromancer. This kind of habitable space differs from the physical habitat not only due to its artificiality but also due to its “unnatural” cylindrical. In Neuromancer the outside of the cylinder collects the much-needed energy for the celestial projections on the inside enabling the “narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system” to produce an “abstract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of recorded cloud” (Gibson 137). What I would like to point out here has to do with the fact that even when alternative spaces emerge, as the one featuring in Gibson’s novel, the human need for familiarity with its surrounding environment functions as a stimulus even when it comes to artificial or simulated versions of the human world.

Apart from the most obvious instances of simulated space in the novel, such as those mentioned above, another simulated space is present in Neuromancer, that of the drug-induced hallucinations that change the manner in which characters experience the physical or cybernetic space. In many instances in the novel, the physical body of the main character, Case, is referred to derogatorily as “meat” highlighting the experience of being within a non-drugged self. As

Gibson writes:

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The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the

drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much,

to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park

bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener stripped

diagonally with black and yellow (170)

As shown here, the experience produced by these artificial substances is so potent and its effects to reality so intense that the use of narcotics constitutes a separate space of its own. In the passage provided above. Gibson uses an array of different inanimate objects all of them mentioned in the same sentence as is also the case with the descriptions one finds in Virtual

Light that I am to comment in Chapter Two of the current thesis. But before that, the author provides examples of the altering nature of narcotics, “chrome skeleton corroding hourly” and

“drug-flesh replaced with the meat of life”, that highlight a shift from one condition to the next and even an evolution of tangible materials through drug use. In a telling example Gibson has one of his characters describe the effects of drug consumption to another by saying that “[i]t’s the ganja... They don’t make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him” (118-119; emphasis in original). This points to the distorting effect these substances can have on the user’s visual experiences leading to an illusive perception of the surrounding world, as it will be explained in the following section.

1.1.3. Flesh as a Confining Space

The narcotic substances mentioned in the novel create a separate space of illusion or at least one of an altered reality. However, the use of such substances is poignantly attributed to the characters’ desire to escape not just from their physical reality, but also from their own human flesh. Gibson describes the attitude of many characters' in Neuromancer as one that

“involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat” and goes on to label

Iliopoulos 19 the existence within the natural physical human form as a “prison” (6). This desire to escape their own body can be seen as something natural since many of the characters in the novel face serious difficulties in their physical reality. For example, Case, the main character of the novel, was punished by his former employers with a surgery that “damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin” (6). This operation left Case unable to access cyberspace and hence unable to work as a “cyber cowboy”. One could also claim that a large part of his identity was injured through this procedure since cyberspace and his work in it constituted a major part of his former life. The serious injury inflicted on him was probably one of the main reasons why Case wanted to escape the troubles of his physical existence.

This fleshy space of confinement is seen as such due to the progress of technology and the limits set by the human nature itself. With the emergence of cyberspace these aforementioned limits can be surmounted with users from all over the world being able to assemble in the same space and fulfill any need they might have by accessing a vast amount of information (59). Physical presence at a specific place is deemed useless since, as Gibson writes, “travel was a meat thing” (87) and a thing of the past more or less.

Through all these available spaces to humans as is the case of cyberspace, simstim, and narcotics I suggest that Gibson challenges the boundaries of the human flesh which starts appearing chokingly limited for the characters of the novel. At a time with so many bodily and spatial augmentations readily available to characters, Case alongside Peter Riviera, a member of the group that tries to assault Freeside, seem to be desperately afraid of any reality that is not either drug-induced or cybernetic. In the beginning of the novel, readers find Case at a low point in his life where he drowns himself in the world of narcotics simply because he is denied access to the virtual world of cyberspace. As Timo Siivonen claims, the protagonist suffers from withdrawal symptoms since the hold of technology on the lives of humans is significant and their autonomy within their own natural body is limited (228). Case manifests suicidal

Iliopoulos 20 tendencies in the thought of being deprived of his ability to “go online” having to spend the remainder of his days not in cyberspace but in the confinement of his own body. This seems unbearable to him, making the use of drugs indispensable. Gibson provides an example of this in the novel, where he writes that “[i]t took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need” (9). This excerpt portrays the protagonist as being able to feel affection for a woman only after finding the comfort of substance use. Furthermore, as Siivonen suggests, the example of Dixie, a man long dead but preserved as a ROM artificial intelligence of some sort, proves the ability cyberspace has to break the boundaries of the flesh: “[b]y referring to the ‘tailbrains’ with whose help Dixie Flatline is ultimately able to operate in the technical environment of the cyberspace (‘that black stuff’), Gibson activates the discourse setting the biological origin and the “naturalness” of the human” (236). On the one hand, Siivonen stresses this need for the human element, but on the other hand he suggests that Dixie can affect the physical world through the use of real people. That is the reason why such spaces are so important and even addictive to the characters in Neuromancer helping them, even in an artificial manner, to override the limitations of the natural flesh.

It is my claim that Gibson repeatedly refers to “meat” and “flesh” in the narrative in a derisive manner in order to highlight the dependency of humans bodily and spatially on all new technologies. Flesh and its vulnerable and aging body space can be seen as redundant in

Neuromancer with many characters trying to escape from it in one way or another. Through substances, cyberspace, the simulated experiences of simstim and even outer space megastructures humans try to move beyond and transcend the boundaries of their bodily existence. For instance, the Tessier-Ashpool family attempts such an escape from the mortal prison of flesh by keeping its members in cryonic stasis where “ [t]he dreams grow slow like ice” (205) but even that does not make them untouchable. Gibson has a member of Tessier-

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Ashpool family say that he is “old... Over two hundred years, if you count the cold” (204), which alludes to their deep sleep method of preservation. Through the use of cryonic sleep and other body interventions, the family attempts to make its escape from the limitations of the flesh in a manner analogous to Case’s drug use. Case because of his financial state and background, chooses the more convenient and dangerous use of substances while the Tessier-

Ashpools opt for more advanced, and obviously costly, methods that help them disengage from the constraints of the natural body.

1.1.4. Fear of Empty Space

As it has already been mentioned, the utilization of space is a paramount concept in the novel. This assertion, apart from the obvious examples of structures that stand in the reaches of outer space and are fit for habitation, is also evidenced in the fear of empty spaces. This

‘horror vacui’ that the reader can locate in different instances of the novel may also be seen through the “claustrophobic interiors” (Rapatzikou xiv) readers encounter in the novel.

