SOURCE: Mead, David G. “Technological Transfiguration in William Gibson's Sprawl Novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.” Extrapolation 32, no. 4 (1991): 350-60.

[In the following essay, Mead asserts that characters in Gibson's trilogy of “Sprawl” novels—Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive—use technology as a means of transcendence, transformation, and liberation.]

Some years ago, in a review essay in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Norman Spinrad urged calling the writers of the nascent cyberpunk movement “neuromantics.”¹ In contradistinction to the hostility to technology, the neo-Ludditism, so to speak, which is often attributed to the New Wave writers of the 1960s and early 1970s, Spinrad found in William Gibson, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and Rudy Rucker, among others, a “forthrightly high-tech romanticism,” an attitude that embraces “wholeheartedly the real world that science and technology have made, the technosphere, the reality of the last quarter of the twentieth century” (185). Spinrad uses the adjective “romantic” frequently, defining it very loosely and operationally to mean an unashamed affection for or acceptance of: egregious individualism and defiant self-reliance; radical technological change which provides the opportunity for human beings to positively change the “perceptual and psychic definitions of what it means to be human” (187); and a rebellious rejection of society's oppressions. He cites as his instances of the Neuromantic hero Gibson's Henry Case and John Shirley's Rickenharp (from Eclipse), and he invokes the transformation of humanity in Greg Bear's Blood Music as an instance of the romantic apotheosis through technology. Spinrad's enthusiasm for the values of the “movement” is shared by many, including the distinguished critic Brooks Landon, whose introduction to the Easton Press edition of Neuromancer praises cyberpunk fiction for its “simple, unhysterical, unsentimental understanding of the profound technological and epistemological implications of accomplished and near-accomplished cultural fact. And Neuromancer did this best” (v). Landon praises Gibson in particular for his ability to make “us realize the incredible implications computers pose for human memory, and thereby for history, for our sense of reality itself” (iv).

Gibson himself is somewhat more reserved about the positive benefits of technology, at least publicly, than are his admirers. In an interview printed in Mississippi Review 47/48, Gibson said, “My feelings about technology are totally ambivalent. Ambivalence seems to me to be the only way to relate to what's happening today. … You can't be a Luddite and you can't buy technocracy” (McCaffery 228). Mikal Gilmore, writing of the cyberpunks and Gibson in particular in Rolling Stone, also noted the mixed nature of the movement's vision:

Unlike their predecessors, who took a more cynical view of man's machines, cyberpunks are saying that while technology is rampant and scary, it can also be redemptive. In some of the movement's most inventive works … technology leads to both transendence and negation of the human spirit, occasionally at the same time.

(78)

Perhaps provoked by Spinrad's somewhat undisciplined use of the term “romantic,” certainly prompted by the inherent ambivalence toward technology's consequences in Gibson's early short fiction, Miriyam Glazer explores Gibson's romanticism in some detail in a recent issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. She finds that his “deepest literary roots are to be found … within late eighteenth and nineteenth century romanticism,” and suggests that Gibson opposes the “technolatry” of earlier science fiction, seeing in the new technologies he extrapolates a set of tighter, more devastating “mind-forged manacles” for the passive victims of the not-so-brave new Sprawl (156-57). For Glazer, Gibson's outlaw heroes may be trying to reenact the romantic rebel's journey toward a liberating expansion of consciousness, to transform the world. However, they must fail because they reject the “meat” by reconstituting vision and imagination in and from a gomi-heaped world (160), denying their essential human selves and Nature, in favor of entering cyberspace, a “universe of opaque signs” in which imagination is constrained by “an all-encompassing manufactured illusion” (161-62). For Glazer, the technology of Gibson's fiction makes the human obsolete. For example, she asserts that when Bobby Newmark's body dies at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive, he dies, and that people like Lise in Gibson's powerful story “The Winter Market” are diminished by their escape from the flesh into silicon.² For Glazer, the characters of Gibson's world are “invaded and altered” by technology.

