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Analysis of William Gibson's Neuromancer
Analysis of William Gibson's Neuromancer
Analysis of William Gibson's Neuromancer
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William Gibson’s Neuromancer: the Creation of a Language
Published in 1984, Gibson’s Neuromancer, with its vision of technological and impersonal life in the twenty-first century, echoes George Orwell’s ironic commentary on the controlling and dehumanising bureaucracy associated with post-war society. Writing in an era when technological and scientific advances are increasingly prominent, often to the detriment of humanity, Gibson differs from other science fiction writers in that he uses existing contemporary themes and issues, forecasting a possible and believable future and simultaneously providing a commentary on late twentieth-century society which his audience can relate to. His version of this not-so-distant future stems from an observation of contemporary post-colonial society in which national identity is shown to be insignificant, as uniformity reigns supreme. Speaking of the influences on his fiction, he states:
I see myself as a kind of literary collage-artist, and sf as a marketing framework that allows me to gleefully ransack the whole fat supermarket of 20th century cultural symbols (Maddox, Tom. “Cobra, She Said: An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson.” Fantasy Review 4: April 1986, 46- 8).
Through the novel Gibson was responsible for creating the terms “virtual reality” and “cyberspace”, and in an increasingly computer literate age these terms would be adopted by a generation of users, becoming an independent and universal language. Within the novel cyberspace is described as 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. (Gibson, William. Neuromancer, 67).
As technology has advanced with inventions such as the Internet and computer simulated images, the possibility of existing within this alternative world has become a reality. Therefore it can be argued that Gibson’s futuristic vision has in fact been realized, within a few years of the novel’s publication, and reinforces the view put forward by Maddox: “If the 20th century has a distinct narrative voice, this is it” (Maddox. Fantasy Review, 46-8).
Gibson addresses global concerns with his depiction of advances in technology leading to the computer becoming an independent life form. Despite the intentions of those responsible for creating this technology, it is this artificial intelligence which triumphs at the end of the novel. Echoing the viewpoint of Jean Baudrillard, who believes that reality is shown to be irrelevant in contemporary society due primarily to technological advances, the simulated world of cyberspace is shown to offer individuals greater possibilities and rewards than the harsh reality ever could.
In 1971 in Mobile County Alabama the School Board created a state statute that set aside time at the beginning of each day for silent ’meditation’ (statute 6-1-20), and in 1981 they added another statute 16-1-20.1 which set aside a minute for ‘silent prayer’ as well. In addition to these, in 1982 the Mobile County School Board enacted statute 16-1-20.2, which specified a prayer that teachers could lead ‘willing’ students in “From henceforth, any teacher or professor in any public educational institution within the State of Alabama, recognizing that the Lord God is one, at the beginning of any homeroom or any class, may pray, may lead willing students in prayer, or may lead the willing students in the following prayer to God… “ (Jaffree By and Through Jaffree v. James). Ishmael Jaffree was the father of three students, Jamael Aakki Jaffree, Makeba Green, and Chioke Saleem Jaffree, who attended a school in Mobile County Alabama. Jaffree complained that his children had been pressured into participating in religious activities by their teachers and their peers, and that he had requested that these activities stopped. When the school did nothing about Jaffree’s complaints he filed an official complaint with the Mobile County School Board through the United States District Courts. The original complaint never mentioned the three state statutes that involved school prayer. However, on June 4, 1982 Jaffree changed his complaint. He now wanted to challenge the constitutionality of statutes 16-1-20, 16-1-20.1 and 16-1-20.2, and motioned for a preliminary injunction. The argument against these state laws was that they were an infringement of the Establishment Clause within the First Amendment of the Constitution, which states that Congr...
This case was appealed to the Supreme Court on June 17, 1963. The Court ruled 8-1 against the prayer recitation. This ruling was partially due to the case Engel v. Vitale, where a similar Establishment Clause issue was approached. In both cases, the strict...
People all around agree that technology is changing how we think, but is it changing us for the better? Clive Thompson definitely thinks so and this book is his collection of why that is. As an avid fiction reader I wasn’t sure this book would captivate me, but the 352 pages seemingly flew past me. The book is a whirlwind of interesting ideas, captivating people, and fascinating thoughts on how technology is changing how we work and think.
...rst nation individual and not having one of these can cause many problems to the outcome of the that individual later in their life. The symbol of Beaver symbolizing family and what it is all about, how first nation people stick together shows us the struggle that Will and Annie go through to protect their family and who they love. The Symbol of bear showing protection and love conveys to the reader that when Will had those bear’s it was them that defended him from Marius and his gang. Lastly but not least, the symbol of goose in the novel shows freedom and taking on a long difficult journey and not giving up. The book Through Black Spruce written by Joseph Boyden tells the readers that the symbols present in the book shows the readers the struggles and hardships the characters in the novel are facing, which in turn helps the reader understand its own internal self.
... to foretell of a dystopian America that has eerily similar qualities to current- day- America even though he wrote this book over sixty years ago. Just as the novel predicts, People are becoming buried in their technology, leaving books and social interactions lower on peoples’ priority list. They want to have the latest technology to make it seem like they live a successful life. People have turned towards the technology obsessively in order to have fun entertainment and feel happy. Medication consumption is higher than ever and humans are addicted to fast- paced actions that provide them with their coveted entertainment. America is changing, moving towards an alarming technological dystopia just as the America in the novel did.