In Neuromancer these “claustrophobic interiors” are presented as cramped and over- adorned spaces. More specifically, Gibson describes the decoration of the Tessier-Ashpool mansion by detailing that they had “imported these things...and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fitted” and all these in a “compulsive effort to fill space” (198). As Molly wanders in the Tessier-Ashpool mansion she comes across an “inverted tree of crystal”, a “primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon” and a door in the shape of a “rectangle amid smooth curves of polished concrete” (196,198) all of which pointing to Gibson wanting to provide an obviously overloaded space. Such an overelaboration on space and its exaggerated features intensify its fearful and shifting construction.

Further in the novel, reader’s come across the Rastafarian group of the Zionites with its own orbital habitat and recreational substances in the form of ganja (116). As for their

Iliopoulos 22 clothing, presented as both worn out and flamboyant as their spatial aesthetics, is described by

Gibson in visually intense manner when a certain Zionite appears to be wearing “a stained pair of baggy fatigues... sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles” (248). Whether spatiality is drug-induced, cyberspatial, or decorative, humans appear to feel the need to fill that space with their creations.

By intermingling various spatialities, Gibson aims at exposing their excessive but decadent qualities which marks their liminal and composite structure. What I suggest is that through the insistence on filling up empty spaces with an assemblage of disparate and contrasting elements Gibson does not only showcase the paramount importance of space but also he highlights its decadent and hybrid nature.

1.2. Re-purposing

1.2.1. Peripheral Spaces

Early on in Neuromancer Gibson clarifies that “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself” (12). This view of peripheral spaces as unrestricted territories of uncontrollable actions is deliberate. Those people who inhabit marginal spaces in the novel often engage in actions of material and technological reconstruction away from authoritative supervision and control. What is suggested here is that Gibson’s narrative enables the reader to understand that Chiba City or any other peripheral and lawless space constitutes vital part of society. Actually, such spaces serve as buffer zones whose inhabitants are willing to take risks.

For example, Tokyo’s Chiba City allows “console cowboys” like Case and other criminals to work in greater liberty (Gibson 31). According to Gibson, the yakuza has control over the area something which in my opinion denotes a certain lack of control on the part of

Iliopoulos 23 the official government of organized crime. As a result, these peripheral spaces take on political significance if one considers the official and unofficial forces at work there.

However, it is not just the body politic that is subject to alteration in such a marginal space. In the first pages of the novel, the author makes clear that in Chiba City any cure could be found “[e]ither in a registered clinic or in the shadowland of black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and microbionics. Chiba was the magnet for the Sprawl’s techno-criminal subcultures” (7). This excerpt, apart from solidifying the fact that such a space is home to criminal actions, also clarifies that this underworld is strongly linked to a bleak market of body alteration practices. The re-purposing of the human body is untouched by either law or ethics within this space. Technology and materials originally designed for other purposes can be tested on the human body. This idea agrees with Dani Cavallaro who calls the body in cyberpunk narratives a “fluid entity” (72). As such the body is also a material that is and can be utilized as well as exchanged according to the needs of the user.

Furthermore, Gibson writes that “the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now controls a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums” (178). Hence, there is a bond between the marginal space of Chiba City and the mainstream space where corporations exist with the former experimenting on bodies and other materials and the latter embracing anything that can have commercial value.

The re-purposing of the human body is a major motif in Gibson’s Neuromancer. The facilitating space of Chiba City allows for alterations influenced by the beauty standards that are set by the entertainment industry. Gibson writes about Armitage’s looks calling them

“handsome. Inexpressive features [which] offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade’s media faces” (51). Armitage, a character that in the end proves to be a salvaged human from a controlling AI, has been altered in order to fit the purposes of his AI master. As a result, even if the body is the most evident material that has

Iliopoulos 24 been re-purposed, Armitage’s identity has also been altered and manipulated. Hence, it is not just the human body that can be tampered with but the human being as a whole. I suggest that the person with all its constituent parts, body, personality, and memories can be ‘rewired’ in

Neuromancer so that they better fulfill the requirements of their newly acquired personas.

This trend of re-purposing can be understood when the reader views it within a culture- specific context. For instance, Gibson writes that “[i]n Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications” (98). Through this reference, Gibson makes the reader aware of the fact that the whole world does not move in a uniform manner but it is characterized by varied views regarding body changes. In a similar manner, Chiba City is presented as a fluid and amoral space, as an elusive threshold to deviant actions.

1.2.2. Upper Class Re-Purposing

In Neuromancer re-purposing is not the sole privilege of the underclass, as is the case in Virtual Light to be elaborated on in Chapter Two. The peripheral space of Chiba City seems to be in the hands of the criminal underworld. However, certain of its criminal business ventures are connected with the law-abiding entrepreneurial activities in the city of Tokyo

(Gibson 178). The fusion of marginal and centralized spaces effaces limitations which leads to a different understanding of spatiality. For example, Freeside, being an orbital artificial environment of casinos and hotels, serves as a manifestation of a floating but proliferating construct where the rich and powerful dominate not because the authorities do not enforce rules but because the authorities themselves are controlled by the very same elite upon which the rules do not seem to apply.

This difference in the rules that the elites can adhere to is evident when Gibson refers to “orbital law’’ (85), which differs from the law that applies to Earth. Since it is the wealthy who have access to artificial orbital spaces, they are also the ones who make the rules. The

Iliopoulos 25

Tessier-Ashpool family that the readers encounter in Neuromancer has access to cryogenic and cloning technologies due to the existence of the aforementioned “orbital law”. Gibson describes them as “[b]ig money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering...it’s hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time” (85). The Tessier-Ashpools are able, through deep sleep, to preserve their bodies while through cloning they can ensure the continuation and replication of their family genes at different moments in time.

Such delicate, and possibly detrimental, changes to the human body would not be put into use without any prior testing and experimentation. One could claim that this is exactly the role the peripheral spaces, as is the case of Chiba City, play in the novel. What would be first tested upon the desperate or even unwilling underworld of Chiba, it would then reach the

Tessier-Ashpoοls after it has been perfected. This is how re-purposing works in Neuromancer with its peripheral spaces embodying both the corruptive and transformative potential of a technologically controlled and generated reality.

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Chapter Two

Virtual Light: A Bridge Between Spaces and Purposes

In Virtual Light, Gibson creates the space of the Bridge, a space that resembles a collage common to cyberpunk narratives as Brian McHale suggests (Constructing Postmodernism 250-

251) and also a space full of inhabitants eager to experiment with the uses of technology and materials. In Virtual Light, William Gibson explores the construct of the San Francisco-

Oakland Bay Bridge with emphasis placed on the re-purposing of its tangible materials as well as its cultural function. In Virtual Light, the reader can also recognize what McHale notes about postmodern writers and their relation to science fiction settings when he suggests that they are

“more interested in the social and institutional consequences of technological innovation the social arrangements these advances give rise to, rather than the innovations themselves

(Postmodernist Fiction 66). As for the technological advancements the readers encounter in the pages of the novel, they serve as the basis for the exploration of the societal changes that take place within the space of the Bridge as it is about to explored in all subsequent sections.

