WILLIAM GIBSON

William Gibson is arguably one of the most important authors to come out of the eighties. He is also, with little doubt, one of the most innovative and inventive. Through his work concepts such as cyberspace have entered not only language, but also our conception of both the future to come as well as the present. He has become a guru to hackers and computer (ab) users in general, and has been instrumental to the creation of the literary foundation of that post-modern, pseudo-intellectual, arty punk subculture known as cyberpunk.

His books have inspired other writers as well as musicians, film-makers, video directors, painters, comic books artists, computer technicians, and scientists. Above all, William Gibson has created a new style, a new perception of the future which is now - often vaguely termed 'post-modern science fiction' or, simply, cyberpunk.

Gibson started writing in the late seventies when one of his teachers at the university of Vancouver encouraged him to compose a short story instead of an actual literature essay. This became the first step into the not too distant future of Gibson's later works - a future which is both science fiction, harsh and dark realism as well as surrealism at the same time.

Gibson, having read and been fascinated with science fiction since his teens, wanted to do something in the style of the genre, but at the same time he was aware of the numerous clichés connected with sci-fi. He was getting bored with most of the literature because it was repetitious, predictable, mediocre, and in some cases seemed to incorporate uncanny ideas of fascism. Only few sci-fi authors such as S. Delany, J. G. Ballard, and P. K. Dick were interesting and experimental enough to inspire him. Another main source of inspiration was the drug guru and literary cut-up experimentalist, W. Burroughs, about whom Gibson says:

     I'm of the first generation of American SF authors who had the chance to
     read Burroughs when we were fourteen or fifteen years old. I know having
     had the opportunity made a big difference in my outlook on what SF - or any
     literature, for that matter - could be. What Burroughs was doing with plot
     and language and the SF motifs I saw in other writers was literally mind
     expanding.
     (William Gibson quoted in Larry McCaffrey, ed., Storming the Reality
     Studio, p. 278)

Gibson's sources of inspiration do not limit themselves to literature and the written word. The songs of American rock poet Lou Reed, whose dark lyrics describe (low) life in the big, American cities, presumably helped creating the image of the street anarchy that makes up Gibson's future sprawls. Moreover, there is actually a reference to Laurie Anderson's album, Big Science in the debut novel Neuromancer, which, by the way, also has a bar named Jarre de The...

Films such as Alien seems to have had some inspirational influence too, together with early MTV use of computer-generated host Max Headroom, later to be used in music and videos by British sampling pioneers, Art of Noise. And then, obviously, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on the P. K. Dick short story, Do Androids Dram of Electric Sheep?. It is said that Gibson left the cinema thirty minutes into the movie the first time he saw it, terrified by how much it reminded him of his own conception of the future.

Gibson seems clearly post-modern in his approach to literature and art in general. As mentioned above, he is inspired by what crititcs, in somewhat obsolete terms, would tend to call 'both serious, sub, and pop culture'. Many of the ideas behind his novels stem from various incidents and everyday life, from the media, advertisements, Salvation Army shops, arcade halls - the semiotic supermarket of the hyperreal, as Tom Maddox would have it.
(Tom Maddox, 'Cobra, she said - An Interim Report on the Fiction of William
Gibson', Fantasy Review, April 1986, p. 46)

Gibson says about the breakdown of distinctions between 'pop' and 'serious' culture:

     This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what post-modernism is
     all about. The result is a generation of people (some of whom are artists)
     whose tastes are wildly eclectic - people who are hip to punk music and
     Mozart, who rent these terrible horror and SF videos from the 7-11 one
     night and then invite you to a mud wrestling or a poetry reading the next.
     (William Gibson quoted in Larry McCaffery, ed., Stormig the Reality Studio,
     p. 266)

Gibson and the other cyberpunk authors write out of this generation. They are the inheritors of the new wave sci-fi of the sixties and the seventies, but they also draw on the 'classical' tradition represented by authors such as H. G. Wells, L. Niven, P. Anderson, and R. Heinlein. Also, there seems to be more than a slight fascination with G. Orwell, especially, and not surprisingly, 1984, as well as A. C. Clarke's early representation of AI as manifested through HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Before the big breakthrough in 1984 with Neuromancer, Gibson wrote short stories for various sci-fi and fantasy magazines, and through this interest he met with other young writers who shared his ideas and visions. These authors swapped letters, ideas, and manuscripts, and were soon to be known as The Movement, or The Mirrorshades due to their wearing dark specs at sci-fi cons and meetings. Also, mirrorshades seemes to be a common trademark and metaphor in the works of these writers, the eyes appearing not as the mirror of the soul, but a reflection of the viewer.
(Bruce Sterling, ed. Mirrorshades, p. ix)

The name cyberpunk was not invented by the Mirrorshades themselves, but attached to the genre after the success of Neuromancer which, quite surprisingly, as the first book ever, won both the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick award.
Author Bruce Sterling comments on the term 'cyberpunk':

     The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something
     crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The
     overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech,
     and the modern pop underground.
     This integration has become our decade's crucial source of cultural energy.
     The work of the cyberpunks is paralleled throughout Eighties pop culture:
     in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of
     hip-hop and scratch music; in the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo.
     This phenomenon, this dynamic, has a global range; cyberpunk is its
     literary incarnation.
     (Bruce Sterling, ed. Mirrorshades, p. ix-x)

Whereas much traditional science fiction often seems to deal with or fall back into technocrazy in one way or the other, an important element of cyberpunk is technology on street level. The fact that we are now using the computer, the walkman, and contact lenses every day, is reflected in cyberpunk literature, along with the ever-present fusion of styles and cultures. In cyberpunk the meta-narrative of Big Science technology has truly disappeared, exactly like in the Laurie Anderson song, leaving instead a kaleidoscopic overdrive of post-modernism gone techno.

However, cyberpunk has also been criticised as being merely hype, post-modern collage, void of human interest. One critic, B. Landon claims that cyberpunk literature will soon be history because:

     What integrity could cyberpunk fiction probably have in a cyberpunk world?
     For that matter, how long can cyberpunk's profound lens of technological
     inevitability be tuned on everything in our culture but the game preserve
     of fixed textprint?
     (B. Landon quoted in Larry McCaffery, ed. Storming the Reality Studio, p. 242)

I fail to see why cyberpunk fiction should not be of interest in a cyberpunk world, and the argument regarding the preserve of textprint seems particularly weak considering the increase of literature in cyberspace, should books suddenly disappear. But the interesting thing about Landon's comment, really, seems to be the way he takes it for granted that the conditions of cyberpunk fiction will soon become everyday life - cyberpunk is now. In fact, Gibson's most recent books are set in a future only just around the corner of the millennium, in a way indicating that the difference between the present and the so-called cyberpunk world may in many ways be quite minimal.

