The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson's Neuromancer

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. "The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson's Neuromancer." Critique 33.3 (Spring 1992): 221-40.

Thesis summarized by IC-R as "[…] Gibson's fiction returns continually to the question of how artists can represent the human condition in a world saturated by cybernetic technologies that not only undermine earlier ethical and aesthetic categories, but also collapse the distance between the sense of real social existence and science-fictional speculation. The cyberspace novels' protagonists all work to restore value and meaning to their lives through technospheres that have appropriated the realm of transcendence.  In Neuromancer […] every character is an artist or a work of art, for all are functional parts of a transcendentally evolving artistic  creation," including the AI's in M-F Tessier-Ashpool's "grand unified Artificial Intelligence, the consciousness of cyberspace." Compares Neuromancer's "vision and style" to "Italian Futurism's image of futuristic technological transcendence" and concludes the summary with "Hence, Neuromancer expresses a sentimental futurism" (headnote to IC-R's "Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's Count Zero" essay). (Maly, 01/07/02, RDE, 15/08/02)