The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 9 (1998)

Cyberpunk Revisited: William Gibson’s
Neuromancer and the “Multimedia Revolution”
Nobuo KAMIOKA
Meiji University

I
1984 was a very important year for the development of multimedia.
In that year, Apple Computer Inc. started to sell the “Macintosh,”which was the ﬁrst personal computer with a GUI (Graphical User
Interface) using “icons” and a “mouse.” This “user-friendly” and lowpriced computer sold tremendously well, and as a result personal computers began to prevail widely, ﬁrst in the United States, and then allover the world. This can be regarded as the beginning of the “multimedia revolution.” During the following decade, personal computers
became indispensable tools, and other multimedia, like virtual reality,
CD-ROMs, and the Internet, were made available to the masses.
1984 was also important as the beginning of a literary movement
called “cyberpunk.” In that year the science ﬁction writer William
Gibson published Neuromancer and coined the word “cyberspace,”
meaning a computer-generated landscape. The characters in Gibson’s
novel are mercenary hackers and digital cowboys who “jack in” to theworldwide computer network and move at the speed of light between
the ﬁnancial centers of the world. Many readers were fascinated with
the novel’s unique style, which some critics called a “virtual real”
style;1 thick with computer jargon, slang and neologisms, the story
randomly jumps from one cyberspace to another, like hypertext. After
Copyright © 1998 Nobuo Kamioka. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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the publication of this novel, under its inﬂuence, a lot of science ﬁction
writers, called “cyberpunk” writers, began to use computer-generated
worlds as their settings. Yet the impact of the novel has not been conﬁned to science ﬁction. Its style and structure as well as Gibson’s
invention of “cyberspace” contributed a great deal to subsequent art
forms, including so-called “mainstream” ﬁction.
In the sense that we now live in the world of the computer networkand virtual reality, Neuromancer correctly predicted the coming “multimedia revolution.” We may also justly say that it represents, in an
exaggerated way, human consciousness in the highly technologized
future world, in which nature has been almost completely destroyed,
and the virtually real and the real are indistinguishably mingled. Reading closely, however, I think we can also sense some discrepancy between what the novel predicts and what we are now experiencing.
What does this discrepancy mean? How correctly did Neuromancer
predict the age we live in today?
In this study, I will ﬁrst deal with Neuromancer, following the lineof those critics who have regarded it as the “literary expression . . . oflate capitalism.”2 Read in this context, this novel can still give somesigniﬁcant comment on our “late-capitalist” world. Then I will examine the divergence it shows from the world we live in now and consider why this divergence has occurred. This divergence, it seems to me,
indicates Gibson’s weakness and limits. But I also believe that his limits indicate something important with regard to our coming “virtualized” world.
II
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a deadchannel.3

This opening sentence of Neuromancer has become extremely wellknown for its symbolical representation of the oppression of natureand the pervasiveness of the media. “[T]he color of television, tuned toa dead channel,” that is, “white noise,” is a metaphor the postmodern
novelist Don DeLillo was also to use the following year for the mixture and pervasiveness of various media in his famous novel White
Noise. This metaphor clearly refers to our media-pervaded world.
In the ﬁrst chapter of Neuromancer, the protagonist, Case, a “con-CYBERPUNK REVISITED: WILLIAM GIBSON’S NEUROMANCER