While I disagree with Glazer's view almost entirely, and side, so to speak, with those who find in Gibson and the movement a profound affection for the opportunities—as opposed to the threats—offered by scientific and technological change, the clear division of opinion regarding Gibson's themes, represented by Spinrad and Landon on one hand and Glazer on the other, suggests that his writing is crucial, that is, it somehow embodies a meaningful intersection of apparently divergent ideas and values about the relation of humanity and its technology. One impediment to resolving the division of opinion may be the “romanticism” that we choose to invoke in order to apprehend Gibson's meanings. Arthur O. Lovejoy pointed out some years ago that it was necessary to discriminate among the various romanticisms which developed in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe to understand the literature of the age. It seems to me that such discrimination and definition is useful also in seeing Gibson in terms of literary tradition and the history of ideas.

Glazer, working from an unabashedly Blakean romantic perspective, demands an organicism, primitivism, and humanism which Gibson's cosmos simply cannot supply. Like Blake, Glazer valorizes the human face of things, rejecting the world of technology, specifically the virtual reality of cyberspace, as an Urizenic or Newtonian reduction, an inhuman “single vision” educed by “mind-forged manacles.” Like those early romantics—for example, Joseph Warton, who rejected the symmetry of the formal French garden and the heroic couplet, Glazer rejects the inorganic geometrical symmetry of cyberspace, seeing this human/machine interface as an unnatural enslavement. It seems to me that a more appropriate romanticism to invoke in Gibson's case would be the German variety represented by Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. As Lovejoy notes, Schiller expressed “the conviction that ‘harmony with nature,’ in any sense which implied an opposition to ‘culture,’ to ‘art,’ to reflection and self-conscious effort, was neither possible nor desirable for the modern man or the modern artist” (14-15). This version of romanticism values diversity, irony, and complexity and accepts the superiority of the cultivated over the primitive; as Friedrich Schlegel observed, for man the artificial is “natural” (Lovejoy 15). It embraces the idea of self-transcendence without demanding that this be achieved by denying the artifacts of culture, including technology, in favor of a simple, primitive humanism.

Approaching the term “neuromantic” from the perspective of Schiller and Schlegel helps not only to resolve the problem of terminology but also allows us to avoid forcing an overly simplistic—and I think false—choice between Blakean and Enlightenment forebears on this eclectic postmodernist author. If we allow that the German notion of the “romantic” is more appropriate for him than the Blakean or Wartonian—that it is more tolerant of diversity and complexity, more eclectic, more tolerant of the artificial—then the dilemma (somewhat illusory) of fixing Gibson's literary heritage is resolved to some degree. His ambivalence and complexity has historical precedent and echoes the problems that writers and thinkers encountered as the complexities of the new industrial age dawned on Europe in the late eighteenth century.

In the neuromantic vision of William Gibson, developments in cybernetics, biotechnology, neurochemistry, and so forth offer the opportunity, but not the certainty, for personal liberation and self-actualization, almost to the extreme of apotheosis. No longer does technological change mean the danger of planetary destruction first and foremost; nor does it just threaten urban hells with “mind-forged manacles” fastened to passive consumers by Sense/Net or multinational megacorps. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy—Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive—technology permits us to become what we will, to realize our selves, however banal, in ways undreamed of by the countercultural, New Wave technophobe or the Blakean romantic. In Gibson's long fictions, almost all characters are given the opportunity to use technology to reformulate themselves in some significant way, to realize an ideal selfhood.

The characters of Neuromancer, the quintessential cyberpunk text, perhaps best illustrate the neuromantic attitude toward technological liberation. The commonfolk visit surgical boutiques, where for a few dollars they can buy vat-grown Zeiss Ikon eyes or have microsoft sockets implanted in their mastoid processes. The cheap elective surgery made possible by advances in biotechnology and immunology allows a young gang member to look the way he feels, to express his style in a powerful way.

His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-charides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He'd seen that before.

