Mona Lisa Overdrive and the Prosthetic

'''Palmer, Christopher. "Mona Lisa Overdrive and the Prosthetic."' Science Fiction Studies'' #93 = 31.2 (July 2004): 227-42. Available (with limited access, and as of July 2019) on JSTOR here: OR at Research Gate here:. Possibly available, depending on "Your Local Library," here:.

FROM THE ABSTRACT This essay surveys the protagonists of Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) in the light of the concept of the prosthetic. The survey is inconclusive: Gibson proliferates images of prostheses in an exploratory fashion. With Slick Henry, however, one of a series of artists in Gibson's fiction, certain concepts of D.W. Winnicott's — transitional object and the play space — are more useful. The essay concludes by considering how Slick's constructions, autonomous rather than prosthetic, figure in the ending of the novel, where relations between the hard-boiled and the religious are otherwise driving Mona Lisa Overdrive into a cul-de-sac.

In addition to Mona Lisa Overdrive the essay deals at least cursorily with the other books in the Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero) and what is now often called the BRIDGE TRILOGY (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties);

Note Palmer's assertion that "Science fiction is a rich field for examining interrelations between subjects and objects because a cyber-entity — and Gibson offers a range of these — elides the distinctions between person and machine. Gibson [...] complicates the issues because he has an intense imagination for commodity fetishism, for the luxury or high-tech item that is cherished [...], the object of ambiguous psychic or erotic investment" (p. 230).

Note well Palmer on "the Aleph," a "big blocky-looking electronic thing" associated with life-support. The Aleph figures in the grand cybernarrative continued from Neuromancer and Count Zero [...]; eventually several characters [...] will be downloaded into this separate world, an abstract of everything in this world (as, roughly, in Borges's Aleph), and thence will set out for Centauri. [...] [Unlike the "anarchic, aggressive" cyberspace in the early novels in the trilogy, ...] The Aleph is a refuge a haven, a marvelous safe place that manifests itself and allows entry to some; it's like the haven on the deserted beach with Linda Lee and the boy Neuromancer that case eventually rejects in Neuromancer. (p. 236) — I.e., variations on cyberspace as a VR zone offering possibilities of both freedom and containment, and containment as both threatening (if stimulating) and reassuring: in the Aleph, a safe place, possibly for play.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 20-21July19