55

sole cowboy” who has been disabled as a hacker, walks into a bar
called Chatsubo, in a near-future Chiba City. (The reason he has been
disabled as a hacker is that he was punished by his former employers,
for trying to double-cross them, by having his nervous system
destroyed.) Chatsubo is a literally borderless place, alienated from any
physical background. Although it is located in Japan, one can “drink
there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese” (3). The bartender, Ratz, has a “Russian military prosthesis,” uses the German
word “Herr,” and has a Brazilian boy, Kurt, as an employee.
What fascinates most readers of Neuromancer may be the image ofthe future world its ﬁrst few chapters evoke (which many readers haveassociated with the world of Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner[1982]). In this novel, both characters and settings, apparently having
lost any physical connections to nature, birthplaces or nationalities, arerepresented in “virtual real” style. The following passage, introducing
Case’s girlfriend Linda for the ﬁrst time, is a good example of thedescription of this virtual world:
Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke,
holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline. . . . And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones ﬂaring scarlet
as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munichfell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor
struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. (8)Linda is not the only character who is represented as if “reduced to acode.” Other characters, too, seem to have lost their physical substanceor to have been transformed into cyborgs (hybrids of human andmachine) in some way or other. Molly, who becomes Case’s partner,
has mirror-shades implanted in her eyes and retractable blades in her
ﬁngernails. A ninja, Hideo, is a human clone who is stored in a freezer
and defrosted whenever necessary by an artiﬁcial intelligence. Armitage,
Case and Molly’s mysterious employer, also turns out to be a cyborg
who has been revived from death and is completely controlled by an
artiﬁcial intelligence. Case’s mentor Dixie Flatline is nothing but data
downloaded to a computer from his brain after his death. In the nearfuture world of this novel, with “wireheading” (wiring their brains
directly to computers), humans can do everything, without bodies,through the computer network: go everywhere, talk to anyone, and56

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even have sex with others. Many characters, including Case, experience bodiless ecstasy while moving around in “cyberspace.”
One of the signiﬁcant aspects of this novel, therefore, is that it represents the irresistible power of this cyberspace “as a place of raptureand erotic intensity.”4 The hackers in this novel feel that they can exert
their powers freely in cyberspace without being conditioned or controlled by machines. Thus cyberspace attracts people by giving theman illusion of autonomy, and what fascinates the reader is this sense ofbeing able to drive freely through virtual realities. For example, thereader may experience a vicarious exhilaration while sharing Case’s
sensations when he enters cyberspace after a long absence:
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray.
Expanding—And ﬂowed, ﬂowered for him, ﬂuid neon origami trick, the unfoldingof his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to inﬁnity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of theEastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes ofMitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the
spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant ﬁngers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face. (52)Even more interesting is the scene near the climax, where Casejacks into Molly’s sensorium and at the same time enters cyberspace.
In this scene, the different virtual realities that Case experiences commingle at random, and the way an artiﬁcial intelligence is penetrated
by another program is depicted visually in a geometric design. Thesevisual and surreal representations of virtual realities (and their random
commingling) are often termed “Magic Realism,” and here we candetect Gibson’s relationship to (and even inﬂuence upon) “mainstream” writers like Steve Erickson.5
In this novel, this ecstasy of driving through cyberspace is often
compared to that which can be achieved with drugs. In fact, many of
the characters are drug addicts, who console themselves with drugs
when they cannot enter cyberspace, or who enhance the ecstasy of driving through cyberspace with drugs. For example, Case compares theelation of taking drugs to “a run in the matrix [cyberspace]” (16). For
those hackers, as Darko Suvin says, “cyberspace is itself a kind of
superdrug vying in intensity with sexual love.”6

