An analysis of selected ""cyberpunk"" works by William Gibson, placed in a cultural and socio-political context

• Main Author: Blatchford, Mathew
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2014
• Subjects: English Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6721

This thesis studies William Gibson's ""cyberspace trilogy"" (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). This was an extremely interesting and significant development in 1980s science fiction. It was used to codify and promote the ""cyberpunk"" movement in science fiction at that time, which this thesis also briefly studies. Such a study (at such a relatively late date, given the rapid pace of change in popular culture) seems valuable because a great deal of self-serving and mystifying comment and analysis has served to confuse critical understanding about this movement. It seems clear that cyberpunk was indeed a new development in science fiction (like other developments earlier in the twentieth century) but that the roots of this development were broader than the genre itself. However, much of the real novelty of Gibson's work is only evident through close analysis of the texts and how their apparent ideological message shifts focus with time. This message is inextricably entwined with Gibson's and cyberpunk's technological fantasias. Admittedly, these three texts appear to have been, broadly speaking, representations of a liberal U.S. world-view reflecting Gibson's own apparent beliefs. However, they were also expressions of a kind of technophilia which, while similar to that of much earlier science fiction, possessed its own special dynamic. In many ways this technophilia contradicted or undermined the classical liberalism nominally practiced in the United States. However, the combination of this framework and this dynamic, which appears both apocalyptic and conservative, appears in some ways to have been a reasonably accurate prediction of the future trajectory of the U.S. body politic -- towards exaggerated dependency on machines to resolve the consequences of an ever increasingly paranoid fantasy of the entire world as a threat. (It seems likely that this was also true, if sometimes to a lesser degree, of the cyberpunk movement as a whole.) While Gibson's work was enormously popular (both commercially and critically) in the 1980s and early 1990s, very little of this aspect of his work was taken seriously (except, to a limited degree, by a few Marxist and crypto-Marxist commentators like Darko Suvin). This seems ironic, given the avowedly futurological context of science fiction at this time.