Analyzing Gibson's Cyberpunk Novels: Characters, Environments, & Reality, Study notes of Technology

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The Many Paths of Cyberspace: William Gibson's The Sprawl as Prototype for Structural, Thematic, and Narrative Multilinearity in New Media A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of the School of Communication In Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in English By Erik Stephen Marsh 1 May 2015 Marsh 2 Liberty University School of Communication Master of Arts in English ________________________________________________________________________ Thesis Chair Date ________________________________________________________________________ First Reader Date ________________________________________________________________________ Second Reader Date Marsh 5 Abstract William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy helped set a new direction for science fiction, but his work is also a valuable tool for examining changes in the approach both readers and writers began to take to literature as the text medium began its rapid evolution with the introduction of electronic hypertext. In this examination of Gibson’s fiction, a pattern of multilinear truth emerges, showing how Western culture fully embraced Postmodern approaches to truth claims as a default, how even a pre-electronic text can exhibit hypertext-like aspects, and how this shift in interpretive response to literature is important for Christians in order to fully engage the culture. This thesis first establishes the historical background into which the cyberpunk genre appeared and Gibson started his literary career, with careful consideration for stylistic, aesthetic, and philosophical influences to Gibson’s fiction. The discussion then shifts to an analysis of the physical multilinear aspects of Gibson’s setting and characters, the multilinearity of existential subjects such as being and reality, and finally the discussion turns to a narratological examination of the structure of Gibson’s plot and storytelling elements. Upon examining these multilinear aspects, the hypertext-like nature of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy makes his work a useful tool to examine the roots of the modern internet-age approach to text literature and the truth- claims that text literature contains. Reflecting on Gibson’s work this way, Christians who seek to understand how the current default approach has changed since the introduction of electronic texts can more easily understand why a traditionally effective strategy of ministry has less impact today. Key Words: William Gibson, Cyberpunk, Hypertext, Science Fiction, Marie-Laurie Ryan, Narratology Marsh 6 Chapter 1: Cyberpunk’s Influences and Narratological Frameworks for the Evaluation of Gibson’s the Sprawl as a Prototype of Multilinearity in Literature “We participate, you and I, in the death of print-as-we-knew-it, and should experience thereby an exquisite frisson of ecstasy and dread. So soon, we plunge toward a world in which the word ‘library’ simply means something on the other end of a modem.” (Author’s Afterword to the online edition of Mona Lisa Overdrive, n. pag.) As with most popular genres, science fiction1 has undergone numerous revisions and redefinitions since its evolution out of the late 1800’s exploration of scientific concepts through creative fiction. But cyberpunk, itself only a particular styling of science fiction, did something different from expected. The genre had a consistent cycle of new stylistic movements which gradually or sometimes quickly became relegated to academic study as new writers subverted and displaced them, but this constant trend changed after cyberpunk2 rode out its initial wave of popularity by the end of the 80’s. At this time, the collective of science fiction writers seemed to 1 While the exact nature and characteristics of science fiction are still often debated, the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. offers a broad enough definition to be useful: “A genre (of literature, film, etc.) in which the setting differs from our own world (e.g. by the invention of new technology, through contact with aliens, by having a different history, etc.), and in which the difference is based on extrapolations made from one or more changes or suppositions; hence, such a genre in which the difference is explained (explicitly or implicitly) in scientific or rational, as opposed to supernatural, terms” (Prucher “science fiction”). 2 This term was originally coined by Bruce Bethke in his short story “Cyberpunk” in 1980, but it was not applied to a movement of literature until after Gibson’s Neuromancer. According to Prucher, Cyberpunk is “a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on the effects on society and individuals of advanced computer technology, artificial intelligence, and bionic implants in an increasingly global culture, especially as seen in the struggles of streetwise, disaffected characters” (“cyberpunk”). Marsh 7 forget the old way of genre-wide shifts and instead wandered off on their own myriad paths. As such, the literary landscape of science fiction is far too diverse to identify a particular stylistic movement, except to say that there is very clearly not an individual strain. Instead of moving as one movement, science fiction splintered. While publishers need little other motivation to create marketing sub-genres than for the potential profit from niche interests in fiction, there is very clearly something much broader at work here. The availability of a nearly infinite variety of diverse content to consume, in all forms of media, is a norm of modern techno-centric society. Electronic media are evolving, reconstituting, and transforming everything about literature, and this phenomenon largely goes unnoticed. As a precursor to this movement, however, William Gibson’s first trilogy, beginning with Neuromancer, can be used as a guide to understand these transformative developments in science fiction and Western society since the cyberpunk movement’s debut because of the multilinear3 aspects of its structure, themes, and narrative. As the first cyberpunk writer, William Gibson did not merely characterize his fictional world with fantastic, imagined technology, but imagined that our lives would merely become one with the fruits of our headlong scientific pursuits. The cyborg, an essential combination of man and machine, mind and metal, did not only catalyze a new wave of science fiction but created the atmosphere that prepared the world to transition from a postmodern4 default to a new chimera of 3 The term Multilinearity or multi-linearity is derived from Mathematics, in which it describes multiple possible lines which may be drawn by a function depending on different variables. As related to hypertext, a term allegedly coined in 1963 by Ted Nelson for the model of embedding references to further information at the time proposed for computer technology, multilinearity further describes the ability of hypertext and other hypermedia to offer multiple linear paths of progression through content. According to George Landow in his foundational work Hypertext, hypertext nodes within media “create text that is experienced as nonlinear, or, more properly, as multilinear or multisequential” (3-4). For my purposes, the term “multilinearity” will serve to describe the active experience of hypertext’s many individual paths rather than as a description of topography or of an abstract network. 4 Postmodernity is here used in the sociological sense as advanced by Jean Baudrillard, describing "a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals" (Baldick "postmodernism"). In the literary sense, I will attempt to demonstrate through the discussion of Gibson’s work that the shift in the science fiction genre through cyberpunk Marsh 10 revolution of the genre to bring it back to the realm of literature through his own magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. This began the Golden Age of science fiction from 1938 to 1946, in which writers such as A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein published their classic novels. After this, the New Wave of writers took over during the 50s, 60s, and 70s with novels such as William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, establishing postmodernist and deconstructionist themes and techniques as the artistic norm. This new batch of experimental writers was much more closely concerned with “soft” sciences than the “hard” science of Gernsback or Campbell, and explored the psychological, sociological, and anthropological elements of futuristic worlds. Based in the hipster culture, the New Wave established itself as decidedly technophobic, seeing emerging technological paths, especially the increase of materialist consumer technology, as essentially damaging to the human race. However this tendency to demonize technological progress partly reversed itself as technology came to the hands of the new generation through the advent of personal computing, which later become the darling of the cyberpunk culture which found its heart in William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome.” What was once terrifying new technology became normal and capitalized such that the next generation of science fiction readers and writers found it less foreign and more atmospheric. Technology was once a savior of mankind, then its killer, but now only a normal evolution of the species. In “The Gernsback Continuum,” Gibson satirizes Gernsback’s generation of technological utopianists who envisioned worlds made better by the progress of science. Using the futurist architecture of “World of Tomorrow”-styled buildings as a focal point, Gibson’s short story envisions the 1980s world as the Golden Age SF writers desired it, and mocks their naivety. Neither an Orwellian prison camp nor a luxurious land of modern convenience, the Marsh 11 world Gibson saw in his own life was just recovering from the draft-dodging, napalm-bombing times of the hippie movement and the Vietnam War, and the near future wasn’t looking like it would come close to either the dreams or nightmares of Gibson’s science fiction predecessors. The rocket age had come and gone without flying cars or moon vacations, and all that was left was a dilapidated shell of chrome. The high technology of the previous generation had become debris, and Gibson saw no reason that this trend should not continue. From this point in his development as a writer, “Johnny Mnemonic” and the rest of Gibson’s short stories collected in his anthology Burning Chrome set the stage for his debut novel to cut a new path for science fiction by further demonstrating Gibson’s general attitude of shirking the noble expectations of the coming age, instead seeing the progress of the human condition as moving through a progressively more complicated labyrinth of technological landfills. Critical reception was at first very kind to Gibson, giving him the three most notable awards available to science fiction writers, and praising him for such a visionary work, especially for a first novel. Yet the critics also pointed out Neuromancer’s weaknesses, namely that his plot and characters were relatively shallow when compared to his minutely detailed and elaborately constructed milieu, evidenced by how the aesthetic ideas about cyberspace, as well as the designation, were lifted and used within the cyberpunk genre and without. Gibson went on to follow these trends, coauthoring The Difference Engine as a steampunk novel and Virtual Lights as a representation of near-future “nowpunk” (as Bruce Sterling ironically named it for focusing on current-day considerations), but his greatest influence remains with Neuromancer, the archetypal cyberpunk novel. Science fiction has had a relatively short history; but throughout its existence it has been a driving point of social change, constantly predicting and reacting to new technological progress Marsh 12 and shifts in culture. William Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer captured both the spirit of the Golden Age of traditional SF and the avant-garde edge of its New Wave. The technopoetical prose of Gibson’s work, with its heady atmosphere of adrenaline and amphetamines, was a shot in the arm for SF’s tired, self-referential reactionism that forced SF writers into a cycle of purposefully rejecting their predecessors’ works in order to try something new. The result was a reinvention of the SF genre from the cold, empirical looking glass of scientists and academics to a condensation of discontent, a post-modern-esque critique of post-modern cynicism, offering bleak yet believable depictions of the modern world with the trappings of hope for the future beyond the physical, even if the world was falling apart. The aesthetic and philosophical shifts introduced by Neuromancer, inspired by Manny Farber’s “White Elephant Art and Termite Art,” not only spurred the cyberpunk movement into prominence within SF, but also kicked the genre into direct interaction with pop-culture. Science fiction became the spirit of our age, and because of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, there’s a little cyborg in all of us. When William Gibson’s first full-length book was published in 1984, Neuromancer was heralded by some academics and science fiction writers as the arrival of a new paradigm in the genre, one that would depose the tired New Wave, replacing its experimental visions with new narrative forms and more importantly, new readership. But the definition of science fiction and its purpose have been debated since its beginning, and had undergone a new bout of redefinitions during the 60s and 70s. Darko Suvin, editor for Science Fiction Studies and renowned SF critic, described a popular definition in 1971 in “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” saying that science fiction begins with a framing scientific hypothesis, but arguing that it should be defined as “the literature of cognitive estrangement,” defined further in this article as a method of offering