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This ecstasy of being immersed in virtual realities (often with drugs)
is reminiscent of the enthusiasms of those who have seen great possibilities in multimedia. For instance, Timothy Leary, a cult ﬁgure of thepsychedelic movement in the 1960s, saw in computer networks andvirtual reality a resistible power “against the brainwashing forces ofindustrial slavedriving and imperialist expansion.”7 For him, the computer network is a utopia where people can communicate simultaneously and expand or change reality with their collective power; this isexactly what he also believed we could do with LSD, in the 1960s.
Also, many of the engineers of personal computers are one-time 1960s
radicals who believed they could democratize technology and liberate
people through personal computers.8 The journalist Douglas Rushkoff,in his book Cyberia, reports a wide range of people who believe in a
utopia which can be created by computers, sometimes together withdrugs. Placed in this context, Neuromancer can be regarded as a comment on those who share the 1960s’ dream that drugs and multimedia
can liberate people.
Since Gibson expresses this kind of ecstasy through computers anddrugs, some critics attack him for his uncritical praise of technology.
However, Gibson does seem to point to the danger that cyberspace
may paralyze our sense of nature and body. At the beginning of thenovel, Case, deprived of his ability as a hacker, dreams of cyberspace,which had become more real to him than bodily reality:
For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was
the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite
stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the ﬂesh. The body wasmeat. Case fell into the prison of his own ﬂesh. (6)To make light of the body like this, however, can endanger one’s
autonomy and life. For if you are connected to computers and immersed in cyberspace, you have totally entrusted your body and life
to machines. In fact, after Case is revived as a console cowboy andbegins to work for Armitage, he learns that he has been controlled byan artiﬁcial intelligence called “Wintermute” all along. In addition,some of the virtual realities Case enters on the computer network arenightmarish spaces, created and completely controlled by artiﬁcial
intelligences. In one of them he meets his late girlfriend Linda andeven has sex with her, but as she is already dead, it is only a bodiless(and therefore futile) ecstasy.

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An even more striking case of the oppression of the human body inthe novel involves the technology of downloading data from humanbrains and letting them “live” as “ROM constructs” on computers.
Whether this kind of technology is attainable in reality or not, andsome scientists are currently working on its development,9 it nonetheless represents the ultimate in ignoring the human body and treating
humans as controllable data. In Neuromancer, Case’s mentor Dixie
Flatline, although physically dead, lives on as a “ROM construct” on
the computer network, and helps Case in his hacking. Yet Dixie isonly a part of the network; he is manipulated as software by others andswitched off when not needed. Therefore, without any autonomy at all,he cannot accept his immortality and hopes someone will delete hisdata (he cannot even delete it himself). Case himself is involuntarily
downloaded as data into a computer and his virtual self continues tolive on in the network. Both of these instances show that in the ultimately advanced computer network humans cannot be distinguishedfrom data or software; the computer network can completely grasp andmanipulate even the human mind.
These things have been pointed out by many of the critics who haveread Neuromancer in the context of late capitalism. For instance, oneof the most recent essays on this novel, “The Business of Cyberpunk”
by David Brande, aptly interprets the novel in this way. Brande saysthat Gibson’s ﬁction, “far from simply celebrating the conjunctionof human and machine, . . . stages the ‘constant revolutionizing ofproduction’ and ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’characteristic of its socioeconomic context.” According to Brande,
Gibson’s cyborg characters “express the underlying market forces thatcondition their environment.”10 They are nothing but commodities
controlled by other capitalists, and their lack of psychological depth
clearly exempliﬁes the form of subjectivity conditioned by the latecapitalist value-system. Gibson’s cyberspace represents the possibilityof limitless market expansion into virtual spaces in our future.
Here we must notice that Gibson’s world is far from a utopia. In thisfuture world, following a major global war, people suffer severe air
pollution, nature having been irrevocably damaged (horses, forinstance, have been wiped out by plague). What impresses readers inthe ﬁrst few chapters is the shabby and grotesque picture of the criminal area of Chiba City and its cheap “cofﬁn” hotels (Japanese “capsulehotels”). Repressive global organizations like the zaibatsu and yakuza