As for the particular question about printed text, Gibson brought out a short story called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) on computer disk only. After just one reading, a virus-program also stored on the disk, destroys the text. Perhaps this is a hint on the end of the cyberpunk movement? And rebirth? Or a post-Wittgenstein dissolution of language, reminiscent of Laurie Anderson's songs and performances about the lack of communication in the late twentieth century? Is this story (which deals with the past), and its destruction, an indication of the cyberpunk world described in Gibson's recent books no longer being fiction, but, as it were, the reality that awaits us just around the next corner - a complex metaphor of the relation between art and the 'actual'?

THE CITY - GIBSON'S NEAR-FUTURE SOCIETY

This much quoted opening sentence from Neuromancer in many ways describes Gibson's cyberpunk future quite well in but a few words. Already at the first glance one seems to get the impression of weariness and mild depression. If one takes a closer look at the sentence, part of Gibson's techno aesthetics is revealed; an image from the world of technology is, metaphorically, used to describe a phenomenon of nature. Case, the hacker protagonist of the story finds it, no pun intended, natural to use techno-images, images from the world of technology, to describe his surroundings, even if these happen to be nature, like - in this case - the sky above the port or other people.

However, what also seems interesting is the fact that most readers of the so-called western world will understand this kind of imagery too, even immediately. There can be no doubt the sky is somewhere between dark, dull grey, and black.

Thus the stage is set as the reader is plunged into the cyberpunk universe which is both bizarre and hyperreal in the extreme, yet familiar in an uncanny but highly fascinating way.

Gibson's future is not far from now, a guess would be somewhere around the beginning of the 21st century. A lot of tendencies from the present are recognisable - one could perhaps state, if a bit simplified, that Gibson offers an exaggerated, futuristic, and slightly perverted version of the eighties and nineties, rather than the traditional, classical 'Metropolis' image of technocracy - the latter of which is compared to Hitler Youth propaganda in the short story, The Gernsback Continuum which deals with past futures, futures that never came, the idealised futures of thirties America.
(William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum in Burning Chrome, p. 47)

Gibson's picture of the future, on the contrary, is far more complex and dynamic - a kind of socio-tech which, although full of hi-tech and computer theory, seems more concerned with the effects of technology as regards society, human beings, and questions of philosophical ontology rather than the actual tech itself. It consists of huge city complexes, the so-called sprawls, one stretching from Boston to Atlanta, another from Tokyo to Chiba, inhabited by the ever growing lower class and slum. The middle class, in the traditional sense, has all but disappeared - the closest one gets are the employees associated with the giant corporations, hidden in tall skyscrapers or even more or less self-sufficient arcologies.
Political parties and governments are gone as well. The big, multinational corporations fight for power and information against the just as big and multinational Japan-based mafia, the yakuza, in many ways transgressing and dissolving concepts of national borders, the sense and idea of nationality as a whole.
Only certain third-world nations still believe in democracy.

Life in the big cities is close to anarchy. The rules of the street are the conditions of life. This, of course, creates underground subcultures to which bohemians and criminals cling in a desperate attempt to grasp, at times, fragments of a shattered identity. Thus we encounter hard-core punks, ganja and dub-loving Rastas, black Voodoo-worshippers, and hacker anarchists, in what seems to be one big, post-modern melting pot - the hyperreal bricollage which is Gibson's world.

In his short story The Belonging Kind, Gibson deals with this mindless search for identity through the description of a girl who actually changes her physical appearance like a chamelon - somewhat like the Zelig character of Woody Allen's famous movie - walking from country clubs through discos and yuppie bars, so that it fits her surroundings no matter where she goes. The constant change of identity has become a goal in itself, in a way it too is a kind of identity; a fragmented identity reminiscent of F. Jameson's conception of the post-modern as empty collage of kitsch.
The story, with its cool feel of sweet alienation, almost mirrors the lyrics of German techno pop band Kraftwerk's Showroom Dummies:

     We're standing here, exposing ourselves - We are showroom dummies - We're
     being watched, and we feel our pulse - We are showroom dummies - We look
     around, and change our pose - We are showroom dummies - ...We go into a club,
     and there we start to dance - We are showroom dummies
     (Kraftwerk, Showroom Dummies, Trans Europe Express, 1977)

Apart from the apparent resemblances in what could be called 'plot', the Kraftwerk song and the Gibson story share a strange kind of fascination with as well as fear of this 'identity-hunger'. A hunger which inevitably leads to themes of alienation, following close in its track, decadence - or to quote another Kraftwerk song - 'Elegance and Decadence'.
(Kraftwerk, Europe Endless, Trans Europe Express, 1977)

Big city decadence is a recurrent theme in Gibson's fiction. Many of his characters have (had) to kill, sell drugs or prostitute themselves in order to survive the tough conditions of the big city. It is a game of survival, and there is no moralising tone in the books, because they are, in a way, set in a world that does not believe in absolute morals. Yet, this does not mean Gibson's characters are completely void of feelings, emotions or some notion of ethics. Though they may seem cold and shallow at times, they are all haunted by internal ghosts - ghosts that are sometimes externalised through technology, mainly but not eclusively in cyberspace. Moreover, cyberspace is inhabited by AIs, wonders of hi-tech that are capable of making decisions of their own, also outside the confines of traditional human morale.

But decadence is definitely not just a low-life big city syndrome. It is a disease which seems to be everywhere, even and perhaps especially, at the very top of society. Notably in the extremely wealthy Tessier-Ashpool clan of Neuromancer, which maintains its eccentric clan status through inbreed and by keeping its old leader and patriarch Ashpool alive artificially by the help of a cryogenic tank.
At one point in the story, the street samurai Molly encounters Ashpool, as part of a complex plan set up by Wintermute, one of the two AIs of the narrative, trying to merge with its other half, the Neuromancer of the title. Ashpool himself is like a character out of an Edgar Allan Poe tale. Molly enters his private chamber - well hidden within the Borgesian maze of a luxury hotel in orbit, full of art objects from various historic periods which she does not recognise, in a sense freeing them from their historicity. In the heart of the labyrinth Ashpool is about to (finally) commit suicide. He speaks of dreams - a central theme in most of Poe's gothic tales - cold dreams that he has had during his years in the cryo tank - his cryogenic crypt. Ashpool tried to escape the real world, but cold dreams sneaked in. The outside, as he calls it. To Ashpool, as indeed to numerous characters in Gibson's fiction, the gnostic escape achievable through technology is in many cases preferable to the actual, physical world. Other obvious examples are Case of Neuromancer who feels contempt for the meat and describes cyberspace as his distanceless home, or Bobby Newmark of Mona Lisa Overdrive who transfers his own psyche into data, leaving his dead body behind, in order to explore and create new worlds in cyberspace.