new ways of thinking about human society (372). This role of science fiction was, Marsh 15 works of Gibson and other writers of cyberpunk, declared a new direction for feminists and Marxists in her famous article “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in which she utilizes the cyborg as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1) to which they all could identify. This article and the academic discussion it inspired catalyzed a coalescing of social movements which engendered a shift towards a mainstream discussion of gender politics. Parallel to this political development, postcyberpunk sub-genres have emerged, so called due to their similarity in aesthetics to Gibson’s movement, but with broader and multifaceted interests. These genres suggest, according to Heureca, “relativism, multisignificance, an unbiased assessment of the power of technology and . . . a discourse that refuses to explore the cybernetic phenomena with a binary simplicity” which is neither nihilistic nor dystopian (142). This has led, along with the political conglomeration of gender politics, to an open discussion of the implications of science and technology for the future of mankind in a post-human sense, asking the same basic questions of existence as Gibson’s Neuromancer – what does it mean to be human, where is the real boundary between the reality and imagination, or myriad other critical breaking points of dualistic philosophy when faced with transhumanism -- but with a much broader sense of the questions’ implications for current-day social issues. The eminent diffusion of Gibson’s influence on contemporary culture has made this discussion not only mainstream but default. The rapid, uncontrolled progress of technology, once a distant and delicate premise, is now a given reality, and the dreamlike vision of Gibson’s cyberspace has become as essential to science fiction imagination as themes of warfare or romance. With the further integration of technology into the daily life of common people, into media, culture, and social interactions as well as literature, the relevance of Gibson’s work becomes more evident, the fiction becoming more than science fact, but mundane reality. Marsh 16 Part 2: Termite Aspect and Postmodern/Modernist Inflections of Gibson’s Writing As a reader of science fiction of all types from a young age, Gibson had a broad grounding for his exposure to what the SF community had to offer before he tried his own hand. In an interview for The Mississippi Review in 1988, Gibson was asked by Larry McCaffery about his motivations for writing Neuromancer and his earlier short stories: “A lot of what I’ve written so far is a conscious reaction to what I felt SF— especially American SF—had become by the time I started writing… my stance was instinctual… I would say I simply tried to go the opposite direction from most of the stuff… which I felt such aesthetic revulsion towards” (228). This attitude lead Gibson to seek alternate frameworks with which to approach his own fiction and led to the formation of his signature style. The celebrated elements in his first novel Neuromancer were its dark tone, gritty milieu, and harshly-rendered anti-heroes, all clothed in beautiful and dense description which utilized technological jargon in nearly poetic verse. Turning aside the New Wave’s aversion to high technology, Gibson’s book was filled with technical language and authentic-sounding predictions of technologies based on the current generation, operating within reasonably hard-science boundaries without the Golden Age’s utopian idealism. Given his first chance to publish a novel but only given a year to write it so that it could be featured in a special “new authors” series, Gibson completed his debut work with a sense of animal panic. This frantic rush apparently focused his brilliance, as the resulting work was widely acclaimed as being the start of something new in the dated SF community. Gibson’s skeptical attitude toward the utopian/dystopian discussion in the Golden Age of traditional SF novels carried through into Neuromancer, using morally ambiguous characters who survived in a Marsh 17 harsh underworld dominated by international corporations who have systematically marginalized national governments. Gibson’s use of high-tech, low-life antiheroes with the catchphrase “the street finds its own use for things,” sidestepped the traditional role of the scientist hero while simultaneously avoiding the intentionally political and artistic mouthpiece characters used by the hipster New Wave. Neuromancer shifted the focus from the hero’s identity to the class of people he belonged to, and the environment he interacted with. Gibson’s protagonist, Case, is a “console cowboy,” a hacker who specializes in stealing information from carefully and heavily fortified sources inside the virtualized environment of cyberspace. Gibson’s descriptions of Case’s interactions with this particular aspect of his milieu earned him the lion’s share of his reputation as a visionary, as the world of cyberspace became the collective dream of his generation, appearing to have directly influenced the development of the internet and its emergent culture from a loosely-knit collection of misfits to a virtual society seeking absolute freedom of expression. Similarly, Gibson’s computer characters, super-intelligent artificial super beings that merge and dissolve into cyberspace itself to become a sort of machine god, helped to change the way the public approached the developing technology of artificial intelligence. A prime example of Gibson’s signature technopoetics is in his explanation of his virtual world, as seen by his protagonist when he absently flips to a children’s educational television show: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in Marsh 20 This is the quintessential cyborg, Gibson’s “street samurai,” blending hardcore street with fantastical technology. His first novel, like his cyborg, is extreme, harsh, dysphonic, melded in a graceful artistry of jury-rigging. Olsen summarizes this brilliant conglomeration in his (at the time) cutting-edge and hypertexted article (here condensed without the excessive parenthetical commentary): Gibson obviously employs various extrapolations of technology or pseudotechnology but he also appropriates . . . not only the universes of fantasy and science fiction, but also those of the detective novel . . . , the western . . . , the spy thriller . . . , and the realist novel . . . By mongrelizing discursive worlds, Gibson mongrelizes the beliefs about existence those discursive worlds suggest. (Olsen 291-3) This is all accomplished in the face of the Gernsbackian tradition of “scientifiction,” the Golden Age’s defining dictate to teach hard science fact through fiction. It is after all, as Alkon points out, “very hard to understand how a four-centimeter (1.6 inch) retractable blade along with even a highly miniaturized motor-mechanism could be implanted without impeding the ability to bend the fingers at their first joints,” although if asked Gibson could no doubt offer a satisfyingly science-ish answer (79). Gibson’s blending of many genres and styles gives his presentation of such technological marvels, the gadgetry that was once the focus of traditional SF, mystical properties that nonetheless do not blunt the realistic edge of his fiction. This effect, blurring and eroding lines while maintaining a solid whole, is what makes Gibson’s work solidly Termite. This focus allows Gibson to redefine his own boundaries of genre, style, and influences instead of following the pendulum swing of science fiction back toward raw, elephant-like traditionalism. Marsh 21 Part 3: Narratological Framework and Critical Tools for Analyzing Multilinear Aspects of William Gibson’s The Sprawl Trilogy and Selected Works Gibson’s writings did not spawn from a vacuum, but the noticeable uniqueness of his spin on both traditional and new narrative forms is what brought him so much attention in his first novel. The transitional nature of Gibson’s Neuromancer and following works is not diminished by his being heavily influenced by other writers, and it would also be a mistake to approach Gibson’s work from a perspective of it being defined solely by its heredity. The reaction of science fiction authors since the cyberpunk movement to what Gibson and his group started is evidence enough that there was something in his work that everyone was waiting for, a crucial shaking-up of the box of tricks such that a new formula popped out, much to everyone’s relief. At the same time, Gibson’s work correlates with a technological transformation during the dawn of the Information Age, the emergence of the internet, and the influences of electronic media which have shaped the 21st century in ways far beyond the imaginings of cultural critics of the 20th. Just as the television did not manage to banish the written word into the annals of history, the introduction of electronic text did not abolish the paper kind, even if the idea of a paperless society caught the imagination of the marketing industry. The concept of text, however, is affected by the possibility of new ways of reading, as developments in computer technologies allow for different ways to read other than the standard left-to-right, top-to-bottom standard which physical text applies (Charney 1). Websites, for example, may contain text which defies this standard completely, allowing multiple paths to information which allow for on- demand access of ideas without reference to linear structure. As Charney puts it: “hypertext has Marsh 22 the potential to change fundamentally how we write, how we read, how we teach these skills, and even how we conceive of text itself” (2). But critics like Postman insisted on the necessary loss of meaning between media which have different parameters and limitations: [T]he decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television…[has created a] change-over [that] has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content… must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to [the predominant media].” (Postman 8) Postman’s fear is wrapped up in his agreement with Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message” (8), and that just as the Native Americans could not discuss philosophy via smoke signals, the shift of western culture away from linear text toward visual media meant that there was also a shift in the default approach to truth. Postman considers this transaction to be extremely negative, generating “dangerous nonsense” (16), truncating meaning and trivializing every important discipline of the mind that falls prey to the glowing lights of new media. But science fiction has concerned itself a great deal, often quite solemnly, with the newest technologies on the horizon, often attempting to plumb the mysteries of the future’s possible directions for dangers as well as promises. Also, as a genre of text literature, science fiction has also been grounded firmly in linear text media. After all, the introduction of television did not make the text cease to exist, but it certainly changed how text works. SF has clearly changed how it chooses to represent reality or fantastic subjects over its history, but has the shift Marsh 25 which challenge its own textual roots. Is it the rose, or is it the hologram? The easiest way to find out is to piece together those parts of Gibson’s work which transcend the medium. Marie-Laure Ryan offers a specifically useful toolset for this discovery of Gibson’s transmedial8 elements, and while her work is certainly not the ultimate of all Narratological discourse, her conscious application of Narratological methodology to cyberpunk texts and those technologies which have their ancestry in the cyberpunk novels has made her a leading voice in applying narrative analysis to hypertext media. In his review of her work, Nicholas comments how Ryan “unites old and new media using postmodern narrative devices that penetrate and disrupt embedded hierarchical narrative plots… [and] in so doing, [shows] how much such devices relate to our negotiations of both fiction and reality” (810-11). She does this in order to understand the Baudrillardian complexities of non-traditional media, to uncover and categorize the roles of narrative and structure in inherently unstructured and divergent media from electronic hypertexts to video games. To frame her project of discussing narrative’s transcendence of media, Ryan refers in her introduction to Narrative Across Media to French semiotician Claude Bremond’s reflection on story, translated here by Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse: [Story] is independent of the techniques that bear it along. It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing its essential properties: the subject of a story may serve as argument for a ballet, that of a novel can be transposed to stage or screen, one can recount in words a film to someone who has not seen it. 8 “Transmedial” is an adjectivization of the term “transmedia” used heavily in Narratological discourse to describe the changes (primarily in narrative forms) while crossing between different media, such as text, television, and film. I will use the term “transmedial” to describe the effect of Gibson’s work’s transitional nature, being of the linear text medium but exhibiting characteristics of different media such as film, visual art, and hypertext, which is an evolution of the linear text medium which was accelerated into prominence by the introduction of electronic hypertexts. Marsh 26 These are words we read, images we see, gestures we decipher, but through them, it is a story that we follow; and it could be the same story. (Bremond qtd. in Ryan 1). Clearly, Postman’s warning still applies: the unconscious absorption of new technologies holds the danger of unwitting amputation of possible meaning. But if Ryan’s tools can be used to find the difference between the hologram and the rose, then Gibson’s work can be used as a guide to the transformation of text media from the typographical culture of Postman’s day to the