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59

control this future world, but they are in turn controlled by an artiﬁcial
intelligence, Wintermute. Wintermute, having become autonomous,tries to free itself from human control and coalesce with another artiﬁcial intelligence, Neuromancer, in order to gain ultimate almighty power. In order to achieve its purpose, Wintermute ruthlessly murders anyone who is in its way, including small children. Thus this novel can beread as a conventional dystopia novel, in which machines bring
terrible disaster upon human beings.
Case is also controlled by Wintermute all along. He sometimes
seems to feel anger based on his physical memory, but this turns out tobe one of Wintermute’s strategies to condition Case’s mind. Thus mentally manipulated, Case has no choice but to penetrate a corporate system and help Wintermute coalesce with Neuromancer. Nevertheless,near the end of the novel, Case leaves the virtual reality created by
Neuromancer, refusing to accept immortality as data. Then the reader
learns in the coda that Case ﬁnds a girl friend, and in Mona Lisa
Overdrive (Gibson’s third novel) it is brieﬂy related that Case retires
and has four children. Therefore, we can conclude that Case leaves
cyberspace and reclaims his body.
In this sense, Gibson’s future world is a dystopia in which the “multimedia revolution” has gone too far. If virtual realities invade our daily
life completely, and if we come to feel that our own bodies are useless,we will not be living in a utopia at all but will be totally under the control of the media. The media may give us the ecstatic illusion that we
can express our desires freely through cyberspace, but its control may
be all the more powerful for this illusion. In depicting the society thatthe development of multimedia can lead us to, Gibson gives us a grave
warning.
III
So far, I have presented a basic interpretation of Neuromancer inlight of those critics who have viewed it in the context of late capitalism. Even if we ﬁnd aspects in the novel different from what we experience in the real world, we still interpret it as an exaggerated or somehow distorted version of our world. Looking at it in this way, we canregard Neuromancer as an exaggerated representation of the dystopia
towards which our late capitalist society may be heading.
However, there are some tech enthusiasts and New Age visionaries

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like Timothy Leary who praise this novel as the literary expression of
their ideas. Also, there are some critics who, even though they understand Gibson’s critical perspective, still think that “Gibson . . . revels
in both the perverse gloss of late capitalist culture and the possibilities
of its machines.”11 The science ﬁction writer Norman Spinrad evensays that “Gibson is having sex with these machines.”12 If we grant
some validity to these views, it may be because the novel’s climax andcatharsis come when Case, accompanied by a powerful Chinese software (Kuang), cracks the ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics)
of a corporation. For instance, reading the following paragraphs inwhich the ICE is cracked, we cannot but share the intense excitement:
Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace. . . .
The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid ﬂuidity, as though theshards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell—“Christ,” Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above
the horizonless ﬁelds of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon
cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.
(256)

Dazzling excitement also accompanies a reading of the following
paragraphs in which Case exerts power, in conjunction with the software:
And then—old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate
ﬂowed into his hands.
In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of theﬁrst tower, he attained a level of proﬁciency exceeding anything he’dknown or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with anancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted
him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
(262)

In all of these paragraphs the reader shares the satisfaction Casefeels when, driven by his own hate, he confronts and defeats therepressive machine and corporation. Moreover, in these paragraphs,
Case even seems to transcend his own ego and become godlike in his
conjunction with the machine.
I must repeat here that because Case is motivated throughout by

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61

Wintermute, he has no choice about attacking the ICE. Yet it is also
true that he is released from a deadly danger by penetrating the data of
the corporation. For this reason, reading this climax, we cannot but be
drawn into the romantic possibility that an individual can achieve liberation in joining forces with a “good” machine to defeat a “bad”
machine. And if we sense in the novel a discrepancy between its world
and our world, it may be traced back to this “romanticism.”
The postmodern theorist Arthur Kroker sees this romanticism as
one reason why we feel that cyberpunk is now out-of-date. Saying,“Johnny Mnemonic, the movie, is the day when cyberpunk died,” heattributes this movie’s failure to “the fact that 80s cyberpunk metaphors don’t really work anymore in the virtual 90s.” He continues:
In the age of Neuromancer we could still believe for one charismatic
moment that the body could deep-dish its way past screenal telemetry
into galactic ﬂows of data, that Molly could vamp her way to mind
fusion, that Case could jump out of his ﬂesh and byte-fry his way toStarlight, that somehow we could become data, and it would be good.13