2.1. Space

2.1.1. The Visual Element as a Main Indicator of Space

Both words that make up the title of Gibson’s novel, Virtual Light, relate to virtual reality that utilizes the capacity the optic nerve has to immerse us into an artificially constructed spatial environment as well as light that enables our navigation and orientation within virtual space. However, the paramount importance of the visual element in the novel becomes evident throughout with visuality constituting the main facilitator of spatiality in Gibson’s narrative.

Tatiani G, Rapatzikou has also referred to the importance of the sensory stimuli and specifically that of vision in Virtual Light when she comments on the “mechanically reproduced” image of the Bridge in order to supplant the reader’s sight (183). This suggestion agrees with Tony Myers’ attempt to link visuality to spatiality in Neuromancer. However, in

Iliopoulos 27

Neuromancer much more emphasis is placed on the visual intensity rather than the tangibility of cyberspace, whereas in Virtual Light materials do play a major role in descriptions of space as exemplified in the examples below.

The main techniques utilized by Gibson to portray space is the bombardment of the reader with imagery that emphasizes the assimilation of disparate elements. One example is the collage of different establishments finding shelter on the Bridge which, according to

Gibson, include “tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars” (70). As seen in this instance Gibson crams an assortment of multiple but different shops in one sentence almost forcing the reader to read the whole array of establishments in a rapid and breathless manner. This is an example of Gibson’s writing style often overwhelming his readership with a number of detailed images all in one sentence in an attempt perhaps to communicate to us a multi-layered and at the same time synthesizing sense of intersecting spatialities. Readers may find it hard to envisage the whole assembly of materials and objects while reading this sentence for the first time. A second reading may be of use so that all the pictures triggered would come alive in their imagination. Moreover, this technique does collate together parts of space all fusing together. This becomes evident in the example where a woman with “short red hair behind a counter, and every wall covered with these bright cartoony pictures, colors that made your eyes jump, all snakes and dragons and everything. So many pictures it was hard to take it in” (152). The description provided here almost absorbs and transfuses the female character with all the other images mentioned creating thus an overwhelming effect.

This bombardment of visual stimuli neatly fits into cyberpunk aesthetic since it focuses on the assembly of different and mostly flashy elements of popular culture. In Gibson’s world of Virtual Light, space is valuable hence leaving room empty is a major waste of a precious

Iliopoulos 28 resource. In Neuromancer, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the Tessier-Ashpool tries to fill in space with their own offspring, while in Virtual Light empty space is presented in a more straightforward manner due to the finite structure of the Bridge allowing only for limited expansion in its available space. As a result, the readers come across in the two novels an ongoing re-formulation of space communicated to them via certain rapidly alternating images and visually dense sentences that aim at capturing the cramped and chokingly tight spaces of the Bridge.

2.1.2. Space as Valuable and Regulated Commodity

As I have claimed above, space is a precious commodity in the imaginary 2006 world of Virtual Light. Hence, it is only reasonable to expect that something of value would be a thing to contend for also needing its own regulation rules as other real-world commodities such as money, services or even, to a lesser but still comparable extend, space in our own world. It is also natural to assume that the regulations with regard to space would be created by those in power or at least they would aim to serve their priorities. It is the upper class and its capitalist status quo that set the rules in Virtual Light reminiscent of a land-owning aristocracy.5

First, I should stress that Gibson makes it clear in his novel that there are only two classes in Virtual Light which are separated from one another as the words of Sammy Sal highlight: “There’s only two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore.

How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip rain on the carpet” (146). It is interesting to compare the two different visions

5 For more information on landed aristocracy see FM.L. Thompson’s - English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century. In this study, he suggests that “[i]t was the general opinion at the close of the eighteenth century that all peers ought to be great landowners (…) a sizeable fraction of the nobility exercised a considerable degree of direct control over the composition of the House of Commons through proprietary rights of nomination and virtually irresistible influence.”

Iliopoulos 29 that the two classes have for San Francisco. In this manner, readers can understand the aforementioned gap that exists between the two classes: upper and conglomerate-minded, lower and Bridge-inhabiting.

On the one hand, Gibson conveys the actual use of the glasses in Virtual Light through

Sammy Sal who says to Chevette that “[y]ou date you some architects, some brain-surgeons, you'd know what those are” (133) suggesting that the gate to the virtual future of the Bay Area is in the hands of the wealthy. The virtual realm the glasses that project is full of numbers and statistics as evidenced in the scene where Rydell upon wearing them ceases seeing the blood and the dead body that lies grotesquely in the hotel room, and instead he sees the “forensic stats” (141) screened on the lenses which could be viewed as an attempt to cover up physical reality with abstract data. Furthermore, in descriptions of buildings this glass façade appears to be “straight and featureless” (158) which again creates a rigid appearance that comes into complete contrast with the organic nature of the Bridge and the world that the lower classes inhabit as I will explain in the following section.

Companies like the Sunflower Corporation, which is also owner of the IntenSecure security brand, can be compared to the modern Japanese “keiretsu,” 6 due to the lack of transparency in their operations and similar lack of ethical concerns. These companies exert their influence on whoever inhabits the space they own. The Bridge construct for example constitutes a dilapidating but habitable space where a vibrant community with its own cultural values lives. Many characters appear to sport elaborate tattoos as noticed in the following example. In one of these instances Gibson writes:

Chevette had seen tattoos in the Juvenile Center, and on the street before that, but those

were the kind you did yourself, with ink and needles, thread and an old ballpoint. She

6 “Keiretsus” are the big Japanese conglomerates that succeeded the “zaibatsus” after WWII. Specifically, their actions are described as “opaque and difficult to disentangle” due to the complexity of their structure (Dewenter 81). For more information concerning the structure and the practices of “keiretsus” please see: Dewenter, “Visibility versus Complexity in Business Groups: Evidence from Japanese Keiretsu.” 79-100

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walked over and took a good long look at the colors exploding between the woman's

breasts-which, though she was maybe thirty, weren't as big as Chevette's-and there was

an octopus there, a rose, bolts of blue lightning, all of it tangling together, no untouched

skin at all. (152)

The information provided here about the tattoo can be seen as an allusion to the practices used by the Yakuza, the mafia that controls all the illegal activity in the novel, which links tattoo art to the criminal world. The characters’ tattoos, as I suggest, could be viewed as the need to utilize body space and as a gesture of defiance against central authority. The last point gains even more credence if one considers that during the 1980s and 1990s tattoos and especially large and complex body tattoos were not as much part of the mainstream society as it is nowadays in the West, almost thirty years after the novel’s publication. Hence tattoos in the context of Virtual Light should be seen as part of Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetics. Tattoo art signifies a deviation from the mainstream aesthetics of the 80s, the period that the novel was written, and through their connection with the criminal world, or the underclasses more generally, Gibson attempts to showcase these deviant aesthetics that allow inhabitants of the

Bridge to be in control of their own bodies which contributes to their empowerment.