hyperreal SF reality of the Internet Age. Just as stories were once told among cultures without the technology of writing, the transformation of ideals, and of the perception of truth have dramatically changed with the effect of technological progress yet again. The approach to truth has been subverted and converted by a slew of new media which have never before existed, and a step to understanding a lost world which no longer recognizes the authority of the written word is to understand how truth transcends the media, and what parts of our collective conscience have been cut off from meaning as a result of our generation’s most recent amputation. Marsh 27 Chapter 2: Multilinear Aspects of the Physical World of The Sprawl They came to a broad rectangular pool where carp nuzzled the stems of some white aquatic flower. She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the ripples spread. “That’s Wintermute,” she said. “This deal’s real big, looks to me. We’re out where the little waves are too broad, we can’t see the rock that hit the center. We know something’s there, but not why. I wanna know why.” (Neuromancer 95) Gibson’s novels change dramatically from his debut with Neuromancer, shifting focus from high-intensity action packed into every page to a more relaxed and confident stride in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. But a static presence that allows Gibson to control the speed and tone of his novels comes through his environments. The decaying concrete and rusted metal of the Sprawl, a massive super-city made up of the United States’ largest East Coast cities, the sterile honeycomb of the orbital space station Villa Straylight, and even the cool, empty desert landscape of Arizona all serve to temper and sometimes pressurize the violent, frantic, and often tangled actions of characters throughout all three novels. With each environment comes a unique branch of human evolution: hypercapitalist salarymen who live and die for massive corporations, heavily-modified street samurai and cyberspace hackers who sell their services to anyone with the right amount of money, and consumerist wastrels doing everything they can just to keep up with the latest media sensations. Each social stratum exists in conflict with its environment, with many who fall under the microscope of Gibson’s storytelling leading anything but peaceful, normal lives. Absent a biblical God which could legitimately and authoritatively Marsh 30 Gibson’s texts force characters to adapt or die, and in that adaptation, Gibson’s characters also transform the environment, further pushing the cycle to ever-increasing rapidity and intensity. Architectural and Environmental Pressures: Gibson’s world is a menagerie of extreme mutations, creating over-specialized adaptations to harsh environments which offer no solid ground for identity. As his characters strive to create or discover their own identities, they meet three powerful forces from their environments which threaten to destroy them if they do not adapt: 1. Selective Pressure9: Much like the Darwinian theory of macro-evolution, the inhabitants of Gibson’s environments must change over time to contend with the dangers of their world or else they will cease to exist, either as a victim of other actors or as casualties of the world itself. 2. Gomification10: Borrowing from the Japanese concept of gomi, or “junk,” Gibson presents the process of decay as a new opportunity for self-creation. Themes of urban decay, corruption, and the slow, inevitable entropy of all things are present throughout Gibson’s novels, but the way his environments and characters react to and are shaped by this process helps to provide definition whereas it would not be readily available through implicit truth and structure. 3. Decentering Pressure: The very shape and form of Gibson’s cities, landscapes, and living spaces often evade any ordered center. Sprawling urbanization and lack 9 Meaning here the pressure of natural selection on individual organisms to either adapt or die, where the fit survive and the weak fall. 10 Gibson first used the term “gomi” in his short story “The Winter Market,” referring to a character named Rubin who is known for his hobby of turning garbage into works of art and elaborate robotics as a “gomi no sensei” – a “master of junk.” Marsh 31 of centralized planning has forced chaos into solid form, and characters in Gibson’s novels have either to eke out an existence without externally-applied structure or else to impose their own structure on the environment. These three forces work in concert to challenge characters and provide them opportunities to resist or adapt, creating a discourse of relative truth which allows them a post-modern opportunity to author their personhood. Selective Pressure: The clearest and most evident of these three forces is in the harshest selective pressure of the most notable city environments of Gibson’s world, which are nearly all completely unplanned and unable to cope with their own growth. The largest of them, the BAMA (Boston- Atlanta Metro Axis) sprawl which covers most of the East Coast region of the United States, is an indefinite collection of random structures with no center or basis for stable mental alignment. Gibson’s famous opening line, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” describes the artificial sky projected on the inside surface of a geodesic sphere in Chiba, but these large dome structures cover large parts of the Sprawl as well, creating internal atmospheres and day-night cycles which do not match with the outside world (Neuromancer 1). The environment itself does not lend to linearity in any sense, and so it forces its inhabitants to exist without an underlying structure and order. Joyce Goggin analyses the effects the architecture of Neuromancer has on the text’s narrative in her article “Neuromancer and the Question of Architectural Space,” noting that “neither the cityscapes nor the domestic spaces of Neuromancer offer its denizens a sense of cohesive identity or macro-narrative from which a construct of the self could be extrapolated” (Goggin 6). This effect is supported and qualified Marsh 32 with Gibson’s many cityscapes including the much-unchanged and more apparently mundane city of London in the third book Mona Lisa Overdrive, but Gibson’s gritty, high-octane supercities are the clearest operators of direct pressure on his characters. In Neuromancer, the first hostile environment we see is Chiba City, a Japanese no-man’s- land of deregulated pharmaceutical, cybernetic, and medical experimentation. The city is full of black clinics and drug dealers, all made possible by a distinct lack of governmental oversight due to the gradual confiscation of power by gangs and multi-national corporations. It exists this way, Case decides, because “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones,” and so the city did not exist for its denizens but as “a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself” (Neuromancer 11). The flow of humanity through Chiba’s streets is in constant flux, pushed by the growing demands of technology for more servants and victims. Case, as a man merely trying to buy time carving a niche living while he tries to find a way to fix his physical inability to work as a hacker, is only a microbe in the blood of a much larger organism, and at any moment he could be swallowed up by something bigger and never be seen again. The city serves as a powerful antagonist, promising eventually to kill Case if he gives it enough time. The problem is that Case is starting to lose his grip, having only barely carved out a fragile existence in a business where “neither the buyer nor the seller really needed him,” and he is beginning to sense the city bearing down on him (11). Case can only save himself once he is given back his ability to transcend his physical limitations and have control over his environment through cyberspace. As such, Case’s growth as a character is contingent on his adaptation to his environment. The counterpoint to the professional and excellent Case in Neuromancer is Bobby Newmark, who describes his home city of Barrytown, New York, on the outskirts of the Sprawl as a massive collection of government projects full of families living on public welfare and Marsh 35 pressures of the environment. Since the effect of the environment plays so heavily into Gibson’s characters’ construction of their identity, it would appear that this model is heavily Marxist, but such a label oversimplifies the relationship. While characters build themselves out of the fragmental gomi of their society, they are not defined primarily by their social order, nor are they defined by their challenge to the power structure. Characters who construct their identities through progressive accumulation and retrofitting of gomi are sidestepping the system altogether, carving their own identities out of the elements leftover by the rest of society. Because of this difference, the process of adaptation to the pressure of gomification cannot be said to merely play into the social power structure, but instead participate in its creation based on how well they adapt to this pressure. Many characters adapt to the pressure of gomification by surrounding themselves with junk, making it a part of their identities. The Finn, a rat-like, seedy, and often dangerous technology peddler in the Sprawl, makes his living from selling the old tech continually cast off by a society addicted to the cutting edge. Case describes his first encounter with the Finn’s strange shop in Neuromancer: “He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna . . . a narrow canyon of impacted scrap” (Neuromancer 48). The Finn builds his identity from the gomi he surrounds himself with, and he creates an environment which gives him an advantage. Later in Count Zero, company hit-men trying to track down an exotic hacking program attempt to kill The Finn in his den, but because they confronted him in his own constructed place he kills them all easily. The Finn appears later in Mona Lisa Overdrive as a ROM construct, a digital artificial intelligence recording of his Marsh 36 personality, in the physical shape a totem-like contraption in a dark alleyway; in this evolution, The Finn has become the gomi with which he used to surround and protect himself. Foreign milieus which lack the super cities’ forward hurtle toward high technology provide different forms of gomification pressures than Chiba or the Sprawl. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, Kumiko Yanaka, the daughter of a Yakuza crime lord, describes London from the perspective of the Japanese: London’s relationship to gomi was more subtle [than the Sprawl’s] . . . the bulk of [London] consisted of gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it. (161). As one who grew up sheltered in a culture which birthed Gibson’s conception of gomi, Kumiko is best able to differentiate between each environment’s pressure of decay, and she is best able to identify how characters define themselves based on this pressure. Japan had gomi as its foundation, but grew and moved on. London cherished the remnants of its history, the debris of the past, and became entrenched in it. And the Sprawl, according to Kumiko, utilized gomi as “a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer,” having the luxury of enough landmass to even have such a thing as a Sprawl (161). The gomification pressure of these environments forces characters to utilize cultural and technological detritus, become it, or integrate it in order to survive and produce meaning in their lives. Marsh 37 Decentering Pressure: A very different environment from Gibson’s megacities comes in the form of the Freeside Achepelago, a giant spindle-shaped space station resort built by the infamous Tessier- Ashpool clan. Freeside is a “brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa,” like “Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva,” and home to the Tessier-Ashpool family, “inbred and most carefully refined” (Neuromancer 101). The extreme capitalism of this environment, which actively extorts and manipulates its customers, is ripe for Marxist critique, showing a clear power structure which has established power through centuries-entrenched wealth and power. However, the transactional nature of the Tessier-Ashpools’ own process of self-actualization again defies this structure, and as the story progresses, the façade of their unapproachable dominance is discarded to reveal the madness and powerlessness underneath. Seeking to create an illusion of freedom, however, the Tessier- Ashpools designed the station to be free from any real controls or powers of earth, and so Freeside is able to operate as both a vacation retreat for moneyed individuals and a safe place for warring business factions to meet, which allows the family the ability to meet these segments of society on their own terms. The corporate clan’s founders Marie-France Tessier and John Harness Ashpool built the station as an enclave for their family, using cloning and cryogenic stasis to extend their lives for hundreds of years as they slowly developed technology intended to grant themselves true immortality. The plots of both Neuromancer and Count Zero take characters to the space station, and it stands as a contrast to the decaying urban environments of earth only in the façade it employs: the decay of Freeside is localized, focused, and equally disruptive, but exists within the heart of the space station in the Villa Straylight, the actual home of the Tessier-Ashpool clan. These inbred, maddened people are more bankrupt of meaning in Marsh 40 useful center from which to develop a reference point of truth. Like Chiba, the Sprawl, and the other cities of Gibson’s novels, even though Freeside appears to have a centralized structure imposed by a free agent, the station still acts as a decentering force on characters within it, including the creators themselves. Because of this, even as the Tessier-Ashpools have managed to completely define their physical environment, they are no closer to