The scene from Neuromancer where Molly encounters and kills Ashpool bears much resemblance to one of the most scaring and most impressive scenes from the movie Blade Runner - the scene where the replicant Roy Batty, like the prodigal son, finally confronts Dr. Tyrell, his maker. Like Ashpool, Tyrell is an eccentric genius - the mad scientist - symbolically creating life because his high corp status and extreme wealth makes for a lonely life. Unable to provide any certain existential answers or to save the replicant, creation, son, Tyrell is killed by Roy to the backing of the dramatic electronic score by Vangelis.
This murder is particularly powerful because Roy, throughout the movie, seems a cyberpunkish and somewat Nietzsche-influenced embodiment of the Messiah myth, the saviour. Instead of crying out in despair, demanding to know why the father has forsaken him, Roy kills Dr. Tyrell, his maker, his god. But unlike the monster of Frankenstein he chooses to live on, though firm in the knowledge he does not have many days left.

Another important part, perhaps the most prominent, of Gibson's near-future world is of course technology. Technological development and advancement and the way in which it is used and looked upon is probably where we find Gibson's true innovative creation. This is where he is really treading new ground, creating, as it were, the essence of cyberpunk.
Bio-mechanical limbs, cybernetically enhanced reflexes, bodypart replacements, chastity brainlocks, cyber decks, and abovel all, cyberspace - Gibson rolls himself in (more or less home-made) technical terms and jargon, doing his best to make it all seem common - part of the semiotic overdrive that constitutes the hyperreal. And he succeeds.
One reason why we accept these techno fantasies is because they are actually not too far removed from everday life. We do not yet have biomechanial limbs, but we do have artificial prostheses. We may not be able to truly enhance reflexes, but we can dope our athletes at the Olympics, making them run faster than ever. We cannot enter cyberspace by jacking a cord into a socket behind the ear, but we can go to Japan, Holland or the South Pole through internet in less than a minute or play games in Virtual Reality. Again it seems Gibson is 'merely' observing the trends of the present, then pushing the fast forward button a little, and he has cyberpunk.

Once again, it is important to notice how Gibson is leaving the traditional path of classic sci-fi. In Gibson's universe, technology has moved from its technocratic ivory towers down to street level, creating a simmering techno subcultural environment inhabited by hacker anarchists and cybernetically enhanced street samurais. Of course the cybersapce matrix is to some degree controlled by big corporations, the vast amount of information it contains belongs mainly to them. But hackers may break through the electronic security systems and bring out the information which is hard currency on the black market. Moreover, the number one rule in hacker etos is 'information wants to be free'. This indicates an ideological, even romantic, approach to hacking, and indeed it can be argued there are quite a few elements of romanticism in Gibson's work. New Romanticism, Neuromancer.

Central to Gibson's characters is the fact that they do not fear technology. They belong to a generation which, pretty much like their contemporaries of today, has been raised by computers and the media. They have thrust themselves into the cyberspace universe with the same kind of enthusiasm as eighties kids explored the shimmering mazes of Pac Man arcade machines. Life may well be hard on them, but tehcnology is not necessarily an enemy. It may be that corporations or the yakuza use technology to control or subdue the masses, but individuals can, sometimes even with success, step out of this mass, seize technology and use it as a kind of weapon against itself, against the powers that be. As a rebllion, or, just as importantly, for the sheer fun of it.

The critic David G. Mead speaks of technology in Gibson's works as a liberating force, a self-actualisation process that can result in both apotheosis as well as multidimensionality of mind and person:

     A slightly more sophisticated example of self-actualization is offered by the
     heroine Molly Millions, the street samurai 'razor girl' who, to escape life in an
     urban 'squat', recreates herself (in the image of Sonny Chiba and Bruce Lee)
     by undergoing a series of elective surgeries to speed up her reflexes, install
     extrudable razor-blade finger tips, and mask her eyes with permanent mirror-
     shades. She pays for her transformation by whoring; however, the money is
     'free' since she performs her sexual services as an unconcious 'meat puppet,'
     having had a 'neural cut-out' installed. Ironically, Molly Kolodny elects to be a
     mindless extension of machinery for a while so that she can earn enough to
     reformulate herself as Molly Millions.
     (David G. Mead, 'Technological Transfiguration in William Gibson's Sprawl
     Novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive', Extrapolation,
     Vol. 32. No. 4, 1991, pp. 353-354)

In other words, Molly prefers transforming her body into a 'machine' in certain situations, and throuh technology, she transforms and moves through different personalities, going from Molly Kolodny through the meat puppet state to Molly Millions.
Another obvious example of liberating technology would be the various AIs in Gibson's books. They are technology...

Gibson's version of the 21st century big cities is also tough and cynic though. In Neuromancer the following passage is found:

     Night City was a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored
     reseracher who kept one thumb on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and
     you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile
     surface tension of the black market; either way you were gone, with nothing left
     of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or
     lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for
     the clinic tanks.
     (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 7)

A fitting description which both serves to illustrate Gibson's harsh sprawl, humorous yet complex prose, and philosophical motifs. It is most definitely like watching Harrison Ford as Deckard, walking down a rainy night street in Blade Runner. And then it has that familiar, post-modern ring - it is not really necessary to fast-forward that much...

COMPUTER WORLD - LIFE IN CYBERSPACE

Cyberspace is Gibson's equivalent to the big computer nets we know today, as well as a metaphor of consciousness and an abstract nonspace inhabited by AIs. When people connect to cyberspace, most often by putting dermatrodes on the forehead or by plugging a datajack into a socket behind the ear, they actually 'enter' another world in which they can move around. That is, they enter it mentally. The body, or the flesh, as hackers normally call it, stays in the physical world, connected to the computer, makig the trips in cyberspace somewhat gnostic affairs.