However, it is not only tattoos that the poor resort to in order to reclaim space. Another body alteration technique used in the novel is body-piercing, which in its turn used to be a marginal practice in the 80s and 90s. Viewed within the context of cyberpunk, one can claim that its effect is analogous to that of tattoo art because it also constitutes a means of body and self empowerment. Extreme examples of such practices are provided in the form of penile piercing when Chevette visits such an establishment and the girl behind the counter informs her about the different techniques she uses explaining that we “[c]all that an ‘amphalang,’ […].

She started flipping through the album. ‘Barbells,’ she said. ‘Septum spike. Labret stud. That's a chunk ring. This one’s called a milkchurn. These are bomb weights. Surgical steel, niobium,

Iliopoulos 31 white gold, fourteen-carat” (153). The listing of multiple terms is employed here once again by

Gibson in order to create a verbal density common within the context of cyberpunk aesthetics.

Space, in whichever form, is claimed by the upper and underclass communities in the novel with the upper class enforcing its dominance through governmental or corporate structures, and the underclass claiming the margins that have been overlooked by the upper class. The vivid descriptions provided in the novel enable readers visualize spatial density both as built or body space as evidenced in Gibson’s verbal structures.

2.1.3. Natural Anarchism and Organic Growth

“Outsiders were immediately recognized and suspiciously watched. The Kowloon

Walled City, in fact, was a world onto its own” (30). It is these words that Elizabeth Sinn chooses in order to introduce the Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong in her work which eerily corresponds to the impression Gibson’s Bridge leaves to the readers. Gibson himself refers to the Walled City in his contemplative piece “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” in an effort to compare it to the overly clean and orderly Singapore. In his descriptions, he resorts to calling the Walled City “the home of pork butchers, unlicensed denturists and dealers in heroin”

(90).The Walled City is also encountered in Idoru, the sequel to Virtual Light, where Gibson creates a structure similar to the Bridge as regards its inner anatomy. Similarly, the Gas

Housing District of New York City, or Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village as it is now known, used to be a ghetto for the unfortunate citizens of the city ravaged by gangs and lawlessness. Irish, Germans, Jews and later East European immigrants nestled to slums adjoining leaky gas tanks in an area out of the law’s reach, as it is suggested in the New York

City Guide of 1939 (187). The existence of such real-world Bridges, that are also touched upon by the author himself as in the case of Kowloon, can help readers trace the origins of Virtual

Light’s Bridge while getting a better insight into how it functions. It is as if places like the

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Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong and Stuyvesant Town in New York lend their features and history to the Bridge serving as a conceptual construction that transfers to us through verbal means the texture and feel of real places. In Virtual Light, Yamazaki provides a first impression of the Bridge that appears to resemble the real-life marginal spaces mentioned above:

The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had

grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no

set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something

amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled

neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. (Gibson 69)

This description reveals the similarities that exist between the Bridge and the Walled City of

Kowloon and Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village with its diversified assembled elements.

The plan for the demolition of the Walled City of Kowloon by the Chinese and British authorities in Hong Kong was made public in 1987, only a few years prior to the publishing of

Virtual Light by William Gibson. The site was initially used as a fort by the Chinese but after

WWII due to the influx of numerous displaced people it turned into an urban organism with

“squatter huts [giving] way to high-rise buildings, which seem designed to break every conceivable construction regulation” in the 1960s (Sinn 40). Much like Gibson’s Bridge, the underclasses, loosely or tightly connected to the criminal underworld, defy the laws of the authorities and proceed with the creation of new urban organisms within or beside the law- adhering cities. The fact that the Walled City of Kowloon was situated in Hong Kong, a territory oscillating between the East and the West due to its colonial past, probably served as a source of inspiration for Gibson.

The previously mentioned defiance of architectural and construction standards is evident in Virtual Light as much as it is in the real-life examples of such organisms. Dani

Cavallaro suggests that the Bridge in Virtual Light is an “ ‘amorphous’ yet ‘startlingly organic’

Iliopoulos 33 architectural ‘carnival’ ” (180). The word ‘carnival’ is telling since it implies a certain disorder and rejection of any accepted mores within this not-clearly defined, in legal status or actual space, structure. This defiance, in my view, may start off as practical insubordination but also provides space for a more general defiance against the establishment, a view which can also be found in Bryan Yazell who notes that the slum is the place of origin of the general resistance against late capitalism (39). Hence, I claim that these anarchic spatialities are born inside marginal spaces. Late capitalism creates these slums through its policies that marginalize people and create a large gap between the poor and the rich. So, it can be claimed that these marginal spaces provide an unregulated space within which various sentiments, such as frustration, can be expressed. In one instance Skinner, one of the inhabitants of the Bridge, explains how the community was established by saying that “[s]hit happens. Happened that night. No signals, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over” (Gibson, Virtual Light 101; emphasis in original). In this example Gibson, through

Skinner, clarifies that there is no political agenda or ideology behind the creation of the Bridge community. By having Skinner say “no leader, no architects” Gibson emphasizes the natural growth of the community. Contrasting the Bridge with the mall, a space with heavy allusions to corporate and capitalist culture, Gibson writes that “this place had just grown” (194; emphasis in original), referring to the Bridge without all the slot-allocating and planning that goes into creating a mall. This natural growth is emphasized in Gibson’s Virtual Light since it contrasts with the strict urban planning supervised by the authorities.

Gibson emphasizes the organic qualities of this urban space and its growth and evolution. It is not that the powerful corporations and the political elite cannot control the growth of this space; even the underclasses Skinner mentions above react to the creation and ongoing expansion of the Bridge. His structure is characterized by a certain “agentlessness” that elevates the structure that is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge into an independent

Iliopoulos 34 and almost sentient space that is the Bridge. One can locate in Gibson’s narrative numerous allusions to the organic nature of the Bridge with references to “[i]ts steel bones” and “its stranded tendons” (70) or to “[t]he hoses [that] swooped down through the superstructure in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below the lower deck in a thousand-gallon holding tank” (100). All those images of the innards of a colossal structure steadily transform it in the reader’s mind into an organic and colossal structure.