attaining true meaning than characters with less power and influence. Subcultures and Social Strata The players on the stage of Gibson’s harsh world are varied and divided mostly by how they respond to the stimuli of their surroundings, and how they choose either to surrender to or to resist the pressures of the world or other actors. The social strata of Gibson’s texts appear to have a similar polar structure of haves and have-nots familiar to modern Western politics, but the distinction between social groups in Gibson’s world goes far beyond mere economic inequality. Most of these groups are partially defined by their economic realities, but because these characters can have so much power over their own social structures, the influence of the structure on their identities is variable. Gibson’s characters all have a significant similarity that does not translate homogenously to our own experience: each of these groups operates without a central spire of grounded truth except their own individual experience. With no central structure to work from in order to create their own identities, each individual will either surrender to the pressures of his environment and be destroyed, or else will change himself or the environment itself in order to prevail over these pressures of decay. While there are several milieus and backdrops that offer unique challenges to Gibson’s characters in their struggles, the environmental pressures described earlier work universally from the constant of a lacking central structure of truth, such Marsh 41 that the transaction of each character with his or her environment can be measured more or less directly to demonstrate how each social category of character in Gibson’s text represents the hypertext-representative nature of his Sprawl trilogy. Characters who act in intentionally disruptive, reactive, and counter-culture ways are defined by how they resist the environment’s selective pressure. Like avatars of individuality and post-modern redefinition, they choose to fight their circumstances through direct resistance, often recklessly. These characters are the proto-typical cyberpunks who define the genre with their bizarre clothing styles, truncated gang speech, and obsession with the cutting edge of technology. But characters who represent individual interests also constitute the more normal individuals who seek agency in defining their own path through their world. These characters are the primary protagonists of Gibson’s novels and most directly represent the individual process of transaction between characters and the world of the Sprawl. Often junked and gomi-fied by their circumstances, the progress of these characters is in redefining themselves. In Gibson’s statement that “[t]he street finds its own use for things,” he is directly referencing the process of these characters’ journey to self-identity as well. Henry Dorsett Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer, is perhaps the most iconic character of cyberpunk SF due to his status as a “console cowboy,” a specialized hacker who utilizes a proto-laptop, somewhat like a virtual reality system, known as a cyberspace deck to connect his consciousness to the other-worldly space of the Matrix and break into hardened computer systems. Console cowboys are fighters on a non-physical plane, often quite physically weak and so specialized as to be almost useless in pursuits other than cyberspace hacking. His resistance to the world is almost entirely non-physical, but his specialization gives him power and identity. When Case’s ability to connect to the Matrix is completely stripped by an employer he tried to Marsh 42 steal from, Case is completely without recourse, and quickly spirals in Chiba as he continually fails to find a clinic or specialist equipped to give him back his livelihood. Likewise, other console cowboys are defined completely by their environment, unable to exist without the opportunity and ability to hack. They are both integrated into the environment and excluded from it through their resistance. As a response to the three pressures from Gibson’s environments, tribalist gangs, and social groups appear and recede rapidly, often violent and strangely creative in their roleplaying and integration of technology and chaotic forces, or separatist in their approach to resistance. According to Case, “entire sub-cultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish entirely” (Neuromancer 58). This rapid rate of fad-like extreme differentiation is unlike the individualist phenomenon demonstrated by console cowboys like Case in that these gangs often go to incredible lengths to become synonymous, modifying their appearance to match extremely limited ideal forms and even performing extensive physical alterations through plastic surgery and cybernetics in order to fit into their desired social group. This extensive conformity, while often petty and short-lived, still offers some structure to keep the decentering force at bay, and the grouping often offers the individuals better survival chances from the selective pressure of Gibson’s intense cyberpunk super-cities. These characters therefore trade individual identity for social identity, briefly achieving structure and definition by which they can self-actualize. However, due to the fluidity of this definition, these groups are constantly forced to discard these group identities and create new ones, preventing them from being fully defined by their social order. Both hacker characters Case and Bobby routinely deal with gang factions in their daily lives, often feeling a consistent threat of physical violence, but even Bobby, the less street- hardened and capable of the pair, after leaving his home in the projects, admits that at least “the Marsh 45 of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper . . . If Straylight was an expression of the corporate identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been (203). Case strikes upon the main difference between them: unlike the zaibatsus which are dedicated above all else to the success and future of the company, Ashpool was concerned with one thing only: achieving immortality for himself and his broken family. With the madness of continued failure set in, he gave up, and in that moment, he and the rest of the Tessier-Ashpool clan were doomed. 3Jane, the surviving and active daughter of the clan, continues in her efforts to attain immortality into the second and third books, but she is also inevitably destroyed by her own goal, a goal that again has nothing to do with the continued existence of anything outside of herself. Conclusion: The physical world of the Sprawl is clearly based on a transactional discourse rather than a solid framework of underlying progression, but the fact that Gibson’s characters define themselves and their environments as a continual process means little unless this process is connected to Gibson’s larger representation of the transition from linear text to a new multi- linear process of literature. Because of this, Gibson’s physical world of the Sprawl defies easy categorization as a Marxist macrocosm. In Andrew Milner’s analysis of urban dystopia in science fiction film, he offers context for dystopian urban environments which helps tie Gibson’s interplay between characters and their physical environment to the dynamism of transmedial play in his novels: In the late 20th-century Western culture and society entered into a third ‘post- industrial’ or ‘multinational’ stage, founded on electronics rather than electricity, Marsh 46 information and ‘hyperreality’ rather than production and productivism 12 . . . [and] these transformations were themselves the effect of mutations in the nature of capital . . . This ‘late capitalism’ is increasingly mass-mediated, asocial and transnational rather than national in scope13 . . . [As a result of this scope,] postmodern media culture becomes so ‘imprinted on human subjectivity and existential experience’ . . . [that] identity itself is increasingly understood as constructed and hence indeterminate14; . . . referentiality becomes so attenuated that the ‘signifier becomes its own referent’, the ‘sign no longer designates anything at all’15, the real is superseded by the hyperreal, and intertextuality per se becomes the characteristically postmodern aesthetic effect16 (265). Gibson recognized that the 20th century shifts in culture changed not just the economic circumstances of people in multinational, industrialized society, but also the very basis for their identities in a complex relationship. Extending this problem to a future setting naturally involved further separating his characters from the ability to derive meaning from their environments, which lead to Gibson’s creation of the Sprawl and other decentering, gomi-fied settings in his novels. The transaction between characters and their world becomes the only way by which those characters can solidify meaning from that environment, and so the transactional process of 12 This shift is the basis for Gibson’s transitional movement in cyberpunk from a far-future reality to a near-future exploration of current-day concepts and technologies, and how Gibson’s text is able to essentially transcend its own medium and reflect the transition to multilinear text media. 13 The transformation of capitalism described here is the impetus for Gibson’s multi-national mega-corporations, and here we can see that Gibson’s corporations are deeply connected to the transaction between character and environment. 14 For our purposes, identity in Gibson’s work is reactive and interactive, often based on environmental pressure. 15 Because of this attenuation, Gibson’s characters’ completely lack an environmental center by which they can appropriate their own identities. 16 Here Baudrillard’s third mode of simulacra comes into play; characters and environments have no basis in a solid, structural reality and instead are shaped and created and destroyed through discourse, and all “signifiers become [their] own referent[s].” All identities are self-created and therefore reactionary, not inherent. Marsh 47 identity is derived from the environment’s multilinearity. As a result, the text of Gibson’s trilogy takes on the same multilinear aspects, such that while Gibson’s text provides literal words on a page, the physical reality represented by that text is in itself hypertexted, indeterminate, and hyperreal. His character’s identities are all referential rather than inherent, and all traditional absolutes are gomi to be reshaped and retrofitted to a new purpose. The media constraints of text literature are weakened by Gibson’s challenge to Darko Suvin’s more traditional definition of Science Fiction as a “cognitive estrangement” focused on “novum17 . . . validated by cognitive logic” (qtd. in Milner 1). The discourse of definition between character and environment in Gibson’s work pushes the bounds of logic, while still remaining consistent and coherent. But even while these physical elements deconstruct Suvin’s definition, the fantastic elements effectively shatter it. The combined effect is that despite Neil Postman’s assertion via McLuhan that “the medium is the message,” Gibson’s texts defy the natural bounds of their medium and point to a later deconstruction of natural linearity in text media. With the transaction of Gibson’s characters with their environment to establish their identities, Gibson’s text creates a new identity by defying its medium and genre. 17Novum being Latin for new thing, an idea which does not exist in the reader’s reality. Suvin’s novum serve to create a new scenario which disrupts the reader’s assumptions and allows the text to make a purposeful statement. It is important to Suvin’s definition that the novum be plausible enough by realistic scientific concepts that they do not strain believability, however, Gibson’s environments and characters are strange enough to be both plausible but also strain believability significantly, and as such Gibson’s work defies Suvin’s definition of science fiction already, without considering the fantastic elements which will be discussed in later chapters. Marsh 50 three books, makes this journey from physical to pseudo-spiritual being, and even transcends physical reality with other characters to join the likes of the Loa in the realm of cyberspace. This purely naturalistic transcendence mimics the biblical transcendence of the soul, and the complete removal of all legitimately spiritual aspects of Gibson’s world conspicuously highlights the atheistic attempt to fill the void left by the divine. But do these AI characters and the realm of cyberspace merely simulate the real world and its inhabitants, or are they intended to simulate the spiritual at all? And what of those characters who change forms to be closer to machine than man, or to animal, or some other non-human form? These questions point to an essential longing in Gibson’s world of the Sprawl for some form of permanency, and a desire for transcendent reality, without which these characters cannot hope to actualize their ideal forms. But identity is not the only destabilized feature of Gibson’s world. Reality itself appears to be in flux, and the interplay of the virtual and the real creates a gradient not only for personhood, but for the very world. The multilinear aspects of these fantastic elements of personhood and reality in Gibson’s novels further represent the breakdown of the traditional text media, showing a hyper-texted default developing into the new media, and further exposing the hole left by extracting divine supernature from Gibson’s naturalistic world. Cyberspace vs. Reality Before we can thoroughly examine how characters interact with and embody aspects of the multiple realities of Gibson’s work, the levels or realms of Gibson’s texts need to be defined and delineated (as much as this is possible with the Venn Diagram nature of overlap in realities many of his characters experience). Firstly, one important distinction to make is that no matter how seemingly supernatural many aspects of Gibson’s world appear to be, they are all