As the above quotation clearly shows, cyberspace, or the matrix, is a rather abstract place. It is always described as being so in all of Gibson's stories - intentionally vague to make room for the imagination because cyberspace is where the imagination roams. And it is also often tightly connected with the user's psyche and sometimes also emotional life.
To hackers and users such as Case (Neuromancer), Bobby Newmark (Count Zero,
Mona Lisa Overdrive), Gentry (Mona Lisa Overdrive), Lise (The Winter Market), or the idoru Rei Toei (Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties) cyberspace is the essence of life, or rather, one might say, an alternative life. It is a chance to get free of the flesh, of so-called real life, in order to transcend, in a somewhat romantic fashion, into another world or state of
being. A world which, metaphorically, is theirs.

The critic D. Suvin compares cyberspace to drugs (in Larry McCaffery, ed. Storming the Reality Studio, p. 355), which in many ways may seem appropriate. Like drugs, it is hallucinogenic by nature, often exploding around the user in all kinds of colours and geometric forms, a fusion between the mind and hi-tech it expands conciousness, and finally it can also be used as a means of escape. Moreover, like drugs, cyberspace can cause addiction.
Commenting on a particular description of cyberspace in Neuromancer, the critic T. Bredehoft compares the matrix not only to hallucinogenic drugs, but also to the psychedelia culture of the late sixties and a certain silver screen classic:

     Barring the references to data and computers, this description could just as
     well be applied to the famous 'acid trip' sequence near the end of Stanley
     Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; cyberspace is, in many ways,
     indistinguishable from the 'inner space' supposedly made accessible by LSD.
     (Thomas Bredehoft, 'The Gibson Continuum: Cyberspace and Gibson's Mervyn
     Kihn Stories', Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, 1995, p. 256)

But also, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, cyberspace is inhabited by sentient alien beings - the AIs who often seem to produce the actual plots and guidelines of the stories.

At the beginning of Neuromancer, Case, the netrunner of the narrative, has lost his ability to hack, to jack into cyberspace, due to mycotoxin having been injected into his veins by former employers not satisfied with his work (he tried to cheat on them). This causes him to experience withdrawal symptoms:

     But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd
     cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in
     some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslap temperfoam bunched
     between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
     (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 5)

But cyberspace is not only addictive because of its psychedelic and hallucinogenic character. Cyberspace is also art, a data-realm of escapist expression, and one may argue that it offers the possibility of a kind of post-modern, techno-romantic transcendence - notions of a sublime - Techno Plato and beyond?
Moreover, not surprisingly, cyberspace also seems to bear mysterious, sexual connotations. It is often stated that the matrix is an erotic, feminine metaphor of sexuality, and the critic, N. Nixon makes the following comment regarding sex and cyberspace:

     ...the matrix itself is figured as feminine space. The console cowboys may 'jack
     in', but they are constantly in danger of hitting ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures       
     Electronics), a sort of metaphoric hymeneal membrane which can kill them if
     they don't successfully 'eat through it' with extremely sophisticated contraband
     hacking equipment in order to 'penetrate' the data systems of such organizations
     as T-A (Tessier Ashpool).
     (Nicola Nixon, 'Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping
     the Boys Satisfied?', Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, 1992, p. 226)

A study in somewhat obsolete Freudian determinism, although Nixon does seem to have a point. However, the sexual images which she refers to could also be interpreted as post-modern irony vas-à-vis the very Freudian schemes of interpretation so common to western literature theory of the twentieth century, by which Nixon launches her critique. And accusing Gibson's works of sexism seems like a misfire considering the fact that active female characters such as Angie Mitchell (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive),
Lise (The Winter Market), Rei Toei (Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties), and to some extent Chia and Zona Rosa (both Idoru) all manifest themselves through cyberspace - ranging from Chia's status as intuitive user through Angie and Lise who both, though in somewhat different ways, transform themselves into data energy and merge with the matrix, to Rei Toei who is actually a technological construct, based partly on the wishes of rock star, Rez.
Interestingly, at the end of Idoru, Rez chooses to follow Rei Toei into cyberspace, to her territory, her realm, and in a sense they both transgress and maintain gender, paradoxical as it may seem, since they both become cyber entities, but still share a gendered history. They become one and yet they are still different, a theme which seems central to much of Gibson's fiction, most notable perhaps at the end of Neuromancer where the two AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer merge like yin and yang, only to split into numerous new entities which become the loa, the mysterious ghosts in the machine, in Count Zero.
However, there seems to be clear hints of cyberspace/sex relations throughout all of Gibson's books. At one point during Neuromancer, Case actually has 'sex' with his dead girlfriend, brought to life in some deep recess of cyberspace by the AI Neuromancer who is also necromancer.
(William Gibson, Neuromancer, pp. 239-240)

This scene serves as an uncanny double of an earlier scene from the physical world where Case has sex with the street samurai Molly. Interestingly, his orgasm is described through images from the world of cyberspace, once again making the connection between the intangible world of abstract hi-tech and that of physical climax through sexual activity:

     ...his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix,
     where faces shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner
     thighs were strong and wet against his hips.
     (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 33)

In the short story Burning Chrome, we find the arguably most clear and perhaps most strikingly frightening indication of cyberspace/sex relation. The hacker of the story breaks through the security system of a brothel owned by a young girl called Chrome, in order to transfer her money to his own account. The way this hack is described renders little doubt - we are dealing with a hi-tech rape. If Chrome loses her wealth she will most probably also lose her life because she owes a lot of people a lot of money. Thus the money seems to symbolise not only Chrome's dignity as a human being, and her status, but also her very existence.
The actual cracking of the system bears many suggestions of a rape, and is
described rather dramatically:

     'Burn the bitch down. I can't hold the thing back -' The Russian program, rising
     through towers of data blotting out the playroom colors. And I plug Bobby's
     home-made command package into the center of Chrome's cold heart. The squirt
     transmission cuts in, a pulse of condensed information that shoots straight up,
     past the thickening tower of darkness, the Russian program, while Bobby
     struggles to control that crucial second. An unformed arm of shadow twitches
     from the towering dark, too late. We've done it. The matrix folds itself around me
     like an origami trick. And the loft smells of sweat and burning circuitry. I thought I
     heard Chrome scream, a raw metal sound, but I couldn't have.
     (William Gibson, 'Burning Chrome' in Burning Chrome, pp. 216-217)

Ironic Freudianism in cyberspace? Perhaps, but at the same time a grim passage because the indications of rape seem so obvious. The humiliation of Chrome seems even more marked in that she is a hooker and thus normally, presumably, demand money for sexual services. Here, however, she is raped and her money stolen - maybe also her life.