Furthermore, my claim that the organic element that is attributed to the Bridge facilitates its independence and its freedom from any kind of control is supported by the reference to its self-regulation mechanisms. A very telling example of this is provided when

Skinner, once again, narrates the story of some unnamed individual who built a little diner on the edge of the Bridge and one morning the structure he had built was nowhere to be seen simply because “he slung it out too far” (72), violating in this manner the laws of gravity. The space of the Bridge dictates, through the laws of physics as seen here, what extensions are permissible. Any excess material, whether people or scrap metal and wood, is simply discarded into the waters below.

The same argument can also be supported by the description of the virtual plans of the city of San Francisco. In contrast to the organic and independent nature of the Bridge, one finds the descriptions provided for structures that rise as “straight and featureless” (158). Both adjectives used here by Gibson in order to describe the plans of a great conglomerate, that of the Sunflower Corporation, can be used about San Francisco as well. Urban development is usually linear and carefully designed and it does not usually follow organic patterns, in contrast to the ones characterizing the construction of the Bridge. Nature does not deal with straight lines or monolithic featureless shapes; on the contrary, it embraces different textures and uneven surfaces. One may also be able to link this to the repeated references to fractal geometries in Virtual Light, about which I will expand further down, that are to be found in

Iliopoulos 35 nature and manifest this very notion that straight and controlled spaces are a human characteristic, if not a human fantasy. The patchwork motif or ‘‘architectural and anthropological bricolage’’ (181), as it is referred by Rapatzikou, of varied styles and materials encountered throughout the novel showcases the difference between the two worlds of the corporate city-planning enterprises and the Bridge which is presented as a place of “different material[s] anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been intended for” (Gibson, Virtual Light 194). The Sunflower Corporation, that has its headquarters in Singapore7 plans the future growth of the city extensively based on its agenda, whereas the Bridge is a space that evolves organically without adhering to any prior design.

Being confronted with two different spatial constructions, readers comprehend space both as a centralized and marginal or streamlined and organic construction.

Institutions that work within the boundaries of a Capitalist world as viewed in the pages of Virtual Light seem to be very meticulous in their planning of the future, whereas the organic element and the evolution that it forces on previously dilapidating infrastructures propose their anarchism as an alternative to human laws or power structures.

2.1.4. Fractal Geometries

The theory of “roughness in nature” along with the very term “fractals” was introduced to the field of mathematics by Benoit Mandelbrot in the latter half of the twentieth century.

References to this particular kind of thinking can be found in Gibson’s Virtual Light. Though, far from being an expert on the subject myself, I would attempt to provide an explanation of the terms provided above.

7 Singapore serves, as mentioned before, as a symbol of the all-controlling authoritarian world that is also contemplated upon in Gibson’s essay titled “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” (69-90).

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Ben Weiss, a graphic designer and computer programmer, in a TEDx presentation in the U.S. chooses William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence (1863) to explain the meaning of fractals.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour (ll.1-4 qtd. in Weiss)

The first four lines of Blake’s poem do not present an adequate explanation, yet, with a little elaboration the concept does get clearer. If we are to imagine a grain of sand, we usually do bring a solid, tiny and, hence, near-perfect object to our minds. However, we also do know that if magnified the solid and seemingly smooth grain has many folds and irregularities on its surface. The more one observes the surface of an object the more folds and roughness its shape reveals. Space, when conceptualized visually, appears to re-unfold itself infinitely creating more and more shapes that in their own turn reveal their own roughness when inspected closer.

Taking this into consideration, one comes to understand that space around us is bounded by the spectrum of our senses, and most of all our vision. When our vision is also enhanced by the use of technology, one can discover more space enfolded within the already perceived space.

In Virtual Light, the reference to “fractal-based calligraphy” appears early on where a reference to a certain “fractal knife” (2) appears, followed a few pages later by the sentence,

“it’s a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself”’ (44). However, the theory of fractals and their infinite dense texture can also be traced in reference to intangible objects like a computer code in order to indicate its manifold and material nature. Gibson writes that “Lotta code in a program like that. Hide all sorta goodies in the wallpaper y’ know?

Running fractal to get the skin texture, say, you could mix in a lot of text” (123). By mentioning

“lotta code” Gibson shows all the work behind computer programs in addition to shedding light

Iliopoulos 37 on their depth and intricate nature. Also, the reference to “skin texture” showcases the material nature of computer codes. Thus, whether tangible objects or intangible concepts, the said theory appears to penetrate all aspects of Virtual Light.

Since the fractal theory proposes the infinite roughness of objects and surfaces and the existence of eternally expanding space upon closer inspection, one should consider the multiple weight references in Virtual Light. Gibson writes about one of his two main characters,

Chevette, that “[s]he picked up the glasses, turning them. They weighed too much for how big they were” (90). This weight motif in reference to the glasses is also seen when the other main character of the novel, Rydell, notices their unusual weight (141). The weight is an indication of mass which may not be able to be judged correctly with the naked eye much like the fractal knife mentioned above. The unexpected weight of an object implies a content that cannot be readily identified as is the case with the pair of glasses. If one is to hold the glasses in their hands they will get a clue of their uncanny properties. As Gibson writes, the glasses “bothered her. Not just that she’d stolen them, but they weighed too much. Way too much for what they were” (89). In this excerpt Molly realizes that it is not only the weight but also all the things that this pair of glasses can do which adds to their strangeness.

Furthermore, San Francisco is a city “folded upon itself” built upon and between the folds of the numerous hills of the San Francisco Peninsula or, as Gibson puts it, a place “[w]ith everything hemmed in by hills, built up and down other hills” (125). The fusion of the roughness of the city with the surrounding geographical roughness reveals the additional space it encompasses when travelled on foot. Hence, I claim that the essence of fractality can also be seen in the host-city of the novel transforming it from a dot on the map to an infinitely dense and inward evolving city. Gibson aligns mathematical and spatial concepts with the real space of San Francisco which, in my view, differs from the abstract and fluid cyberspatial realm featuring in Neuromancer as seen in Chapter One.

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It becomes evident in Virtual Light that Gibson applies the concept of fractality introduced by Mandelbrot to objects such as the knife or, as I claim, the glasses and even to computer programming or the very city of San Francisco. Virtual Light is thriving with references to space folded upon itself or manifesting itself in everyday objects, like the knife or the pair of glasses, or in expansive territories as is the case of the city of San Francisco. In the imaginary near future of 2006 that features in the pages of Virtual Light, Gibson explores diverse spatialities in order to show that nothing is what it appears to be and even space, as will be shown next can be subjected to ongoing reformulation.