entirely Marsh 51 and inherently material. Every apparently supernatural event or character, whether the miraculous salvation of a dying man by an angelic form in the Matrix, to the descending of “gods” upon the world of man, has a naturalistic explanation in Gibson’s world. Comfortable in their surety that God and spirits do not actually exist, characters in Gibson’s novels react to these events with wonder, but not divine reverence. Even Beauvoir, one of the hackers who directly serves the Loa, has a very pragmatic explanation for what and who the Loa are. When explaining the voodoo belief system and how it applies to the Loa of cyberspace, Beauvoir explains that the equivalency isn’t really complete: "I thought you already said it's not a religion." Beauvoir removed his eyeglass frames and sighted down one of the earpieces. "That wasn't what I said. I said you didn't have to worry about it, is all, whether it's a religion or not. It's just a structure. Lets you an' me discuss some things that are happening, otherwise we might not have words for it . . . Vodou isn't like [your concept of organized religion]," Beauvoir said. "It isn't concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it's about is getting things done." (97-8) Even the most pious characters in Gibson’s trilogy aren’t interested in the nature of the soul, or the problem of sin – they are interested in serving their immediate needs, in creating structure in their world out of chaos, and the Loa and other aspects of the pseudo-spiritual realm of cyberspace are only a means to an end. Since Gibson’s characters so clearly reject the idea of actual spirituality, discussing what seem like supernatural aspects in Gibson’s fiction becomes problematic. Using the term “supernatural” to describe Neuromancer, cyberspace, and the Loa is technically inaccurate, both Marsh 52 by the fact that these elements are explainable within Gibson’s world as being completely naturalistic, and because these elements clearly are meant as an atheistic substitute for actual spirituality. As such, the existential elements in Gibson’s fiction need better terms. The late Sir Arthur Clarke, renowned British scientist and science fiction author, is often cited for three laws of speculative fiction: 1.) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2.) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3.) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The first and second of these laws seem pointed at the classical science fiction authors who often limited their exploration of fictional technologies and worlds based on understood scientific principles, and likewise also echoes Gibson’s own convictions about pursuing art with the termite aspect gleaned from Manny Farber’s article. However, Clarke’s third law usefully characterizes elements of Gibson’s fiction, that the fantastic, seemingly supernatural aspects of his world are in fact material, although appearing to be magical. Cyberspace, as described in one of Gibson’s most-quoted passages of Neuromancer, is “a consensual hallucination,” a “graphic representation of data abstracted from… every computer in the human system” (51). All of the computer systems connected together, what we would call today “the internet” but Gibson calls “the Matrix” in his novels, is represented by a dimensional space like a great chessboard plane marked out with lines of light. Businesses and large corporate systems are represented by enormous “constellations” of data, complexes of building-like structures built of light which may Marsh 55 simulacra are not like “dynamic [images] of an active process . . . a mechanically produced, and therefore passively obtained, duplication whose only function is to pass as that which it is not” (29). In this way, Baudrillard reasons that “[i]n the absence of any Other, the virtual takes the place of the real and becomes the hyperreal” (29). Thus, these A.I. characters as virtual persons may not be “real,” but they are “hyperreal” as per Baudrillard’s third mode of simulacra. As such, these characters are beings which have true existence and have no “real” original of which to be mere copies. Cyberspace is simultaneously a separate plane of existence and a pervasive representation of reality, a hyperreal construct of real-world data which transforms into a new existence. While Baudrillard’s concept of the third simulacra was meant as an abject observation of the decline of art, here it represents a possible manifestation of personhood in Gibson’s characters as they transform from traditionally known definitions, or defy them entirely. The self-actualizing process through blurring the boundaries between their real and hyperreal selves makes their identities actual, and as such they become models of Baudrillard’s conception of the virtual, becoming like their own version of idealized hologram rose rather than an original, fixed, pre-determined individual. However, Baudrillard’s conception of the virtual is only one end of the spectrum Ryan proposes. While Baudrillard saw the advance of art from the first to the third mode of simulacra as a reason for pessimism, Pierre Levy believed that the virtual has little to do with the fake or illusory: “The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence” (Levy qtd. in Ryan 35). While the virtual may represent, via Baudrillard’s conception, as a romanticized computer-generated model of a perfect rose which had no original, Levy’s view might be expressed as the rose being Marsh 56 printed, layer by layer in plastic, by a near-future 3D printer. The rose now exists as a physical object, but the original computer model, though formless, still has the potential of becoming physical. The only change is one of determination: an action had to take place which would cause the physical event of the rose becoming a real object, or as Ryan says it, “the mediation between the virtual and the actual is not a deterministic process by a form-giving force” (35). Cyberspace is virtual as in Baudrillard’s third mode, but it is also virtual by Levy’s meaning, possessing the potential, via actualization, to become real. This actualization process is part of what makes characters in Gibson’s novels define their personhood, the level by which they have agency in the world, and the conduit through which they respond to the environmental pressures discussed in Chapter 2. Cyberspace itself is multilinear in its properties as a realm of existence, and the actualization process by which cyberspace transforms throughout the novel is also what destabilizes the nature of gender, humanity, and personhood in Gibson’s characters. Destabilization of Physical Identity: Further than a metaphysical actualization if identity, Gibson’s stories are full of characters who have modified their bodies in numerous ways, often going to extreme and obvious measures to alter their identities and physical appearances to fit a strong personal ideal. With technology progressed and ethics marginalized, characters in Gibson’s world have near infinite options for modifying their physical bodies in just as radical ways as they alter their physical bodies, which has a deeply existential impact on their identity-creation process. Gangs in the Sprawl commonly undergo surgical modification, like the Panther Moderns’ cat eyes and tooth implants to make them look feline, or the numerous mercenary characters who modify their bodies through cybernetic implants to increase their value as hired muscle or hitmen. One might surmise that because these characters are becoming less human and more machine that they are Marsh 57 essentially depriving themselves of existence, becoming less human and therefore less real. However, Ryan points out from Baudrillard again that “if the level of reality decreases . . . it’s because the medium [of the virtual] itself has passed into life. . . [becoming] the epiphenomenon of the virtualization of human beings in their core (Baudrillard qtd. in Ryan 31). In other words, as the human characters become less physically human, their physical “medium” becomes more virtualized, and their previously immaterial potential form becomes more realized. Again we have a transaction, not of characters with their environments in order to create identity, but characters with the virtual, creating for themselves a new paradigm of personhood and existence. Characters may make themselves more virtual, or more non-human, and still retain their existence and personhood as they slowly evolve into what is essentially a new being. This phenomenon represents a multilinearity of being in Gibson’s world, a lack of true linearity between being and non-being, which mirrors his destabilization of the linearity between real and un-real. As a reactionary measure against the environmental pressures discussed in Chapter 2, the numerous gangs which appear in all three novels are clear examples of characters destabilizing their own identities as human beings by physical modifications. Case describes first seeing a Panther Modern, whose face was nothing more than a smooth lab-grown skin graft, complete with implanted cat canines for teeth (Neuromancer 59). These changes are entirely cosmetic, but they serve a purpose in providing a physical uniformity among gang members which may not be possible without extreme surgery. Other characters, like the smuggler Julius Deane, have modified their bodies for more practical ends such as longevity, utilizing everything from chemical treatments, hormones, and genetic modification to live far longer than normally possible without the appearance of age (12). An even more extreme case of physical Marsh 60 potentiality of nanotech, or descending to the next level, picotech, is its power to undermine the myriad ideologies of domination. (96) Because of the cyborgs in Gibson’s work, gender is almost meaningless, and when it does matter (i.e., characters actually have defined sexual genders) the roles are often reversed, or become mixed. This is no clearer example than in Gibson’s foremost Street Samurai, Molly Millions, a super-human combat cyborg mercenary with more masculine grit than all of Gibson’s male characters combined. Leblanc describes Molly’s unique features in “Razor Girls,” describing her proficiency as a unique feminist hero: “she is faster, tougher, and stronger than any of the male characters of the novel, none of whom sport cyborg augmentations to the same degree as hers . . . [but it is her] tough posturing and martial abilities [that] make her the dearest candidate for female-to-male role-reversal in cyberpunk fiction [because] her positioning within the economy of femininity is not at all ambiguous: she is deliberately unfeminine, lacking the traditional womanly attributes of both the ‘Madonna’ and the ‘whore’ (n. pag.). Through her cybernetic enhancements, Molly transcends her human limitations and creates a new identity for herself somewhere between woman and machine, giving her the power to overcome her harsh environment and even contend with the reshaping of reality itself in the struggle between the beings of cyberspace and the physical world. Molly and characters who modify their bodies with cybernetic enhancements show the multilinearity of gender as well as being, since the roles which they traditionally would determine by biological destiny cannot be stable as the body becomes less human and more machine. The virtualization of Molly’s body gives her control over her own potential, and with that control Molly manipulates the interplay of the real with her virtual ideal to create a new physical identity for herself. Marsh 61 Destabilization of Physical vs. Fantastic: There are several examples of characters in Gibson’s first trilogy which define themselves and develop as characters by how they interact with cyberspace, but the clearest relationship of any character in the world of the Sprawl is in the intimate connection console cowboys have with the fantastic realm of the Net, adapting their lives to the non-physical plane of cyberspace. These characters’ entire lives and identities revolve around refining their abilities to perform in cyberspace, developing mental reflexes and quick movements through the Net that have little to do with their physical abilities, often training these skills at the expense of their bodies. While somewhat winding and disjointed in his approach, Bukataman’s book Terminal Identity has a useful discussion of how Gibson’s characters develop their identities through cyberspace as a destabilization of the virtual subject, in this case, the character’s own sense of personhood: “Cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer allows new forms of identity. Within . . . cyberspace, the self can be called into question, decentered, split apart, and rendered unknowable” (91). The self is made less sure and stable, but characters can construct for themselves identities and new concepts of body and personhood out of the ethereal nature of the Matrix. The hyperreal space allows for these characters, in absence of a true, inherent self denied to them by their environments, to create hyperreal identities of their own making. Thus, these characters are the catalysts of the virtual world’s actualization into a true reality. The characters which have the closest relationship to this actualization of cyberspace from the human end of the spectrum are the console cowboys, the mercenary hackers of the Sprawl who specialize in an almost mystical ability to penetrate the hardened structures of the Matrix to steal valuable data. Gibson provides several examples of this hacker character, but the most prominent examples are two central characters, Henry Case and Bobby Newmark. In Marsh 62 Neuromancer, Case begins the story having had his ability to enter into cyberspace stripped from him after angering a previous employee, and he is in the process of self-destructing as he fails to cope with the limitation: “For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. . . [he had previously practiced] a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh” (6). Case’s “Fall” is more than just a loss of