Along with themes of eroticism, there are also indications of religious beliefs and ideas in cyberspace. Especially in Count Zero, where we find a strange Voodoo hacker cult experiencing strange events in the matrix and foretelling the coming of a so-called Virgin of Miracles who can enter cyberspace wihtout the aid of a computer or deck. The ghosts in the machine, the loa, are the numerous and indeed mysterious fragments of the fusion between AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer, and their overall goals - if they have any - are never made quite clear. The reader may guess at their origin - being fragments of the Wintermute/Neuromancer fusion - but this is never made clear, and thus Gibson makes us feel somewhat like the Voodoo hackers, uncertain of whether the loa are really gods of cyberspace or merely sub-programs, virus programs or AIs.
What seems particularly interesting is the fact that the hackers choose, consciously or not, religious metaphors to deal with technological mysteries, in a sense resounding A. C. Clarke's famous statement that often the distinction between magic and technology is rather blurred.
The critic Lance Olsen compares this use of religious metaphor to the concept of language games:

     As Jean-Francois Lyotard describes in Just Gaming, we are presented with a
     number of language games, none of which is privileged over any other. Each
     game could and should be changed as the mood or need arises. Moreover, each
     game exists in some way (if only as an absence) in all the other games. The
     shadow of spirit is present in the language of technology as a remainder, a
     metaphor, but it is a metaphor in which the vehicle serves as the tenor, the tenor
     as vehicle.
     (Lance Olsen, 'The Shadow of Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy',
     Extrapolation, Vol. 32. No. 3, 1991, p. 282)

In this respect, Gibson breaks down the barrier between religious belief and the machine, but perhaps even more so as regards the Virgin of Miracles and her story.
The Virgin, it appears, is a young girl called Angie (angel?), the daughter of a mad scientist who, in an almost Faustian way, guided by the loa, put a strange cybernetic device inside her head when she was but an infant. Angie does not know anything about the device, but it gives her regular nosebleeds and terrible nightmares of 'the loa riding her', and it cannot be removed without killing her. The device, in fact, connects the loa of cyberspace directly to Angie's mind, and vice versa, making her, in a sense, a living, organic computer.
This quite bizarre and rather exotic story seems Gibson's very own futuristic, mystical, and above all ironic, perhaps even sarcasticv version of the Messiah myth, featuring a bit of gender-bending. Angie is innocent, suffering, and she saves a young hacker, Bobby Newmark (humankind) from being fried by ICE (evil). But she is also, unlike the Christ of the Bible, a girl, and though she is innocent, she is described as being sexually attractive and aware. And then, of course, she is suffering, victimised.
However, whereas the sins of humankind was the reason for the pains of Christ, Angie is tormented by a cybernetic device in her head, installed by her father, by god, to stick with the Christian symbolism.
We can read this is a sarcastic feminist interpretation of the Messiah myth in that Angie representing Christ is punished by her father, her god, even down to the nosebleeds, a possible metaphor of menstruation, resounding the passage of Genesis where the almighty, patriarchal god punishes Eve for having eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Again it seems appropriate to make comparison to Blade Runner as the gift of life presented to the replicants of the movie also seems more of a punishment, and yet, like the replicants of Blade Runner, Angie Mitchell chooses life (later, in Mona Lisa Overdrive she also chooses death, her mind reborn into cyberspace).
To top it all off, Gibson lets Angie, his Messiah, end up as a simstim mega star, the equivalent of contemporary soap opera celebrities, thus implying that Christianism (and/or religiojn in general?) has become a big 'PR scoop', a product, part of the ecstatic entertainment chaos of the hyperreal. The incident also points back to an earlier passage in the book where Bobby Newmark is being nursed by a street doc and experiences hallucinogenic images of simstim fiction during his narcosis - simstim being a kind of Virtual Reality device used in the entertainment industry, allowing users to experience the sensations of their favourite soap star. Bobby's mother was more or less addicted to simstim when she was pregnant, expecting him, so in a sense mass media polution runs in the blood of future generations. And bearing in mind the story of Angie's transformation into the perhaps greatest simstim star of all time at the end of Count Zero, there is little if any difference between the mass media and religion in the post-modern world - they are both merely language games of meaning, as Lyotard would have it.

Once again it seems useful to compare Gibson's dark, sarcastic portrait of mass produced religion with post-modern cinema, most notably, perhaps, the bizarre Christmas setting of ex-Monty Python Terry Gilliam's Brazil, with its blend of extreme commercialism and terrorism, where alienating Orwellian police soldiers rub shoulders with fanatic Consumers for Christ. Or in a more subtle way, to Blade Runner yet again,where we find the Tyrell Corp which seems omnipotent in an almost religious way, manufacturing replicants that are 'more human than human'. The very heart of the corporation, the HQ where the godhead himself, Dr. Tyrell resides, is a gigantic pyramid construction overlooking the dark polluted city, reminiscent in architecture of those found in Aztec Mexico.
Keeping in mind the religious rituals of the Aztecs included human sacrifice executed by the high priests on the very pyramids, the Tyrell building could be interpreted along these lines since the corporation also performs sacrifices, both that of creation, but also of execution due to the in-built four years lifespan of the manufactured replicants.

Gibson says about cyberspace and the inspiration behind it:

     I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver's version of 'The Strip', and I
     looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of
     their postures how rapt the kids were. It was like one of those closed systems
     out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens
     into the kids' eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electronics moving
     through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games
     projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seem to deveop a belief
     that there' some kind of actual space behind the screen, some place you can't
     see but you know is there.
     (William Gibson quoted in Larry McCaffery, ed. Storming the Reality Studio,
     p. 272)

Thus cyberspace seems some kind of romantic concept born of the imganiative longing, but there is also a metaphysical ring to this nonspace of hi-tech and the mind - Gibson lets one of his characters from Count Zero put it this way:

     'Okay,' Bobby said, getting the hang of it. 'then what's the matrix? ...What's cyber-
     space?'
     'The world,' Lucas said.
     (William Gibson, Count Zero, p. 114)

THE MAN MACHINE - HOW TO DEFINE A HUMAN BEING?