2.2. Re-Purposing

2.2.1. Peripheral Spaces

In contemporary society, products are created with the intention of fulfilling a specific need. They are designed and tested so that their efficiency in their fundamental aim can be ensured. Or at least that is the underlying principle when it comes to product design, whether one examines the automobile industry or the soft drink giants like the Coca Cola Company. If one wants to peel an eggplant, he or she would most likely buy a peeler made specifically for peeling vegetables or in a more unimaginative scenario one would buy a kitchen knife. No one would attempt to fashion an eggplant-peeler out of a shaving razor. The reason behind this choice is that it is immensely more convenient to simply buy the product one needs. However, what happens when we do not have the ability, financial or otherwise, to purchase a certain product? In this case, we need to use what we have at our disposal. And that is exactly the heart of re-purposing since the poor of Gibson’s San Francisco are unable to acquire products that fulfill their needs. That is because, first of all, they cannot afford it and also, and maybe more

Iliopoulos 39 importantly, because their needs have not been taken into account by the designers of the products. Having almost no purchasing power, the underclass of the Bridge is not a target audience, in marketing terms and, hence, it is not worthy of consideration. Yet, these two reasons are not enough to explain the extent of re-purposing of materials and technology one notices in Virtual Light. What makes all possible is the existence of marginal space.

Even if one has the ability to build the product needed out of spare parts of other products there is a legal system protecting the manufacturing company from such unlicensed reproduction making the whole effort ultimately costly. However, in places where the law holds no power, the regulations set by the ruling elite cannot restrain any form of customization or patent infringement. As a result, I claim that peripheral space is crucial in that it allows the underclass of the novel to use any available material or technology in order to facilitate its own unique aims and needs.

A solid example of this is the total lack of safety regulations or cohesion that can be observed in the development of structures on the Bridge. The reader comes across an assortment of diverse materials that coexist in the buildings of the Bridge made from “[r]ain- silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye” (70). Materials scavenged from different places serve as building blocks for the Bridge, a pastiche construct, made out of an assortment of disparate materials, which indirectly points at the disordered but at the same time organic nature of such a construct. Furthermore, the same lack of any sort of safety regulations can be found a few pages later when Gibson refers to a shack that someone has built ultimately ending up in the waters below since it did not comply fully with the laws of gravity (72). It seems that there is nobody with government-given authority to inspect the buildings on the Bridge or ensure the

Iliopoulos 40 safety of the people living there. The only regulation imposed on the re-purposing of materials in this case is that of natural forces such as gravity.

Another telling excerpt from the novel describes an “espresso wagon” (146), that is to say a cart with an espresso machine loaded on it. One can be sure that no espresso machine manufacturer made this specific model to fit the purposes that it was used for. However, since there was a need for espresso and the Bridge offered no space for a fixed espresso bar the

“Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coated chisels” (146) decided to combine a piece of obsolete technology, the wagon, with a modern coffee machine. Yet, the espresso wagon is also a good example of the whole concept of re-purposing that features in the novel. On economic terms, Chevette in the novel pays the Mongolian girl fifteen dollars for two cups of espresso which appears to be too expensive for this kind of beverage. I do believe that the price is an indication of the declining American economy and inflation that could be one of the reasons that had brought these people to the haven. It is through such references that Gibson indirectly comments on the reality of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s presidency,8 which lasted from 1981 to 1989, played a significant role in the evolution of capitalism as we know it today enabling the upper classes to enlarge their profits by further marginalizing the lower classes leading to the kind of social divisions featured in Virtual Light.

As far as technology is concerned, there are also instances in the novel where the characters engage with the unlicensed reproduction of an intangible technological product much in the same manner they treat tangible materials according to their needs. When Rydell enters a crowded bar on the Bridge a certain shady gentleman offers to “tumble” Rydell’s phone or fax so that he can enjoy the services of the phone company for free (202). This service would

8 The US economy in the 1980s has been characterized by the “ ‘supply-side’ economy, which contended that reducing taxes on the wealthy would jumpstart the economy” (513), as is described by Johnson. The analysis of the socio-economic framework of the 1980s does not constitute part of the current thesis but information on the Reagan years can be found in the edited companion by Johns, A Companion to Ronald Reagan.

Iliopoulos 41 be unavailable in the regulated world of the rest of San Francisco were the companies could enforce their will in order to protect their products.

This unlicensed copying and reproduction of altered product versions can be linked to

Gilles Deleuze’s points concerning replication. Deleuze suggests that “even the simplest imitation involves a difference between the inside and the outside” or in other words the original and the copy (365) and he goes on to mark that copies are not far from becoming simulacra. The unlicensed replication of technology on the Bridge creates a plethora of copies that diverge from the original construction. Through the denial of the existence of an authority and, consequently, the refusal to accept an original product, one may even suggest that there are no copies but further developments of the original one. As Cavallaro suggests, the simulacrum “thrives on dislocation, multiplicity, errantry and heterogeneity” (50). Hence, I claim that in Gibson’s Bridge one can find the perfect environment within which the simulacrum can “thrive,” because this is a structure that hosts a diverse crowd of people that does not abide to the laws set by the authorities and the need to recreate the products and services they cannot afford. The space of anarchy that I mentioned earlier in the chapter constitutes an ideal breeding ground for this kind of re-purposing.

Re-purposing, though, can also be found in Gibson’s non-fictional works such as

Distrust that Particular Flavor (2012), which highlights the author’s interest in this particular notion. Gibson makes a few notable references to “gomi”9 and he even brings up the example of Yumenoshima Island in Tokyo Bay, without mentioning it by name though, where Japanese authorities used landfill waste in order to create a whole new island serving as extra space for exploitation. Gibson writes about gomi that it “consists of outmoded consumer electronics — such as those recently redundant remotes. Wisely assuming a constant source, the Japanese

9 Japanese term for trash, which is also linked to ideas or reusing the materials thrown way, used especially for discarded electronics.

Iliopoulos 42 build themselves more island out of it” (12). Cavallaro also mentions Gibson’s “fascination with the bodily qualities of gomi and Thomassons” (76), with “Thomassons” standing for structures, such as staircases or doors.10 Finally, Gerard Alva Miller Jr. also highlights the fact that the Bridge is “[l]iterally built of gomi, the Bridge represents a fit of massive retrofitting bricolage, making it Gibson’s most profound exploration of such concepts so far” (87). Hence, this celebration of the re-purposed materials, garbage in this case, can be clearly seen in Virtual

Light.

The value of such structures lies in their ability to be re-used. Both terms mentioned by Cavallaro are strongly linked to this idea as regards material use which is fully embraced by Gibson in Virtual Light in his attempt to present space both as a malleable and tangible entity that can be constantly re-purposed on the basis of how its materials can be re-organized.

2.2.2. Brand Names as The Feeble Anchors Against Re-Purposing

One of the main elements of a capitalist economy, where the products and services are strictly regulated with their authenticity being of great importance, is the brand name.