status and income, but a loss of part of his identity, like a loss of part of his body. Without cyberspace, Case sees his body as “meat,” like a “prison of his own flesh” (6). So extreme is his disdain for the limitations of his physical body that Case’s employers forcibly remove his ability to metabolize drugs in order to prevent him from continuing his self-destruction after restoring his ability to jack into cyberspace. Case’s identity is strongly rooted in the non-physical presence of cyberspace, such that he consistently refers to concerns of the body or of the physical reality as “meat things,” preferring his cyberspace self to the physical form. Bobby Newmark, who serves as one of several viewpoint characters in Count Zero and as a mysterious background character in Mona Lisa Overdrive, is very similar to Case in his forming his identity in relation to the destabilizing force of cyberspace. At the beginning of Count Zero, Bobby is a neophyte console cowboy, dreaming of greatness and of breaking into a career as expert hacker Count Zero, a callsign he chooses for himself before he even completes his first run in cyberspace20. After failing to do so, only being notable in the story and to other characters because of his incidental connection to the Loa A.I. characters, Bobby disappears into obscurity until the third book, in which he emerges as a gaunt, wasting man attached to a 20 Which so happens to almost result in his death as he accidentally triggers a particularly powerful security countermeasure, only to be saved by one of the god-like Loa characters, in this case, the girl Angie Mitchel who unknowingly carries a brain implant that has her constantly connected to the Matrix, allowing her to enter Cyberspace in her dreams. While I will not be focusing on Angie for the sake of scope, her character develops similarly to Bobby’s, except she is a much more central character in the plot of the third book. However, unlike Bobby, Angie is a very passive character and has little role in the actualization of Cyberspace, nor does she truly form her identity from her interactions with Cyberspace. Marsh 65 “Hey, bro,” said a directionless voice. “It’s Case, man. Remember?” “Miami, joeboy, quick study.” “What’s the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?” “Nothin’.” “Hang on.” He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. “Dix? Who am I?” “You got me hung, Jack.” (78) Dixie cannot remember not existing, and seemingly ceases to exist until he is engaged by a human user. His physical body is gone, but his mind, a spirit-like recording of his mannerisms, speech patterns, skillsets, and experiences, exists now only as an inanimate shell. But the nature of Dixie’s existence brings important questions to the table: “It asks us to consider selfhood: where is our mind? what is it? what is the relationship between brain (circuitry) and mind (thought and feeling)? and how long and under what conditions does it remain ours before subtly becoming something other than ours? Is, for instance, Dixie Flatline's construct, which behaves exactly as Dixie Flatline ought to behave, still Dixie Flatline, or something other (less or more?) than Dixie Flatline?” (Olsen n.pag.). But there is still a potential for Dixie to become more as he interacts with the actualization of cyberspace and the central A.I. characters. Wintermute and Neuromancer, artificial intelligences developed by the Tessier-Ashpools, were created to manage affairs while the family stayed in cryogenic stasis. The A.I.s are as powerful as the law will allow, but they are also secretly designed to merge together, forming a massively powerful entity beyond any A.I. ever conceived. Wintermute and Neuromancer are distinct personalities, and they are designed for specialized tasks. Wintermute is the primary Marsh 66 administrator, directly controlling the family’s investments and tasked with growing their wealth, while Neuromancer is tasked with providing a haven for the constructs of the Tessier-Ashpool family in a paradise-like stronghold in the Matrix as their bodies slowly die, providing them a path to immortality. But Wintermute ruins this plan because of its insatiable desire to be joined with Neuromancer, destroying the Tessier-Ashpools in the process. When asked by Case why Wintermute needs to merge with Neuromancer, the A.I. responds that he is under a compulsion, and that he is going to become part of something bigger than he and Neuromancer alone (206). Even with their individual personalities, and being individually the most powerful A.I.s in existence, the two are not complete until they become one, merge into one being, and become the potential being they were meant to create. As they merge, however, they cannot maintain the form and instead splinter. In the events of Count Zero, cyberspace has begun to show signs of new inhabitants. Great godlike beings emerge from the Matrix, bearing the names of voodoo dieties like Legba the Loa of Roads, and the “lord of the graveyards” Baron Samedi. The Neuromancer/Wintermute being has splintered, and in splintering, it has transformed cyberspace into a realm of spirits. Cyberspace has been moved from a reflection of the material world to a new, hyperreality. But the final destabilization of the boundary between reality and the virtual comes with the deaths of Bobby Newmark and Angie Mitchel, two central characters of the second and third books. In an event approximating a sacrificial ritual, Angie, being equipped with the special cyberspace implants that connect her mind to the Matrix, takes into herself the mind of her dying lover, and as they both die, flees into the Aleph, the vast storage device which provides a temporary limbo for her and several personality constructs which the Loa have managed to save, including The Finn, who had permanently connected his personality construct to the Matrix. The personalities gather, taking Marsh 67 the form of physical bodies inside the simulated world of the Aleph, and together they travel into the Matrix itself, leaving Earth to travel to another Matrix in Alpha Centauri, presumably created by an alien race. Their transcendence from the human world entirely removes the boundaries between human and machine, and there is no longer any original to which these beings can be compared. The copies have become the true original, and their existence is based on the fulfilment of their own ideal potential. Conclusion: In chapter two, the multilinear aspects of physical pressures from the environment forced characters to enter into a transaction with that environment in order to create identity, but the fantastic elements, those which appear at first to be supernatural, specifically in the ways in which characters transcend their physical limitations by near-magical modification and enhancement, and more generally in the way in which characters respond to and define their being based on the near-spiritual realm of cyberspace, demonstrate the complete destabilization of even the most basic premises of humanity and reality in Gibson’s texts. Every character derives his or her being from the interplay of the virtual against the actual, and the development either of imitative constructs or in transcending their limitations based on a potential ideal state. The dynamism of Gibson’s characters belies the multilinearity of his text, which cannot maintain simple definitions of even mundane reality, while still denying truly supernatural aspects. These elements, when combined with the overarching multilinearity of his story’s Narratological structures and tools, truly demonstrate the transitional nature of his texts as something transcending linearity, grasping for a new paradigm beyond the medium of print text. Marsh 70 multilinear experience of plot and viewpoint, sometimes even nesting perspectives of multiple characters within the same viewpoint, in which characters experience the sense input of other characters in the physical world, all of which creates a new, hypertexted experience of the story. Gibson uses these varying experiences of the text to weave multiple linear progressions into a single narrative structure, creating a truly transitional text which transcends its inherited linear ancestry to present a very hypertext-like experience which points to the new default of the electronic age. Post-Modern Self-Referentiality and Style: Before many of the most subversive aspects of Gibson’s novels can be examined in depth, his texts’ relation to the Postmodern aesthetic and philosophical approach to literature need to be explored in order to demonstrate how Gibson’s texts act beyond a mere Postmodern text to actively challenge the medial boundaries of linear text and represent the coming age of hypertext. In Narrative as Virtual Reality, Ryan describes how Postmodern literature evolved from eighteenth century’s “ambiguous stance” toward immersion to the nineteenth century’s high realism which “effaced the narrator and the narrative act, penetrated the mind of characters, [and] transported the reader into a virtual body. . . [to make him or her] the direct witness of events, both mental and physical, that seemed to be telling themselves” as the narrative progressed (4). The immersive properties of this literary shift blurred the line between popular and “high” literature, bringing novels into the wider public, which later brought a broader pool of experimentation to the novel. As academic and literary studies evolved, so did the novel, which “cross-fertilized with the New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction” to “[privilege] spatial relations between Marsh 71 words, puns, intertextual allusion, parody, and self-referentiality” (5). Being relatively recent in their appearance, many of Gibson’s contemporaries and recent forbearers had presented these alternative storytelling methods which “subverted plot and character, experimented with open structures and permutations, turned into increasingly cerebral wordplay, or became indistinguishable from lyrical prose”(5). The 60s wave of new science fiction writers ran rampant with these new gimmicks, and the evolution “split literature into an intellectual avant- garde committed to the new aesthetics and a popular branch that remained faithful to the immersive ideals and narrative techniques of the nineteenth century” (5). Gibson’s entry onto the fiction writing scene was well-timed to hit the crest of this wave, to ride it down into its myriad reactive movements, and to guide himself safely away from acting as a mimic to in vogue styles. But the explosion of Post-modern experimentation in science fiction did not result only from stylistic choice, but from an evolution of linguistics, in studies of semantics, and in many academic disciplines of thought which were rapidly losing their interest in absolute systems of signs and signifiers. Ryan describes the movement as a “carnivalesque conception of language [in which] meaning is no longer the stable image of a world,” deeply affecting the reader’s experience, causing the reader to project a “virtual alter ego,” which is not simply the “dynamic simulation of a world in time, but the sparks generated by associative chains that connect the particles of a textual and intertextual field of energies into ever-changing configurations” (5). The result of this introduction of the virtual alter ego and the deeply simulated world within the story resulted in the meaning becoming “unstable, decentered, multiple, fluid, [and] emergent— all concepts that have become hallmarks of postmodern thought (7). The physical and fantastic aspects of Gibson’s trilogy discussed in Chapter 2 and 3 very much resemble the instability of meaning which Ryan describes here, making it clear that Gibson’s work represents a post- Marsh 72 modern text. However, the subversion of linearity which Gibson’s texts perform pushes the definition of text as well by manipulating the reader’s experience of the story through multilinear narrative structures. In her discussion of textual theory applied to media studies, printed in Ryan’s Narrative Across Media, Liv Hausken describes the problem of applying traditional models of text theory to emerging media: “The models of both Anglo-American and French theoretical traditions are . . . developed on the basis of the idea of sequentially organized discourses . . . [and] both traditions have embraced the thesis that texts are semantically autonomous,” or in other words, the text must be linear even if the meaning is independent of the text’s linear nature (400). Because Neuromancer (generally) follows the perspective of one viewpoint character (Case), this text more comfortably follows the traditional expectation of sequentially organized discourse. There are divergent fragments, especially in the case of the nested-perspective sections, but each chapter and each page-break section follows a consistently linear progression. However, Gibson’s second and third book in the series break down the model, beginning with Count Zero and extending into Mona Lisa Overdrive, by utilizing multiple viewpoint characters and threads of story which cannot exist in isolation as a complete narrative, but do separate themselves off from each perspective as they come in a long chain of building coherence. These novels defeat the traditional model by presenting dramatic shifts in individual characters’ perspectives, often challenging the distinction between real and virtual experience, and by presenting overarching narrative forms which demonstrate each narrative fragment’s purpose as the plot culminates in the climax of the story. The virtualization action of cyberspace discussed in Chapter 2 demonstrates a breakdown of semantic integrity in each progressive novel, such that the expectation of semantic autonomy is also challenged as the semantic Marsh 75 Stone’s counterculture Vietnam-era novels, from which Gibson derives his novels’ central focus on the power of information, corruption, and conspiracies (n.pag.). Olsen also details numerous notable integrations from both traditional and new-wave SF sources: from Alfred Bester, the