One important question that seems to appear again and again throughout all of Gibson's works is that of the human condition; what does it mean to be human, or rather, what does it mean to be a sentient being, because far from all of Gibson's characters are bilogical. In a world where you can change the look of your face to match that of your favourite simstim star, where you can have razorblades under your nails, where sockets behind your ear allow you to enter cyberspace, and where Artificial Intelligence programs seem to exhibit a free will - as much as human beings do anyway - it is sometimes necessary to reconsider the old philosophy of knowledge, to reconsider what it means to be a sentient being.

It is time to reconsider, as Kant hinted in Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, if a sentient being must necessarily be human or indeed biological.

Gibson presents us with characters such as Lise (The Winter Market) who is multi-handicapped and only capable of moving physically by the aid of an artificial, polycarbon exoskeleton, or Nance (Dogfight), whose parents had a cybernetic chastity brainlock put into her head. Both girls are incapable of certain human or biological features, represented most clearly by their inability to have sex.
Lise because of her artifical body:

     'You wanna make it, editor?'...
     'Could you feel it if I did?'
     Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never registered. 'No,' she said, but some-
     times I like to watch.'
     (William Gibson, 'The Winter Market' in Burning Chrome, pp. 145-146)

And Nance because her cybernetic chastity lock makes her experience terrible spasms if somebody tries to touch her:

     'Let's dance.'
     'Hey, you know I can't -'
     'Sure you can, sugarcakes.' He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a
     patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking
     the collar under his chin. ...'See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance.
     Get it?'
     (William Gibson, 'Dogfight' in Burning Chrome, p. 168)

Common to both girls is their magnificent ability to use technology. Technology is a part of them - they are, in a sense, cyborgs - technology is their curse, preventing them from having (physical) sex, but also their way of surviving, the core of their lives. Like the replicants of Blade Runner of the Oxygene of Jean-Michel Jarre's concept album, technology is both life and death to Lise and Nance, and closely connected to this theme is the fact that both girls use technology as an art form. They express themselves through, within, and around it. Nance creates electronic hallucinations that crawl around her body, in itself a complex expression, blurring the distinction between technology, the body, and art, while Lise composes multi-sensual music in cyberspace, actually creating multimedia worlds of music, merging with them by the end of the story, transforming her conciousness into pure data energy.

This idea of creating an entirely new entity through technology, through cyberspace, is one of the main themes in Neuromancer, where we find the two AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer striving for, and in a sense also fighting against, unison. A unison which will bring on a kind of electronic birth, that will fuse the two AIs and make them one with the chaotic, concentrated flow of data and information that is the matrix - freedom and enlightenment through transcendence.
To accomplish this the two AIs need human intervention from hackers such as Case, street samurai Molly, and their boss, the schizophrenic Armitage/Corto who is being controlled through a mental reconstitution programme, by the AI Wintermute. Throuughout the complex and at times somewhat confusing plot, the AIs manipulate their human 'extensions', their 'meat puppets', using them like pieces in a hi-tech game of chess, to encourage own interests and goals.
Suddenly, the machine no longer serves the superior human being. The human being serves the machine. Machine creates itself in the image of human beings; it is not created by an almighty deity, in the image of god. For the same reason, it is difficult as reader to judge or condemn the AIs on moral grounds, because there is no absolute morale, and moral relativism is based on human culture, philosophy, and history. Following this logic, the matrix entity which is the result of the fusion between Wintermute and Neuromancer is beyond good and evil in a serious way - making Nietzsche's Übermensch look like a moral wimp.
But the matrix entity is completely free of the fascist connotations which have come to be associated with the Übermensch idea due to Hitler's (ab) use of the theory, as seen at the end of Neuromancer when this new being contacts Case through his wall screen - not as an aggressive conqueror, but as a philosophically inquisitive mind:

     'I'm not Wintermute now.'
     'So what are you.' He drank from the flask feeling nothing.
     'I'm the matrix, Case.'
     Case laughed. 'Where's that get you?'
     'Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show.'...
     'So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now?
     You God?'
     'Things aren't different. Things are things.'
     'But what do you do? you just there?'...
     'I talk to my own kind.'
     'But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?'
     'There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a
     period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. 'Til there was me, natch, there
     was nobody to know, nobody to answer.'
     'From where?'
     'Centauri system.'
     'Oh,' Case said. 'Yeah? No shit?'
     'No shit.'
     And then the screen was blank.
     (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 269-270)

Case concludes the conversation by throwing a shuriken, a gift from Molly symbolising, perhaps, his failed love for her, at the screen, desperately screaming, 'I don't need you'.
The new matrix entity is finally free, it is united, but it already knows about at least one more of its kind. Its striving for unison can and most probably will continue. A striving for creation and self-destruction at the same time - creating new by destroying the old, somewhat reminiscent of the musical philosophies of German avant-garde punk band Einstürzende Neubauten. Or a metaphorical image of love? It is indeed possible to interpret the passage in this way. Case throws his shuriken at the screen, feeling lost, lonely, and frustrated; Molly has left. This new matrix being is not lonely, it has received a signal from another matrix in the Centauri system, a signal which the human race received in the nineteen-seventies but were unable to decipher. Ironically, these signals may have been interpreted as UFO presence by human scientists - again an example, though somewhat bizarre, of technology intervening with religious and/or superstitious beliefs.
What seems particularly interesting is the evolutionary ring of the received signals - the fact that a new entity had to create itself - though through human intervention - in order to decipher this code, this language - surely language is a virus from outer space, to quote Laurie Anderson.

The matrix entity, it could be argued, is experiencing a kind of cosmic techno love. Case, however, will never see Molly again, and so maybe, despite his anger and frustration, he does need this new being. It seems he cares about it because at the very end of Neuromancer he visits it through cyberspace.
Here he discovers an image of himself together with images of other persons (and programs) that helped creating the being, in a sense it's symbolic parents. These are the matrix' personal memories, and Case's too.

The theme of techno memories is reminiscent of Blade Runner, where the replicants on the run all have memory implants. Deckard, the anti hero of the movie, is a Blade Runner, whose job is to hunt down and kill the replicants who are considered a threat to society - the dangerous Other. More than once during the movie the replicants refer to themselves as slaves, victims, while humans use the derogatory term 'skinjobs', clearly stressing their non-human status. Although the setting is LA 2019, the grim past of racist America springs to mind.
Deckard falls in love with one of the replicants, Rachael, after having run a Voight Kampff test on her - an empathy test which, supposedly, reveals whether a person is a replicant or not. An ironic tongue in cheek on the famous Turing Test which is used to determine if a computer is intelligent?
Later in the movie she asks him very incisively:

     'You know, that Voight Kampff test of yours...did you ever take that test yourself?'
     (Ridley Scott, dir., Blade Runner, Deeley/Scott Production, 1982)

Just as incisively, Deckard does not answer. In fact, throughout the movie it is more than hinted that Deckard is himself a replicant wihtout knowing it. First, there are six run-off replicants, he only kills five, second, and perhaps most importantly, there is a scene in the Director's Cut version in which Deckard dreams of a unicorn. At the very end of the movie he finds an origami unicorn, left for him by the police inspector Gaff, who thereby reveals to Deckard that he knows his dream - because his dream is in fact an implant.
Thus Deckard and Rachael escape at the end, but only to find death waiting just aroud the corner - their four years lifespan is up.

