William Gibson’s Fictional Worlds: To Virtual Existence and Back Again

Abstract

The postmodernist literary reflections of transformation and the integration of knowledge, power, information and information technologies, and mercantilization of all aspects of reality in highly developed, commodified societies of the Sprawl trilogy made William Gibson one of the pioneers of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Although his later novels Pattern Recognition and The Peripheral do not belong to the same subgenre, they tap into the ideas explored in his cyberpunk visions of computerized space, prosthetic aids, post-industrial and post-humanist tendencies emerging as a reaction to the integration of body, mind and technology, and the overall virtualization of reality. Not only does the seeming of otherness of the post-catastrophic technological cultures in these novels destabilize the idea of unique reality and linear time, but the technologicalimpact on perception in visually oriented consumer societies blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the real, and makes them conspicuously fluid.