I am not sure if all of us in the 1980s could have really believed that
it would be good to jump out of our bodies and become data, but wecan at least say that now in the 1990s far fewer people believe so. As I
will mention later, now that we do communicate with one anotherthrough the computer network, we know its darker side. And thisimpression that Kroker gets from Neuromancer—that Gibson optimistically celebrates the transcendence through machines—can be
attributed to Case’s characterization as a console cowboy.
Case can be seen as a traditional macho hero. Apparently from thelower class, and without the beneﬁt of higher education, he seems tohave lived his life all alone. The fact that he has learned the hacking
technique by becoming a private disciple of McCoy Pauley (a.k.a.
Dixie Flatline) clearly indicates that he is very close to the image ofthe traditional American self-made man. Not employed by any particular corporation, he invades different corporations’ data and steals software from them, sometimes following orders from criminal organizations. That he has been disabled as a hacker for trying to double-crosshis former employers also emphasizes his identity as a lone wolf who
confronts big organizations single-handedly. From these characteristics we can easily trace his literary ancestry to the heroes of pulp ﬁction (especially cowboy or detective stories). As some critics point out,

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what we sense in Neuromancer is some form of “new romanticism,” inwhich a lone man can defeat organizations in cooperation withmachines.14
Case’s role as a form of the traditional lone cowboy/detective heromeans that the novel also relies upon the associated traditional genderrole stereotypes. Lance Olson points out that in this novel male characters tend to be associated with mind and female with body. Cyberspaceis also called a “matrix,” which derives from the Latin for womb, andall of the hackers in this novel are men who try to “jack in” to thisfemale region, just as American pioneers have tried to conquer thevirgin land. Olson continues: “The male principle (Case, the computer
cowboy, the mind) strives to join with the female principle (Molly, thecyberspace matrix, the body) to attain a sense of completeness.”15
Cyborgs in this novel, therefore, show no possibility of upsetting thebalance of patriarchal power as the socialist-feminist historian ofscience Donna Haraway dreamed they would in her famous essay “A
Cyborg Manifesto.”16
The frontier which the “cowboy” Case tries to conquer is, of course,cyberspace. He moves around this frontier-like space, looks for geometric designs representing data of corporations, and penetrates them.
However, it is both revealing and dangerous to compare this cyberspace to the American one-time wilderness, identifying hackers withpioneers. First, the pioneers who cultivated the American Wild West
were also destroyers of nature who victimized the buffalo and theNative Americans. The same thing can happen in cyberspace, hackers
victimizing other people. Also some critics have pointed out that if
Americans try to dominate cyberspace with their conventional “frontier spirit,” other peoples’ languages and cultures may be destroyed.17
Secondly, cyberspace is not untainted by capitalism in the same sensethat the America was untainted before Europeans arrived. Cyberspace
has never been neutral since the beginning; when we have access to
the Internet or a virtual reality, in both cases we enter spaces createdby people. This may mean that, though we think we maintain anautonomous will, we are actually controlled by big corporations ormanipulated by the logic of capitalism. The console cowboys, who
behave like lone wolves, may also be being manipulated by big corporations, victimizing other people. And this can be said about realworld hackers, too.
As I said before, some of the original creators of personal computers