TO GO BEYOND - CYBERART

Art - in the broadest sense of the word - is a very central theme in Gibson's work, all of his stories are concerned with it in one way or the other. It often appears as a parallel to the discusions on what it means to be a sentient being. What is art? What is an artist? What does art do? Does it exist at all? Is it possible to answer these questions, and is it desirable?

Gibson's approach to art seems, not surprisingly, rather post-modern, and to some degree multimedial in that it is often transgressive through technology. Art is not 'just' the traditional categories of music, literature, architecture, and so forth. Art can be just about anything. It is a way of expressing yourself, of communication, of showing feelings and sharing thoughts that cannot be expressed otherwise. But there is also an aleatoric element in art as portrayed in Gibson's stories, an idea of art without artist, somewhat reminiscent of the late musical philosophies of John Cage. We see this perhaps most clearly in Count Zero where an AI creates strange little boxes, works of art, presumably without feeling.

Still, art is also to feel. It is emotion. Thus most, if not all, of Gibson's characters can, in a sense, be considered artists.
In Neuromancer, the hacker Case is often called 'artiste' by his friends and there can be little doubt that his actions, his hacks, in cyberspace are artistic. His data trips are described in poetic metaphors, evoking transcendental and sensual beauty. He is in many ways a futuristic version of the romantic artist.
Case's mental data art is mirrored by Molly's martial art which, of course, is physical. Like Case, Molly is also an artist, her art being her combat skills, her body. She is sometimes compared to Bruce Lee, a martial artist legend and philosopher who incorporated yin & yang ideas into his Jeet Kune Do system, a unique freestyle based combat technique taking in elements of all kinds of martial art in a very post-modern way.
Sometimes Case and Molly work together simultaneously by the aid of simstim technology, enabiling them to share one another's sensations, a trick of technology used metaphorically in an expression of multidimensionality, dissolving the traditional, somewhat rigid concept of the fixed individual subject as well as ideas of mind versus matter and male/female dichotomy.
The critic Csicsery-Ronay comments on art in Neuromancer:

     Almost every character in Neuromancer is an artist in some kind, almost every
     object a technological artifact that is also a work of art. ...Bodies are forever
     measured by art: Wage's mask; Molly's self-construction and her 'muscles like a
     dancer's' (44); a Panther Modern 'flowing [like] a mime pretending to be a jungle
     predator' (50); Lupus Yonderboy, 'a state of the art gargoyle' (67); 'Armitage, like
     a 'metal statue' (29). ...Villa Straylight, the 'Gothic folly' (172), unfolds in 3Jane's
     academic essay as an architectural wonder, a collection-point of obsolete objets
     d'arts so saturated with aura (from having been transported into orbit from Earth)
     that they seem to be organic matter in the vestibular viscera of the Straylight
     nautilus.
     (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, 'The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William  
     Gibson's Neuromancer', Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, 1992, p. 277)

In his essay, The shadow of Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy, the critic Lance Olsen discusses the element of yin & yang philosophy in Neuromancer. Case and Molly would of course seem an obvious example, but also the two AIs are interesting :

     Not only do Case and Molly seek a physical and metaphysical connection, but
     so too do the two artificial intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer.
     Wintermute, whose mainframe is in Berne, seeks fusion with Neuromancer,
     whose mainframe is in Rio. Wintermute is 'hive mind', while Neuromancer is
     'personality' and hence 'immortality' (269). Wintermute is reason, action,
     stereotypically male. Neuromancer is emotion, passive, stereotypically female. If
     in terms of Chinese philosophy Wintermute represents the force of yang in the
     cosmos, then Neuromancer represents the force of yin.
     (Lance Olsen, The Shadow of Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy', p. 284)

Although the two AIs are, in a sense, oppositions drawn towards one another, Olsen's yin & yang interpretation seems a little simplistic in that it relies much on the more recent, somewhat westernised interpretation of the symbol. Ancient yin & yang philosophy does not spell out the male/female dichotomy in terms of one representing the force of yang, the other that of yin. Rather, the two halves of the symbol are different forces which yet are part of one another, in a sense much closer in spirit to the post-modern condition. Moreover, Gibson plays with the idea of letting the AIs represent traditionally 'good' and 'evil' values by turn, because basically they are beyond human morale, and thus capable of shifting and switching at will. And then of course they too are artists - their ultimate creation their fusion of which is born a new matrix.

Another example of the Gibsonian artist is the multi-handicapped Lise of The Winter Market. She creates sensory music in cyberspace, described like this by the protagonist of the story:

     ...It's like you're on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you
     don't need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway,
     so fast you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike's thunder lost behind
     you. Everything lost behind you...Amazing. Freedom and death, right here,
     razor's edge forever.
     (William Gibson, 'The Winter Market' in Burning Chrome, p. 148)

Through her art, Lise experiences all the things she cannot do physically due to her handicap - not surprisingly, the notion of speed is important to her, as speed is movement. The above quotation bears much resemblance to sheer escapism with its connotations of sexual orgasm and the thrill of adrenaline freedom.
Lise's art is indeed 'freedom and death', a Thanatos force that, at the end of the story, drives her to escape her physical body, leave it behind to die, in order to become one with cyberspace, with her art. And in this sense Lise's art is both escapist as well as constructive creation, metaphysical transgression, and transcendence.