In the postmodern world of William Gibson's Neuromancer, nature is dead, and the world is run by the logic of the corporate machine. Confronted by a reality that is stark, barren, and metallic, and the hopelessness that this reality engenders, the postmodern protagonist, like Case, often immerses himself or herself in an alternate form of reality that is offered in the form of addiction (to virtual reality or drugs, for example), addictions that are made possible by the same society that makes an escape desirable. Such addictions are logical products of the post-modern capitalist society because they perpetuate the steadfast power of the corporation by allowing would-be dissidents an escape from reality, thereby preventing successful rebellion and maintaining the pervasive societal apathy necessary to allow the corporation to dominate undeterred. Case, as the addictive anti-hero, is a product of this stifling cycle of apathy. Lacking the motivation or drive to instigate any true change in his reality, he avoids the unpleasant realities of his world by entering into the altered reality of addiction.
The first of the many ideas conveyed in Carr’s article is that the brain is malleable like plastic. To explain, the professor of Neuroscience, James Olds, says that “nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones” (Carr 4). This means that the human brain changes the way it functions according to the information manipulated by neurons. In the novel Feed, brain malleability is involved in the climax of the story. The feed works as a computer chip being directly inserted into a person’s brain. The climax of the story occurs when Titus and his group of friends get their brain chips hack. Before the attack, Violet, one of the main characters, never questions the society she lives in. However, after her brain chip is affected, her thoughts and brain functions rewired and from then, she starts to reflect on society. Given the climax of the story, the novel illustrates how even a brain chip cannot stop the natural malleability property of the human brain.
In conclusion, technology has evolved and influenced our society drastically when it comes to human interaction. William Gibson’s Burning Chrome is a postmodernism/cyberpunk story that blurs the boundaries between what is being human. The story also blurs the line between the physical and the virtual that a human being interacts. The advances we had made with our technology have gotten to the point where it has entwined with human anatomy. Gibson’s novel was partly based on how our civilization is more and more coming together with technology. Another thing Gibson portrayed was how a person’s mind is transferred into a whole new world with the use of our modern devices. In the end, our society’s interaction with both machines and humans is getting to the furuturistic virtural world that Burning Chrome depicts in its text.
Though the overall mechanics of Oceania are false, many of the inventions and beliefs put forth by the novel, have come to exist. Between computers, mind-control experiments, and the overproduction of technological propaganda, the purpose of Orwell’s novel, a forewarning of possibilities facilitating in society’s inability to control the monsters it creates, is well served. Society must continually advance, for the health and survival of civilization. But, as evidenced by a common hope that no situation similar to that of Oceania occurs, this continuous advance must be made with continuos knowledge and restraint, in order to preserve a way of life society to often takes for granted.
Throughout the twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court has protected students’ rights to practice their religious beliefs, so long as they are not “disruptive, discriminatory, or coercive to peers who may not share those same beliefs” (Education Weekly, 2003, para. 3). In 1943, the Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette stated that students could not be “forced to salute the flag or say the pledge of allegiance if it violates the individual’s conscience” (First Amendment Cyber Tribune, 2002). The 1963 decision in Engel v. Vitale made school prayer unconstitutional, and similarly found school prayer at graduation ceremonies in its 1992 Lee v. Weisman decision (First Amendment Cyber Tribune, 2002). Student-led prayer at public school football games was found unconstitutional in 2000 with the Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (First Amendment C...
Cyberpunk is, as its authors would have it, a revolutionary new genre. The Movement is made up of radical new authors breaking from traditional SF ideology and prose. The style evokes a sense of fear and paranoia while overloading the reader with information. Aside from these indefinable feelings evoked by the genre, cyberpunk contains several concrete, identifiable themes in every story. The central theme is about fringe characters -- outsiders -- living in a grimy, seedy world ruled over by huge, all-encompassing megacorporations. The megacorps permeate the world of these characters with an impersonal, hopeless aura. One can either work for them as a wage-drone in mediocrity, or against them as against gods in a pitiful fight to outwit them. The cyberpunk world is completely overwhelmed, infused, and inundated by corporate technology such as decks, the Matrix, "prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration" (Sterling xiii), and artificial intelligences. The megacorporate philosophy that everything can be bought and sold, like the technology that is bought and sold, makes human life cheap and worthless. Technology has replaced humans, much like machines today have already replaced workers on the assembly line.
In Conclusion William Gibson created a cyberpunk/ postmodernism tale that has blurred not only the physical state between mechanics and human anatomy, but has as well blurred the line between the natural and virtual world. He is making the reader contemplate how both software and hardware have influenced the natural world. Gibson’s fictional world would have not been possible without the existence of software and hardware, that is why the distinction between them is very crucial and play a different part within the text. Without these two things, the reader would not be able to comprehend and relate to Gibson’s view on how our society is interlocking with the advances of technology and the normality of today will no longer exist in the future.
Dierenfield, B. J. (2007, April). The Battle over School Prayer. Retrieved March 12, 2011, from www.kansaspress.ku.edu: http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/diebat.html
Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 3rd Ed. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 2007.
...y to write a novel that so clearly shows the power of the state and diminish of the individual send chills to those who read his book. Even in the future, every reader is faced with the reality of the possibility of such a society existing. With technology advances and many history defining issues arising, the possibility of elements of the book coming true seems to become more and more of a reality.