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had the dream of opposing central government by democratizing technology. Many of them had been hippies in the 1960s, coming tobelieve that personal computers could liberate people.18 Likewise,
according to Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, a nonﬁction
work about real-world hackers, “the genuine roots of the modern hacker underground probably can be traced most successfully to a now
much-obscured hippie anarchist movement,” and “[h]ackers long forrecognition as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and moutainman.”19 However,Sterling presents in the same book a very different picture of typicalhackers; though mostly from wealthy families, many of them are petty
thieves who steal passwords or credit card numbers from the old or the
weak. This clearly shows that the picture Neuromancer presents oflone-wolf hackers who oppose power by their hacking techniques isbased on the 1960s’ dream and is in fact far from being an accurate
depiction of real-world hackers.
In the ﬁrst place, it is becoming doubtful that people with lower
incomes can acquire the newest hacking techniques and the newest
machines, capable of defeating powerful organizations. It has often
been said that with the further development of the multimedia revolution, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is becoming wider.
Even among elementary schools in the United States, it is reported, thediffusion of personal computers in schools in lower-income areas ismuch lower than that in wealthy areas, and it may cause even moresocial inequality and alienation.20 If that is true, it will be more andmore difﬁcult for someone like Case, who has neither been to college
nor belonged to any organizations, to acquire the newest techniquesand machines. This, too, may be one of the proofs that the “romanticism” we could still believe in in the 1980s is already outdated in the
1990s.
These discrepancies, between what is in the novel and what is in thereal world, may have been caused by Gibson’s lack of insight into thephysical and social context of cyberspace. Andrew Ross, attacking
cyberpunk’s political irresponsibility in his book Strange Weather,says that “Cyberpunk’s idea of a counterpolitics . . . seems to havelittle to do with the burgeoning power of the great social movementsof our day: feminism, ecology, peace, sexual liberation, and civilrights.”21 The console cowboys in Gibson’s novels, he continues, areafter all white masculine heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and64

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Sylvester Stallone, and the novels’ structures are based on hard-boiled
crime stories. This can be attributed to Gibson’s way of exaggerating
the present male-dominant ideologies. Yet I would rather trace his
romantic picture of the hackers to his uncritical view of ideologies thathave prevailed in America, say, individualism and the “frontier spirit.”
David Brande is right in saying that Gibson’s cyberspace represents
the possibility that market forces will limitlessly pervade virtual
spaces. If so, the traditional macho heroes who represent the “frontier
spirit” could not oppose these forces; as Brande admits, they too are
only commodities controlled by market forces. Rather, the currently
changing ideologies about social and physical context, say, feminismand multiculturalism, could have given Gibson some confrontational
basis against the pervading virtual world. Relying too much on the
traditional frame, however, Gibson could only create a hacker basedon the cowboys or detectives of pulp ﬁction as a force against repressive power. This may be why his novel, even though it can commenton our late capitalist society, lacks a subversive enough point of view.
There are other discrepancies between the technologies in the novel
and those we have now. “Virtual reality” as we know it today is a
device with which we can experience another “reality” with our ﬁve
sense organs. In Neuromancer, on the contrary, people can haveaccess to virtual reality without bodies; since computers are wired
directly to their brains, they can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch justwith their brains. As I have repeated earlier, this technology of “wireheading” can be seen as a metaphor for the ultimate abandonment ofour bodies. However, even if this technology can be achieved, it would“probably ﬁrst be used to help people with physical disabilities,” asBill Gates says,22 and it is doubtful whether healthy people really need
it. For instance, in Neuromancer, Case “jacks in” to Molly’s sensorium and enters cyberspace at the same time. This, as I said before,
enhances the novel’s thrilling “drive.” However, this device is not only
unnecessary for what they intend to do, but even a nuisance; Case has
only to communicate with Molly, but with this device he must feel her
pain, too. Also, as to the technology of downloading data from brains,
does anyone want his or her brain to be downloaded and therefore
exposed completely? Does anyone long to live eternally as “data” oncomputers after his or her physical death? These technologies, even if
attained, seem very dangerous; they could lead to total intrusion into
our privacy.

