The Shadow Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy

Olsen, Lance. "The Shadow Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy." Extrapolation 32.3 (Fall 1991): 278-89.

Finds Gibson's "portrayal of the spiritual increasingly complex and contradictory" as the Neuromancer trilogy continues (281). "Religion and technology, the spiritual and the material, are shown to be no more than games"—but important games: "voluntary activities that generate order and hence 'meaning' in limited environments. Perhaps the gods are real"—and definitely François Lyotard is on to something significant in analyzing the interaction of language games in Just Gaming (282). In its gender games, Neuromancer "is not so much underscoring discrete genders" in word choice and development of Case and Molly as presenting "a search for a union of opposites, for a final destruction of boundaries" (283). Extending such games, the trilogy functions postmodernly "to destroy modern absolutist distinctions between terms like materialism and spiritualism and to reconstruct those terms in a new and more challenging conceptualization" (287). Cited in Hal Hall's "Approaching Neuromancer: More Secondary Sources." (Maly/RDE, 02/07/02)