Companies are fierce when it comes to, what is commonly called, trademark infringement since the name of a product or service comes with guarantees pertaining to its quality, safety in use, or even exclusivity. However, it is important to consider the brand names in a space such as the Bridge, as will be explored next.

Brand names, being main elements of capitalist economy, dominate the space of the

Bridge. In this way, Gibson manages to bring the world of the Bridge closer to our own reality.

10 The name, interestingly enough, comes from Gery Thomasson, a professional baseball player who signed a very extravagant contract to go to Japan only to underperform miserably in the field. For more information on the term, see Akasegawa’s Hyperart: Thomasson.

Iliopoulos 43

Through the presentation of existing trademarks one can experience the world of the Bridge trilogy as a near-future alternative to our own world, as will be shown next.

Contrary to Neuromancer where technology and society have moved far ahead from our own times Virtual Light deals with a much more familiar reality. As Joshua Rothman suggests in his article in the New Yorker “[t]he further Gibson developed his present-tense sci- fi, the more mysterious and resonant his novels became. They seemed to reveal a world within the world: the real present” (“How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real”). This

“present-tense” science fiction can also be found in most of Gibson’s latest novels signaling a conscious shift in the author’s approach11. What I claim is that Gibson deliberately chooses products whose brand names readers are familiar with which he embeds in the narrative enabling in this way the superimposition of the present day capitalist reality on the world of the novel as is the case with the virtual glasses that enable their users to project the virtual design of the city upon the actual city of San Francisco.

In a scene in Virtual Light, Rydell, one of the characters, notices the various commercial signs arranged in the bar space. Rydell wonders: “if NEC was a beer or what. The whole wall was covered with these signs, all different brands, and now he recognized a few of the names he decided they were ads for old electronics companies” (204). The brands assembled here create a collage surface with all of them fusing together in different combinations that nullifies their original meaning and purpose. The moment Rydell fails to recognize them is when, having lost their original meaning, they are re-purposed in space. Such a recontextualization reveals to the eyes of the contemporary reader a different world where companies and their regulated goods interweave with the world of the Bridge.

11 See Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History also known as the Blue Ant trilogy, which are all set in the early 2000s after the 9/11 attacks in New York and deal with the realities of our contemporary world.

Iliopoulos 44

However, some characters in Virtual Light do seem to seek the safety certain trademarks offer, which indirectly touches upon the major influence they exert on people’s worldview. NHK, the national broadcaster of Japan, and BBC are mentioned in the novel in a scene where Yamazaki seeks comfort from the confusing and hybrid world of the Bridge in their state-produced “docu-dramas.” Yamazaki notes how “[c]alm, serious, mildly hypnotic”

(227) these productions are. All three words used here describe an effect that is far from the diverse and noisy realm of the Bridge. To further highlight this point, Gibson goes on to note how “[a]fter two more unsuccessful attempts at locating another channel, Yamazaki let the

British voiceover blot out the wind, the groaning of the cables, the creaking of the plywood walls. He focused his attention on the familiar story, its outcome fixed, comforting-if only in its certainty” (227). It is my suggestion that here brand names in the form of state-run broadcasters stand for the outside intrusive forces of a controlling capitalistic world that the world of the Bridge challenges and resists. As a result, Gibson places side by side two world systems with their own values and regulating mechanisms, with the Bridge featuring as a community that has the ability to constantly adjust despite external pressures due to its organic make up. As for the historical dramas Yamazaki watches, linking the commercial names with the past and, hence, with safety and comfort, they serve as nostalgic markers of idealized and illusive reality that the Bridge people have already denounced.

The community of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is not anchored in the past, but it keeps on developing while using, scarily enough for Yamazaki, non-mainstream and unregulated practices not heard of and tested by the mainstream. Recognizable brands entwine the world of the novel with our own appearing familiar and at the same time antiquated as glimpses of a world that needs to be left behind. They do not guarantee anything anymore simply because their credibility has been breached as the community of the Bridge is moving on in its attempt to secure and discover different ways of dealing with the changes occurring

Iliopoulos 45 in the world. The relation between the Bridge and the rest of San Francisco has evolved into what Michel Foucault calls an heterotopia. Foucault suggests that there are “probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places- places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society- which are something like counter sites” (3). The Bridge is not merely part of San Francisco but it rather stands as its opposite. This mirroring exists to remind the city what it is not and through this opposition, which adheres to the idea of the “Other”, it solidifies what San Francisco truly is. Furthermore, the Bridge fits well into Foucault’s explanation that

“heterotopias are capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (6). Such a combination of diverse elements is the most characteristic feature of the Bridge and along with its ability to mirror the rest of the city one can safely claim that the Bridge is a site that stands apart from the rest of the city or even the mainstream world. That is why the signifiers of the rest of the world, such as brand names, have lost their meaning in the heterotopian space of the Bridge.

2.2.3. Religious Assimilation and Mysticism

As I discussed above, the bringing together of disparate elements and their customization is evident in both materials and technology, tangible or intangible products.

However, there is a realm of customization that even if it does not link directly with materials or technology in the traditional sense, it is paramount of the re-purposing-minded Bridge- dwellers. The intangible field of religion is heavily touched upon by Gibson in Virtual Light and also in a manner that influences technology and the daily and material life of the people of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. However, religion does not feature as a dogma here but as a bricolage of various religious or mystical practices exercised by the Bridge inhabitants.

Iliopoulos 46

The image of J.D. Shapely, a former male prostitute suffering from HIV serves as the example of this assemblage of different elements in Virtual Light. His image is depicted on a mural,

wearing a black leather biker jacket and no shirt, being carried up to heaven by half a

dozen extremely fruity-looking angels with long blond rocker hair. There were these

blue, glowing coils of DNA or something spiraling out of Shapely’s stomach and

attacking what Rydell assumed was supposed to be an AIDS virus, except it looked

more like some kind of rusty armored space station with mean robot arms. (168)

This mixture of religious sentiment, biker aesthetics, and HIV may strike as surreal, nevertheless it touches upon the reality of the inhabitants of the Bridge. This image, even if it seems as an unrealistic representation of the divine at first, is not uncommon in mural art12.

Hence, this sort of depictions may appear vulgar to the conservative eye, but, evidently, it is a common practice employed for the depiction of sainthood in secular and down-to-earth terms.

It is my suggestion that that is the case ever more so when it comes to urban communities where mural art is a form of expression accessible to everyone and free of charge. The people of the Bridge seek daily contact with the religious element that is part of their reality. Mural art removes the spiritual from the dogmatic and many times authoritative realm of the church and regulating authorities in order to achieve a different kind of street-wise freedom.