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In the fact that Gibson presents these technologies as brilliant andstimulating (even if he suggests the possibility that they may control
and repress us), we cannot but sense this novel’s outdatedness. Now
in this age of virtual reality and the Internet, we know there is a darker
side to this global computer network; there have been reports ofmany crimes committed on the Internet—spreading viruses, slandering
individuals, stealing passwords, displaying pornography, and so on.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, giving an example of “rape” in theInternet, illustrates how we can never be free from our own bodies andthe politics that go with them—gender, race, and class. Saying, “nomatter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body
attached,” Stone reafﬁrms the importance of “keeping the discussion
grounded in individual bodies.”23 In short, entry into cyberspace nevermeans that we can “transcend” our bodies and achieve equality.
Rather, it may mean that we will simply become part of the big corporations and market forces. And if so, our sense of our remaining bodies
may be the last stand that we can take against the pervading virtualworld.
Gibson presents in the portrayal of Case the possibility that market
forces may bind us more powerfully through cyberspace. Also we cansay that Case reclaims his own body when, leaving the virtual world,
he ﬁnds a girlfriend at the end of the novel. However, compared with
Gibson’s fascinating way of depicting the sensations of moving
through cyberspace, his insight into the ideologies concerning our bodies is weak. His traditional macho heroes can never have subversive
enough power against the threatening virtual world. This may be why
his novels are so often attacked for accepting technological innovation
uncritically. Maybe Darko Suvin is right in saying that even though
Gibson hates the status quo, “his balancing act accepts the status quo a
bit too readily as inevitable and unchangeable.” 24
As I have shown so far, Neuromancer presents a dazzling picture of
our future world on the one hand, but on the other reveals some divergences from the world we live in now. These divergences, I must say,indicate that the author does not have enough insight into the physicaland social context concerning the newest technologies and our bodies.
For that reason, Neuromancer cannot adequately deal with the current
changing ideologies, despite some foresight on the future of our latecapitalist world. And this weakness seems to remain in Gibson’s later
works too.

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Reading the “cyberspace” novels that Gibson went on to produce
after Neuromancer, we are struck by how the technologies in thesenovels have become easier to understand in relation to the technological innovation of our world. For by the time his second novel, Count
Zero, and his third, Mona Lisa Overdrive, were published (1986 and1988 respectively),25 personal computers had spread widely and theInternet had started to be used by the masses. Gibson, at the sametime, seems to bring the technologies in these novels closer to thosewhich actually exist. As a result, these works, though much more
understandable than Neuromancer, cannot exhibit ideas as stimulating
as those in the earlier novel.
In Gibson’s late novels, cyberspace is much less often depicted surrealistically in geometric design than it was in Neuromancer, causing
the later novels to provide much less of the dazzling and fascinating
sensations of driving through cyberspace. Also, Case’s counterpart inthese novels, a console cowboy called Bobby (Count Zero) has lost
most of the characteristics of the romantic hero. Being much like acomputer “nerd” in our familiar world, he only indulges in cyberspacefor fun. His dream to become one with the machine is in a sense
attained when he becomes connected to a miniature cyberspace machine in Mona Lisa Overdrive, but unable to move any more, his bodyslowly wastes away. This appropriately shows that transcendence
through a machine only leads to physical death.
The technology of wireheading is used in these later novels in amuch more practical and understandable way: as an entertainment
device called “simstim” (simulated stimulation) in which someone’s
sensorium can be recorded and played back. The viewer plugs into it
and gets the sense of acting with popular actors and actresses. Entertainment industries mass-produce these software products and many
viewers become addicted to them (Bobby’s mother is one of these addicts). The real-world multimedia developed in the past ten years has
clearly shown its limitless possibilities as entertainment. In addition,
virtual real experiences in these novels (for instance, “a sensory link”
through which one of the heroines of Count Zero meets a multimillionaire) seem to be much more like those in our world.
These things, however, do not necessarily mean that Gibson gives
more consideration to the physical context concerning the innovative

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: WILLIAM GIBSON’S NEUROMANCER