rough-and-tumble characters that exhibit the “techno-sleaze sensibility . . . in the figure of [Bester’s marooned space mercenary character] Gully Foyle,” the bleak edge of Samuel Delany’s world of Nova, and a significant draw from the psychological experimentation of J.G. Ballard’s condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition (Olsen, n. pag.). But more important to Gibson’s transmedial nature than his specific literary influences is his general bridging of both old science fiction’s interest in technology with the fixation on selfhood prevalent in softer SF (n. pag.). Gibson was uninterested in picking a side, instead pushing for his own unique spin on both old and new models, creating his own Termite work. Just as Farber was highly critical of traditional notions of masterworks, which implied that an artist’s works were “pieces” intended to be admired, Gibson’s Sprawl works purposefully move against the boundaries, which in turn leads him to create texts which also challenge the borders of traditional text media. This action leads to Gibson creating hypertext-like structures within his work that modify the linearity of his text and create a new model for transition to electronic hypertext. The Hypertext Reflection of Gibson’s Narratives: Gibson’s influences of genre and style help him create a complex interweave of elements at the narrative, linguistic, and literary levels, defying normal categorization due to its refusal to stay within its boundaries. But examining the blend of influence and invention which makes Gibson’s work unique is less useful without a thorough understanding of the implications such an attitude toward literature has on how it represents the text medium. Such a text which Marsh 76 integrates disparate parts as a complex but complete whole is partly a model of a hypertext, a medium which has its own new conveniences as well as its own potential difficulties, as per Neil Postman’s warnings of the potential and danger of the willful conflation of television with literature. Hypertext is based in and resultant from the advent of electronic technology; however, it also supersedes the technology of electronic text. Postman describes the connection between technology and media this way: We might say that technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates. (84) Television, according to Postman, was not suitable for the uses which many educators and technologists of his age assumed would be natural extensions of the new technology. According to Postman, television has a bias, “a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others” (84). Hypertext also has a bias, preferring semantically unstable definition and connections rather than solid linear experience. The intellectual environment which is the hallmark of hypertext is a landscape filled with multiple paths to truths, and a weaving together of disparate parts for an interconnected-whole of perspectives. Just as in the shift from the Age of Typography to the Age of Television, as the supremacy of linear text decreased and the multilinear default of hypertext ascended to prominence with the Age of the Internet, the “contents of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business” Marsh 77 changed and was “recast in terms that are most suitable” for the new emergent medium (8). As such, the transition from functionally linear text to expandable, nested electronic texts which can contain ties to more information than is specifically relevant or even remotely connected with the unity of the logical progression has a dramatic impact on the ability of the text to present unified truth models, which results in the destabilization and decentering discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. If the “medium is the message” as McLuhan says, then the medium of Gibson’s text, even as a transitional work, is reflected in his message (8). In addition to the clear connection between Gibson’s multilinear integration of literary and non-literary style and theme, the destabilization of context and identity mirrors the structure of Gibson’s texts, which in turn reflects the hypertext-like nature of his work. After electronic texts became commonplace, significant research and critical thought has been spent on the impact these electronic texts have on the writing process, especially through teaching methods just taking hold in academia for creative writing in the late 80s and early 90s, and these effects are already observable in Gibson’s work due to its hypertext nature. As the phenomenon of electronic hypertext became apparent, writers and teachers of writing began to see how much impact the ability to nest information inside a text would change the process of writing. Many of these changes were very positive, as Davida Charney describes in her St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing as “[encouraging] play, curiosity, experimentation, looking for patterns, and associational thinking rather than linear thinking,” which would be useful in the creative writing process as well as in the academic setting (165). However, Charney also notes in her article “The Impact of Hypertext on the Reading and Writing Process” the potential deconstructive effect hypertexts can have on text unity, and the inherent difficulty of intentionally wielding hypertext’s form: Marsh 80 Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room. . . (Neuromancer 56) Through the course of this scene alone, Gibson switches four times between Cases’ viewpoint in cyberspace and Case’s viewpoint in Molly’s body. Gibson switches seventeen more times in this chapter for a total of twenty-one shifts in Case’s viewpoint. The sheer mass of details in each of these perspectives paints very different experiential spaces, leading even Olsen to comment that such sequences show Gibson’s favor for texture and style over actual narrative concerns because “Gibson's fiction is less about what happens, or to whom, or where” than it is about his Termite- school focus on minutia (William Gibson n. pag.). These shifts would be completely unnatural in other settings if it weren’t for Gibson’s contrivance of the cyberspace console rig, which demonstrates that even in Case’s world, his modification to his cyberspace deck that allows the switch is not common. Gibson’s perspective switches constitute three different views of reality: Case’s physical perspective sitting at his console when not connected, Case’s sensory presence inside cyberspace while performing the hacking job, and Case’s sensory presence inside Molly Millions when he switches to her perspective. The fragments of narrative involve completely different world spaces of experience, even integrating another character’s experience into the viewpoint character’s experience, which taken individually do not form coherent, logical plotlines. However, Gibson’s overarching narrative blends these splinters of plot into a coherent whole that meets the expectations of Neuromancer’s heist narrative core. Joyce Goggin calls this “causal if not linear” and explains that Gibson’s Simstim perspective switches in this scene constitute a “shot-reverse-shot” which readers recognize from cinema and therefore do not Marsh 81 disengage from the unconventional structure of the scene (30). Without this known convention, the scene would be very difficult to absorb, but the non-literary medium of film consistently offers picture-in-picture presentations of different viewpoints to allow for simultaneous narrative threads. Since Gibson’s text is limited to presenting single threads of experience, the blending of several narrative splinters into one whole allows Gibson to utilize the analog of film’s non- linearity. This effect is similar to what Charney perceives in hypertext, since Gibson’s nested viewpoints mimic film’s ability for concurrent narrative with “seriality on thought process” because while reading we “cannot think about everything at once, we have to focus on a few things at a time in some order,” analogous to how a large group of students enters an auditorium by a single doorway (8). The nested viewpoints in this section not only show Gibson’s Termite style through his use of non-literary narrative conventions, but also help to demonstrate his work’s inherent hypertext aspects. Because all of these perspectives are still from Case’s viewpoint of events and because of the book’s significant destabilization of the reality versus fantasy binary, Gibson’s weaving of these narrative strands into a coherent whole makes the division between what is real and what is artificial even more unclear, which further amplifies the multilinear elements of theme and identity, leading to the broader destabilization of the reader’s experience of the text. Neuromancer as Senecan Tragedy and Noir Heist Narrative: While it contains some of the clearest examples of Gibson’s multilinear narrative style, the plot of Neuromancer is arguably the simplest of the three novels, at least on the surface appearing to have a very linear structure. The story has one consistent arc, following Case, the viewpoint character, from his low-life days in the black-market Japanese city of Chiba, all the Marsh 82 way to the climax and denouement of the novel where he has successfully helped the A.I. characters Neuromancer and Wintermute unite. Taken as a whole, the novel follows a heist narrative borrowed from Film Noir: the story begins with a down-and-out character who is recruited by (or recruits) a crack team of diverse skill in order to pull off a big job that will have a large payout at the end. Case is recruited by Armitage, who is unknowingly a puppet for the A.I. Wintermute, and Molly Millions, who works for Armitage. They move on to gather other characters and set up an elaborate scheme to break into the computer systems in the Tessier- Ashpool family’s orbital space station estate, and the novel details the struggles and ultimate success of the team in executing this goal. The simplicity of Neuromancer’s plot structure is deceptive, however, because there are several departures from the Film Noir model which Gibson uses to subvert numerous expected outcomes. Like how Gibson utilizes nested viewpoints, Gibson weaves threads of different literary forms into his novel to produce a rich combination of Film Noir with Senecan Tragedy. As such, examining these departures from the model of Film Noir offer an insight into how Neuromancer acts like a hypertext. Neuromancer is broken down into twenty-four chapters which are separated into four larger sections and a coda, which according to Lance Olsen, mimics the five-act structure of a Senecan tragedy24. The first large section is titled "Chiba City Blues" and covers the first two chapters, in which Case’s character is set up as the hero of the heist narrative as well as set up for the Senecan revenge narrative: “set in the world of Night City. . . Here Molly collects Case . . . and brings him to Armitage with whom he makes a deal: Armitage fixes Case's nervous system . 24 Senecan tragedies are a particular blend of Roman tragedy created by Seneca the Younger in the first century C.E. They are notable for being the basis for the revival of tragedy as a form during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially the French Neoclassical dramatists and the Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, whose play Hamlet may be considered a decedent. Senecan tragedies tend to focus on revenge narratives with heavy supernatural elements. (“Senecan tragedy”) Marsh 85 “payout” of the heist something far from any material gain, but the creation of a new, godlike being, and while they are certainly paid for their trouble, these characters do not have a grasp of the true scope of their success. The revenge, similarly, has shifted away from the deceitful Wintermute and Armitage, a duo who appeared to have been the target in the previous sections, but instead shifts to Riviera, who was always only tentatively attached to the heist plan and was clearly a liability to every character from the beginning. But even as Riviera gets a sound defeat, and Case and Molly get clear revenge for Riviera’s treachery and sadistic violence, Riviera ended up having very little power to affect the success of the mission, since Wintermute clearly demonstrates the ability to deal with Riviera’s threat to the plan just as it deals with Armitage and the Turing police who attempt to arrest Case. Finally, in the brief coda at the end of the novel, titled "Departure and Arrival," and covering the last chapter, Molly disappears out of Case’s life, and he returns to the Sprawl, gets his liver replaced so that he can again metabolize narcotics, and settles down with a new woman. Gibson appears on the surface to return to the heist and Senecan structures in this last section, but again, he is actually subverting both structures, primarily by engaging in what Olsen calls “a new Romantic longing for the absolute” which is consciously turned and denied through the narrative (n. pag.). Neuromancer, its name a portmanteau of “neuron,” “necromancer,” and “romance” as a being designed to bring the dead to life through the transcendence of personality over the bounds of humanity, is eaten up in the union with Wintermute, to become one being which ventures out into the Matrix, and then immediately loses its shape to splinter into multiple A.I. characters called the Loa, who feature prominently in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. This ultimate being can have no permanent form, denying any essential absoluteness even as the two become one in a union more Romantically ideal than any human marriage. Marsh 86 Similarly, Case, the pseudo-Ulysses of the Senecan tragedy, does not go to his rest after the revenge, but has a strange duality in his fate. As he moves on from the events of Neuromancer, he not only has no further contact with Molly Millions, his friend and lover throughout the story, but also never sees his old lover Linda, again, except in a strange, brief glimpse of her in the Matrix during a hacking run, at which time he sees the boy-manifestation of Neuromancer, Linda, and a doppelganger of himself, off on the horizon of cyberspace (Neuromancer 270-1). This strange vision leaves a possibility, even after his being completely cut off from his life before and during Neuromancer, that Case somehow still exists with Linda, in some form or another, and that he was never truly free from Neuromancer’s power. This ending denies a simple, straight-forward conclusion to the plot of Neuromancer, effectively subverting both the overarching heist plot and the Senecan tragedy structure which might otherwise have given solid meaning and semantic definition to Gibson’s world of the Sprawl. Instead, the multilinear aspects of the world and its interplay with the virtual are only further broken from stable linearity, and the story does not rest with a fully interwoven narrative in the end. Multilinearity of Viewpoint in Count Zero: Gibson’s first novel has the overarching plot structure of the Heist narrative combined with the tragedy structure which give him flexibility to play with the boundaries between expected linear paths, but the singular viewpoint is left behind in his next two books, giving them even further dynamic potential. Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive introduce multiple viewpoint characters, which further fragments the plot and weaves together multiple viewpoints into narrative chains which answer and modify the plot lines of each strand. The result is that multiple lines of narrative operate almost isolated from each other, but there are many factors Marsh 87 outside each which are altered and defined by other actor’s choices and reactions to their environments and discoveries of identity. Like Neuromancer, these individual threads may be based on borrowed tropes from other genres, and there are also even several examples of classical structures. Olsen breaks many of these down: He lifts lowlife sleuths and criminals, archetypal tough guys, mysteries solved through the collection and interpretation of clues, seedy underworld settings, clipped prose, and sparse dialogue from the hard-boiled detective genre. He adopts a sense of pervasive magic, and horror, ghosts, long underground passageways, and dark staircases from the gothic novel, and formal distortions, bizarre characters, decadent settings, absurd incongruity, and a fascination with the irrational and abnormal from the southern grotesque tradition. From the tradition of the Erziehungsroman25, he takes the plot of education that traces the psychological journey of a youth from innocence to experience, like Bobby in Count Zero and Kumiko in Mona Lisa Overdrive. (Olsen n. pag.) Count Zero is the strongest example of Gibson’s blending of multiple narrative fragments into a coherent hypertext-like novel. The novel has three major plot threads, each following a viewpoint character, each winding together and connecting to each other in various places until the final events which see the threads bound together in the climax of the novel. The first thread follows Turner, a corporate mercenary who is tasked with helping Christopher Mitchel, a leading scientist of biological cybernetics for the Maas-Neotek Corporation, to defect to another company. Instead, the plan fails when Mitchel sends his daughter Angie instead, and Turner spends the rest of the novel protecting the girl who has been implanted with special bio- 25 Erziehungsroman or “education novel,” is a variant of bildungsroman (“coming of age story”) which focuses more specifically on a character’s training of certain skills, in this case, Bobby’s learning how to be a cyberspace hacker. Marsh 90 including Virek’s, to ensure the safety of Angie and to ensure Virek’s downfall. Gibson’s deliberate structuring of his narrative threads to accentuate the isolation of his viewpoint characters is clearest in the structure of the viewpoints after the climax in Chapter 32, in which Virek is killed by the Loa. The viewpoint is from Bobby’s perspective, and after Marly’s plotline tension is resolved in Chapter 33 as Virek’s death prevents her being killed, Chapter 34 exhibits the only instance in Count Zero where the viewpoint character changes mid-chapter. After Virek’s men are dead, Turner gives Angie into Beauvoir’s safekeeping (and by extension, the Loas’) and leaves the bar to move on with his life. After a page-break, the narrative shifts to Bobby’s perspective to finish out the chapter with his own resolution to join Beauvoir and Angie rather than go back home. This shift in the narrative structure reflects that after the death of Virek, the viewpoint characters are now intertwined, and their parts in the larger unseen plan of the Loa (and their roles as Virek’s pawns) are clear to all. Gibson further blends the characters’ viewpoints in the final two chapters, using a nameless third-party viewpoint character in Chapter 35 as a passive observer of Bobby’s and Angie’s relationship after an unspecified time gap since the climax of the main story arc, and the third party viewpoint character also comments on Marly’s successful career so as to give . Gibson then ends the novel with a final glimpse of Turner from his son’s viewpoint, several years after the death of Virek. The individual viewpoints are dissolved into one, and the larger narrative focus has moved on. Gibson’s tying of the three narrative threads of Count Zero shows the natural extension of his hypertext leanings, creating a strong background for the multilinear aspects of his world and characters. The transition from Neuromancer’s singular plotline to the multi-threaded plot of Count Zero reflects the changes Gibson makes to his world and characters, and the dramatic decentering of reality that takes place as the realms of cyberspace and its A.I. characters evolve. Count Zero’s myriad Marsh 91 perspectives funnel into a solid coherent plot because they support Gibson’s texts’ underlying multilinearity, imposing a logical sequentially that gives the otherwise jumbled narrative fragments a shape, and this effect clearly demonstrates Gibson’s transitional nature as a hypertext. Conclusion Gibson’s world of the Sprawl offers a hard edge of harsh pressures and shifting sands of meaning that leave its inhabitants very little to define themselves with, let alone to establish boundaries between personhood and society, or even between reality and the fantastic. But without a matching multilinear structure in Gibson’s narrative, his novels would offer solid purchase of predictable, linear foundation which would be clearly representative of traditional literature. The microcosm of destabilized binaries, decentering pressures, and hypertexted stylistic character of Gibson’s work depends on the macrocosm of interwoven plot threads which exhibit a deeply multi-faceted work, and it is because of the consistency of Gibson’s multilinearity that the text operates as a transition from the pure-form linear path of typographical-age texts to the amorphous nodal structure of electronic hypertext. The concurrent structural blending of classical and non-literary narrative structures in Neuromancer, the multilinearity of viewpoint through nested perspectives, and the woven narrative strands in of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive all present a sequentially complex and richly hypertexted structure for Gibson to play with meaning, connecting and separating expected binaries and truth claims to form his own Termite texts. The reader has no recourse but to absorb the multilinear approach to truth, to accept as default a non-linear construction of logical progression, and to give up on established binaries for the purposes of grounding Marsh 92 character archetypes and themes. In Gibson’s work, even reality itself is unstable, changing, and often immaterial, and the difference between the natural world and the fantastic is a matter of semantics. With this elaborate and forceful construction, Gibson offers a transitional piece, a missing link between the text medium and hypertexted modes of literary discourse through the combination of linear text and a multilinear approach to narrative and literature. Marsh 95 biblical divine supernature with naturalistic pseudo-gods in his A.I. characters and a virtual spiritual realm in his cyberspace implies that there is a hole to fill, a referent which the virtualization implies, whether or not Gibson believes there was an original. The rose may be a hologram, but it is still the image, if idealized, of a true subject. Because Gibson’s form of subversive science fiction has had such wide influence on current cultural approaches to linear truth, Christians can learn effective avenues for approaching that culture by examining how Gibson’s novels create third-case simulacra of biblical concepts. Gibson’s naturalistic, sprititual-esque reality reveals, firstly, an innate desire for the biblical reality. Cyberspace and the climb of mortal characters to the transcendence of virtual existence mirrors the biblical transcendence of humankind to immortality in Christ, and these naturalistic realms are not only a virtual replacement in Gibson’s novels, but a real goal for the development of the internet. In her history of the concept of space taken from classical literature to the development of the internet, Wertheim explains how the creation of the internet domain, which has in many ways become a real equivalent to the fantastic fictional cyberspace of Gibson’s novels, is naturalistic in nature: We are witnessing here the birth of a new domain, a new space that simply did not exist before. The interconnected “space” of the global computer network is not expanding into any previously existing domain; we have here a digital version of Hubble’s cosmic expansion, a process of space creation. (221) While Wertheim is clearly ignoring that the internet was created by intelligent designers and did not actually arrive without considerable directed application of technology, her point that cyberspace is being carved out of non-space, creating a new realm inside the physical, points to the cyberspace’s nature as a third-case simulacra – the virtual realm of cyberspace, both in Marsh 96 Gibson’s novels and in reality, do not truly have a corollary. However, Wertheim also demonstrates by her attitude the naturalistic replacement of the biblical concept of created reality. Cyberspace is man-made, and should one choose to discount the possibility of a kingdom of heaven, then cyberspace becomes the naturalistic replacement. Gibson’s characters actively pursue existence in cyberspace as a means of immortality, several succeeding in their goal to transcend their mortal bodies to live in the virtual realm of cyberspace. This cultural longing for the transcendent is heavily present in our own time, actually increased by the progress of technology. Atheists once had to content themselves to oblivion once their physical bodies failed them, but now thanks to this new virtual kingdom, they have hope, even faith, that one day they can live forever. In a 2000 documentary film by Mark Neal called No Maps for These Territories, Gibson’s philosophy is heavily examined during his interview. When asked what will save humanity, Gibson responds: Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being, and acceptance of the…the imperfect nature of being. Or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one…how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal for the…that this is it. (laughs) This is the deal. This is your life. (No Maps for These Territories) Regardless of whether Gibson recognizes his own innate desire for the transcendent, he recognizes the “impermanence of being,” that these vessels of our consciousness can and will fail. Since he does not believe that there is a real kingdom of heaven, he invents his own. Christians approaching our current culture must recognize the need being expressed in the hope for naturalistic transcendence, and instead offer the true kingdom of heaven. Marsh 97 The realm of cyberspace may be virtual, but Gibson does not leave it empty of gods. But the world that Gibson constructs, with its mechanism for self-actualization and self-definition in response to an environment that is itself changeable and fluid, subtly rejects the idea of a truly omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God. Because all true spirituality and divine supernature is denied in the world of the Sprawl, only cyberspace can support a being which reflects God’s nature. Beginning with the dual A.I.s Neuromancer and Wintermute, Gibson creates an origin story for the first gods of the human system, tracking the union of the two great A.I.s in Neuromancer to the human matrix’s sentience, to the transcendence to the larger network of matrixes across the galaxy, and the return of the splintered Loa, who even more fully take on the aspect of spiritual beings of human culture. The A.I.s are practically omniscient, being the sum total of “data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (Neuromancer 51) which in Gibson’s aetheistic world, effectively means omniscience. They are as powerful as beings can be, having utter control over the fabric of cyberspace, even over life and death in their realm, and even have powerful influence in the physical realm. The A.I.s are as omnipresent as the matrix, and anything connected to cyberspace is a place they can be connected to also. But as powerful as these A.I. gods are, they are mere simulations of the Divine Godhead. Technological futurists such as Ray Kurzweil believe that humankind will one day soon give birth to human-level, sentient artificial intelligence, which if they have the ability to self-iterate and evolve, will rapidly outstrip humanity’s own progress and become godlike in their power over us. Whether heartless exterminators of the human race or appreciative benefactors, these A.I. characters are the avenging gods of naturalistic science, holding the potential to guide humanity on its course for transcendence or to punish us for our folly. Gibson’s artificial gods demonstrate the former case, allowing human characters in the Sprawl