Another picture of religious assimilation found in the novel is that of the carnivalesque procession in honor of J.D. Shapely. Here the readers see elements of Mexican culture through people dressed as skeletons with respirators in the form of grinning skulls which is a straightforward reference to “La Noche de Muerte” an allusion to the Mexican holiday of Dia de Muertos (282). This sort of macabre dance mixes Pagan elements, Catholic traditions of

12 Such modern examples of murals can be found in Glasgow‘s St Enoch and St Mungo’s depictions. See Lennon, “Giant mural depicts two of Glasgow’s major saints.”

Iliopoulos 47 saint-reverence, and social bonding thus, making the procession both mystical and worldly.

J.D.Shapely is a folk hero, apart from a saint, that ascended to the ranks of the hallowed through defeating HIV. With Shapely being a member of the underclass himself, his worship, combined with all the disparate elements of his persona, can also be seen as a celebration of the hybrid but organic character of the fringe community. The underclass in the novel appears to be prone to iconoclastic processions rather than the starker and dogmatic religious approach that is preferred by the middle and upper classes. It is through Shapely that people on the fringe view their own diverse ethnic origins edgy body alterations, actions and beliefs. For example, “they wouldn't talk at all except on Mondays, and that was the day they'd go and dig off spadeful of dirt out of their grave, Scooter. Every little while they'd get one of them thought he'd got the spirit in him and they'd just do it, do it with these special chrome nails they all carried, leather neck-pouch, see, it had to be unborn lambskin” (308). These lines here acquaint readers with a different belief system that is adopted by the radical and marginal communities that lived beyond the Bridge. Organized religion is one of the most ancient bearers of authority and since marginal spaces occupy the fringes with limited or no influence from a central authority they are unrestrained in their practices but much closer to an unrefined and possibly genuine form of expression.

In Virtual Light, life in the periphery also identifies with a far more radical, hence unrestricted, expression of spirituality that challenges mainstream religious beliefs while offering readers an insight into the values and beliefs of the peripheral communities in the narrative. Their attention to the material representation of religious sentiment diversifies and re-purposes religion viewed here as an accessible and tangible means of communal expression.

Iliopoulos 48

Conclusion

In both Neuromancer and Virtual Light Gibson deals with the re-purposing of space.

Any deviation from what is considered mainstream is presented in the pages of the two novels through multiple manifestations as is the case of the lawless slums inhabited by the underclass in Chiba City and the Bridge. In addition, cyberspace, a technologically-constructed spatial realm of infinite opportunities and the orbital structures designed for human habitation outside the Earth constitute examples of alternative spaces. It is in these spaces that for various reasons the re-purposing processes can be realized given the fact that they offer none of the limitations of regulated physical space.

In Virtual Light and Neuromancer, the poorest people living in the aforementioned slum areas find it necessary to engage in such practices of re-purposing in order to survive. Gibson focuses more on the change and manipulation of the flesh in Neuromancer, whereas in Virtual

Light there is an abundance of re-purposed materials in their more traditional and tangible form.

Furthermore, Gibson attempts to include in his novels elements that come from contemporary subcultures, as is the case with piercings and tattoos that relate closely to the principle of re- purposing as they offer readers the opportunity to better relate to the characters and world in the novels.

Other peripheral spaces such as Freeside in Neuromancer work through the same principle since they diverge from the mainstream, being outer space structures built for the rich.

The elite is allowed a much greater liberty when it comes to alterations of their space or body and in this aspect they resemble the underclass that enjoys the same liberty in their habitats only because of their desperation and not because of the comfort money power gives to the elite. Any spatial realm that is allocated to the rich or to the very poor is given a certain amount of autonomy for very different reasons, as I have explained above. My suggestion is that, as in real life, all innovations are based upon already existing ideas taken further by those who dare

Iliopoulos 49 and can do so. This is exactly why the concept of repurposing is so vital in the inner workings of a society.

Gibson implies in Neuromancer that Chiba City exists because the authorities enable it to do so. In Virtual Light, the author emphasizes the natural evolution of the community of the

Bridge. Both elements suggest that Gibson considers the existence of these spaces necessary in urban communities, whether they are Tokyo or San Francisco. This need is explained because of their ability to foster the daring and the new. To further solidify this argument, I should highlight Gibson’s words from the “Winter Market,” a short story from his Burning

Chrome (1982) collection, where one of the characters asks:

You know what your trouble is?... You’re the kind who always reads the handbook.

Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific

purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody understands. But if it’s new

technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man,

and you won’t play around it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody

else uses it to do something you never thought of. (138)

This excerpt from 1986 showcases, in my view, the permeating effect of re-purposing in

Gibson’s work, which constitutes the driving force in the effort to envision different opportunities for expression and conceptualization of experience.

Another important common point in Neuromancer and Virtual Light is the paramount place that vision occupies in both narratives. The connection of space and re-purposing with the visual element is something that I have highlighted in both novels by Gibson with numerous examples that attest to that. Gibson attempts to verbalize the imaginary and at times unfamiliar world of the future while portraying its diverse and dense scenery through the use of equally dense language. His writing style endeavors to recreate these spaces in the readers’ mind and provide visual descriptions of the imagined spaces featuring in the two novels. But as a final

Iliopoulos 50 argument on the significance of this I would like to provide the work of other artists that, as I suggest, understood Gibson’s focus on the visual.

Daniel Brown designed new covers for the 2016 edition of the whole of the Sprawl trilogy along with Burning Chrome for Gollancz. His design challenges the human sense of vision because it defies the mainstream dimensions of space providing the image of urban landscapes that appears to fold upon itself. This is achieved through the use of computer code which is able to generate unique patterns of fractal patterns or London-inspired urban space

(Schwab, “William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” Gets A Cover Made With - What Else?- Code”).

In a more traditional and less digital, but certainly relevant, approach James Warhola created the first cover art for Neuromancer in 1984 with a close up of a face that seems to exist in the world of computers with stars bursting bright from the figure’s eyes. A similar face in a close up with emphasis on the eyes was designed by Don Braughtigam for the 1993 edition of Virtual

Light only here the figure wears a chunky pair of glasses. Through the years, from 1984 with

James Warhola to 2016 with Daniel Brown, artists, in relation to Gibson’s two novels, appear to be understanding the great importance that the visual plays in both narratives.

The visual element in both works serves as a designator of space and all the abnormalities that may come in its re-arrangement. Gibson, as evidenced by the numerous visual images his narratives resort to, invite both the readers and the characters of his two novels to experience any space as a material but malleable entity that has the ability to reform itself in a contingent and subversive manner.

Iliopoulos 51

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BIO

Grigorios Iliopoulos is a postgraduate student in the MA in English and American Studies, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His interests include science fiction, cyberculture, and literary theory. He is currently employed as an EFL teacher in Thessaloniki.