67

technologies. Rather, they only seem to mean that he depends more on
the technologies of the real world and, at the same time, the formulaeof traditional pulp ﬁction. In a more plausible and therefore less exciting world, characters in his later works (there still are macho heroes
like Turner in Count Zero) pursue and solve problems like the heroesof typical detective stories. Compared with Neuromancer’s non-linear
structure, these novels follow a more conventional line; they use plural
viewpoints of characters, but only in due order. For instance, Count
Zero starts with Turner (Chapter 1), and then moves to Marly (Chapter2) and Bobby (Chapter 3), following these characters almost in thisorder, and these three plotlines dovetail at the end.
Moreover, these novels end just like traditional novels or even fairy
tales. Count Zero ends with Turner, who has married Sally, teaching
his son how to shoot (a symbol of masculinity). Mona Lisa Overdrive
ends with Bobby’s construct happily reunited with Angie’s constructin the miniature cyberspace machine, as if celebrating their transcendence of physical death. With these “closed” endings, which give asense of harmony, hope, and completion, these novels are less stimulating and subversive in an ideological and structural sense. The samething can be said about his latest work Idoru (published in 1996).26
Gibson’s later novels clearly indicate where his limits lie. He tends
to lack the subversive standpoint against the virtual world, because hecannot break out of the traditional structure of popular novels and,
therefore, cannot adopt deconstructive ideologies. This may have beencaused, as I said, by his lack of sufﬁcient attention to our physical context. And this attention to our physical context may be the very thing
we must retain in resistance to the pervasiveness of the virtual world.

NOTES
1
Masaki Enomoto, Denshi-bungakuron [On Electronic Literature] (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 1993), 148.
2
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 419, note 1.
3
William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1984), 3. All
subsequent quotations from the novel will refer to this edition and will be paginated in
my text.
4
Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 86.
5
An American writer, Karen Tei Yamashita, refers to Gibson, along with main-

68

NOBUO KAMIOKA

stream writers like John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut, as one of the writers who adopt
the technique of Magic Realism in order to represent the “virtual” First World. See
Karen Tei Yamashita, “Virtual Reality vs. Magic Reality,” Subaru (August 1995),
183. Steven Erickson is the mainstream writer whose work is often called “a hybrid of
Magic Realism and cyberpunk.” See Larry McCaffery, Avant Pop (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1995), 230.
6
Darko Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk” in Storming Reality Studio, ed. Larry
McCaffery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 355.
7
Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York:
HarperCollins, 1994), 44–45.
8
See Toru Nishigaki, Multimedia (Tokyo, Iwanami-shoten, 1994), 72–76.
9
See Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 109–10.
10David Brande, “The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology inWilliam Gibson” in Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Markley(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 84–85.
11
Erik Davis, “A Cyberspace Odyssey,” The Nation 248, no. 18 (1989), 636.
12This remark by Norman Spinrad is quoted (source unspeciﬁed) in Mark Gilmore,“The Rise of Cyberpunk” Rolling Stone 4 December 1986, 78.
13
Arthur & Marilouise Kroker, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-eating 90s(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 50.
14
See Lance Olsen, William Gibson (San Bernardino: Borgo, 1992), 66–67.
15
Ibid., 75.
16
See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.
17
See Toru Nishigaki, Shisou toshiteno pasokon [Personal Computers as Ideas](Tokyo: NTT-shuppan, 1997), 56–60.
18
See Note 8.
19
Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic
Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992), 43, 51.
20
See, for example, “Chikyu jouhou mura”[Global Village], Yomiuri Shinbun, 3August 1997, 1.
21
Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of
Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 152.
22
Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995), 133.
23
The case of “rape” in the Internet that Stone presents is the story of “Julie.”“Julie,” known to the Internet community as an old disabled woman, offered womenfriends advice, and many of them confessed their personal troubles to her. However,when information was leaked that “Julie” was actually an able-bodied middle-aged
male psychiatrist, many of her (his?) women friends felt outraged and even “raped.”
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories
about Virtual Cultures,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 111.
24
Suvin, “On Gibson and Cyberpunk,” 357.
25
William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Arbor House, 1986); William Gibson,
Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988).
26
William Gibson, Idoru (New York: Putnam, 1996).