Mythology and Technology: The Novels of William Gibson

Schmitt, Ronald. "Mythology and Technology: The Novels of William Gibson." Extrapolation 34.1 (Spring 1993): 64-78.

An old-fashioned but important essay on Gibson's Neuromancer series, relating cyberpunk to punk rock music, and relating both to mythology, esp. such "specific mythological icons" as "the primitive warrior" (66-67 and passim). See also for the combination of myth and technology as a "'litereralization' of Arthur Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, and for cyberspace as the territory of "ghosts, demons and gods": i.e., "flatlined" cyberjocks, voodoo loa, and the AI's, respectively (68-69). Deals indirectly with the themes of transformation (and containment) and directly with transfiguration (73 f. and passim), concluding that ". . . the advanced technology of Gibson's world, instead of making people into robots, has intensified and expanded the potential for the realization of our most primitive mythic desires. Instead of desensitization and uniformity we have transfiguration and [among the more extreme of Gibson's punks] disfiguration" (75). Cf. and contrast J. G. Voller's "Neuromanticism: Cyberspace and the Sublime" and N. Easterbook's "The Arc of Our Destruction: Reversal and Erasure in Cyberpunk." (RDE, 20/03/93)