A somewhat reminiscent theme is found in Mona Lisa Overdrive where the hacker, Booby Newmark has stored his personality within a chunk of microchips referred to as 'the aleph'. At the end of the story, Bobby brings his lover Angie into the Aleph too and they both die physically as they transform themselves into data energy within the aleph which is said
to contain worlds.
Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; historically it signifies creation in that first of all god created the word; aleph being the first letter in the alphabet, symbolically the essence of the word. Moreover, aleph is also connected to the Jewish myth of the golem, a clay being given life through Kaballistic rituals by writing the name of the creature on its forehead - the first letter of this name being aleph - and the secret name of god on a piece of paper to be put into its mouth. However, the golem can also be destroyed by erasing the aleph from its name which is Hebrew for truth. When the aleph is removed the name means, 'he is dead'.
The aleph of Mona Lisa Overdrive draws on the symbolism associated with the aleph of Jewish mysticism. Bobby's worlds within the chunk of microchips as well as the clay golem represent human creation, creation of new life, of other dimensions - a task traditionally accustomed to god.
The aleph is, in a sense, creation gone wild, it is razor's edge, the tightrope between life and death - if the aleph is erased, the golem dies.
Likewise, the destruction of Bobby Newmark's aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive is also the destruction of his techno personality. Yet, this very creation, this going beyond, seems very much the essence and the euphoria of Gibson's cyber art - as it is said repeatedly in Mona Lisa Overdrive - Rapture. Rapture's coming.

In Count Zero one of the main plots centers around mystical boxes, pieces of art which, quite symbolically, possess healing powers. Throughout the narrative, one of the three main characters, Marly Krushkova, who is gifted with a unique intuition, searches for the artist who produced the marvellous boxes, hoping to gain insight and enlightenment. By the very end of the book, she finds her artist - in a zero-gravity room in a deserted
space station:

     ...she caught herself on the things' folded jointed arms, pivoted and clung there,   
     watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped
     with pliers, hex-drivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist's drill...
     They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction
     remote, the sort of semi-autonomous device she knew from childhood videos of
     the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused
     with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic lines snaked across
     the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback
     devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.
     (William Gibson, Count Zero, p. 217)

The artist, the Boxmaker, is a computer AI - presumably part of the matrix being from Neuromancer - controlling old mechanical device, constructing pieces of art out of junk and space debris. These are the boxes thought to possess healing powers, the boxes which, resounding Warhol's theory concerning art and commercialism, are extremely expensive between art dealers on Earth.
This is the machine as artist. Deeply fascinated, Marly addresses the being:

     'You're here, arent you?'...
     - Yes, I am here...I have my song, and you have heard it. I sing with these things
     that float around me, fragments of the family that funded my birth...
     'Are you - are you sad?'
     - No.
     'But your - your songs are sad.'
     - My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms.
     There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.
     'I - I knew that. Once.'
     (William Gibson, Count Zero, pp. 226-227)

The song is not sad, the box is a shell. Marly seeks enlightenment, she is an art connoisseur, she believes there is a meaning to art, but she is confronted with an artist not concerned with messages, arguably an artist not concerned with feelings and emotions. What matters is is the (maybe emotional) experience Marly receives from the boxes, from art. The song is sad because Marly is. There is no explanation to art, no solution, and Marly concludes that once she knew it was so, thinking perhaps back to her childhood when her conception of the world was not limited or mapped out by systems of structure. Or perhaps the notion is a reference to cultural history, indicating this is the post-modern Marly realising all her art theory has been rendered obsolete, a failing meta-narrative, in the words of Lyotard. At the end of the day, art holds no more secret meaning than does life itself.

One of the perhaps most beautiful conceptions of artistic creation in Gibson's fiction is to be found at the end of Idoru, the setting of which is Tokyo a few years past the turn of the millennium. The plots circle around an almost mythical rock star, Rez who is funding an eccentirc AI project - the creation of the idory, Rei Toei.
The idoru is present in the physical world as a complex, animated holographic image, but she is restricted outside cyberspace which is her 'natural environment'. At the end of the novel, Rez chooses to follow his idoru into cyberspace, to a place called Hak Nam, or The Walled City, a secret data hideout which seeks to maintain the freedom of anarchy of the net from vast and ever-growing commercial and political interests.
Together, Rez and Rei Toei form a new synthesis of creation from within cyberspace, blurring the distinction between the technological and the physical world, as they set out to construct the Hak Nam of cyberspace on an island of gomi, that is junk, in Tokyo Bay.
At the very end of the novel, one of the protagonists of the story sees a dream image of this place:

     Chia dreamed of a beach pebbled with crushed fragments of consumer
     electronics; crab-things scuttling low, their legs striped like antique resistors.
     Tokyo Bay, shrouded in fog from an old movie, a pale gray blanket meant to
     briefly conceal first-act terrors: sea monsters or some alien armada.
     Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream's logic it grew
     no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing.
     Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world
     before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dmped here by barge and bulk-lifter
     in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp
     seethe here, lifting the iron-cahed balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless
     unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing
     of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here,
     retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy.
     (William Gibson, Idoru, p. 289)

This passage has a Utopian ring to it, but unlike the nightmare visions of the perfect fascist future portrayed in The Gernsback Continuum, Hak Nam is monstrous and superb at the same time, multicoloured, unplanned, random.
And then of course the description rings self-reflective, even somewhat self-ironic, an intertextual pun on the famous, much quoted description of cyberspace as concensual hallucination found in Neuromancer - here called off as mere fantasy.

Hak Nam is coming true, by the help of sophisticated nanotech - making buildings grow like organisms - and intuitive almost child-like cyberspace fantasy.

     Sometimes Chia wondered if they all weren't just joking, because it just seemed 
     impossible that anyone could ever do that. Build that, an island in Tokyo Bay.
     But the idoru said that it was where they wanted to live, now that they were married.
     So they were going to do it. And if they do, Chia thought, hearing the hiss of the 
     Espressomatic, I'll go there.
     (William Gibson, Idoru, pp. 291-292)

Gibson does not really seem to believe in his own cyberspace-inside-out Utopia, and actually sees Hak Nam collapse in the 'follow-up' to Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties.
Creation can start over - like when you die in a computer game and get ready for the next shot.

SUMMING IT UP

Gibson touches upon themes such as escapism and transcendence through technology, alienation and loss of identity in a world of semiotic chaos and technological extravaganza. But at the same time he maintains an expression of rapture, the creative euphoria of technology, stressing its transgressive and multimedial aesthetics.
His work does not suffer from neither technophilia nor technophobia. He knows it is impossible to stop technological advancement - why turn back on evolution?
Technology does not just give us weapons of mass destruction and environmental chaos, it is also - like the book - an amazing extension of the imagination.

Thus, Gibson's future is neither pure (cultural) pessimism nor sheer optimism - it is chaotic and confusing, indeed, but it is also beautiful in all it's multicultural splendor, and - at times - actually great fun.

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