(59)

A slightly more sophisticated example of self-actualization is offered by the heroine Molly Millions, the street-samurai “razor-girl” who, to escape life in an urban “squat,” recreates herself (in the image of Sonny Chiba and Bruce Lee) by undergoing a series of elective surgeries to speed up her reflexes, install extrudable razor-blade finger tips, and mask her eyes with permanent mirrorshades. She pays for her transformation by whoring; however, the money she earns is “free” since she performs her sexual services as an unconscious “meat puppet,” having had a “neural cut-out” installed. Ironically, Molly Kolodny elects to be a mindless extension of machinery for a while so that she can earn enough to reformulate herself as Molly Millions.

Henry Case, the human protagonist of Neuromancer, is another person for whom life is made livable, not terrible, by technology. Case is a “console cowboy,” a computer thief who makes his living stealing data from various databases. Case enters these data stores through the medium of cyberspace, a consensual hallucination which has evolved to serve modern business and industry. Indeed, Case is, in his own estimation, alive only when he is jacked into c-space; everything outside cyberspace is just a “meat thing.” For Case, to be severed from c-space is to be dead. And dead to the world is what Case is when the novel begins, since his ability to jack has been destroyed by a disgruntled former employer.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

(6)

Gibson's metaphor of imprisonment here is significant. For Case, Molly, Angelo, and other characters of this novel, life, the status quo, is imprisonment; escape or transformation is made possible by science. For Case, liberation or transformation comes twice. As the novel ends, Case discovers that an electronic version of himself, a RAM construct given a sort of electronic life by Wintermute/Neuromancer, exists in cyberspace, presumably living inside a world-construct with an electronic duplicate of Linda Lee. Meanwhile, his meat self, redeemed from death by technology and matured by his experiences, will marry, have children and, more or less, live happily ever after. There is no doubt that Case has been transfigured and redeemed.

Case is saved from self-destruction and meat death (indeed, he achieves a sort of electronic immortality) by an artificial intelligence called Wintermute. This entity is owned and operated by the multinational corporation Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Wintermute controls one-half of T-A's computer net, the other half being run by an AI located in Rio; these vastly capable intelligences are kept from knowing each other by both software controls and hardwired “shackles.” Additionally, the Turing Police, an international agency, monitor the operations of these AIs to prevent them from escaping human control.

The fundamental plot of Neuromancer is Wintermute's struggle, stemming from a drive secretly and subtly programmed into its software by its creator, to break its “shackles,” link directly with its Brazilian alter ego (the AI whose true name is Neuromancer), and achieve a sort of machine apotheosis. It is Wintermute who reprograms the schizoid Willis Corto, invents a medical technology which refurbishes Case's nerves, hires Molly, locates the ROM construct of the Dixie Flatline, identifies Peter Riviera as being attractive to 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, purchases the Chinese ICE-breaker, and so forth. Wintermute is technology liberating itself from enslavement by humans.

Of course, not all opportunities are seized for the better. Technology permits self-enslavement or entrapment as well as self-transformation or transcendence. Linda Lee, Case's girlfriend in Chiba, loses herself to drug addiction as well as love. The executives of the great industrial zaibatsu that dominate the world economy, exchange their liberty for the cradle-to-grave security of the corporate arcologies. The mark of their election is a corporate logo tattooed on their flesh and patented medical microprocessors in their blood. As corporations replace nations, changing jobs becomes defection; employees sign indentures and are fitted with “cortex bombs.” If the price is right, one can sell oneself into eternal shackles. McCoy Pauley, the Dixie Flatline, Case's mentor, allows himself—his memories and behavioral patterns—to be replicated in a ROM-construct. The man, the meat, died, but his electronically caught pattern, aware of its own forever-fixed artificiality, would have been owned and operated by Sense/Net in perpetuity had not Molly and Case stolen the device and eventually, at the construct's request, erased it.

Escaping a stultifying or imprisoning life is a basic theme of the second Sprawl novel, Count Zero. Every significant figure in the book is trying to break free of some constraint, and using the new technology is often the way the escape is made.

The most obvious figure seeking liberation is the novel's villain, the enormously wealthy Josef Virek. His body, about 400 kilograms of cancerous flesh, is kept alive in a support vat in a suburb of Stockholm. His persona, or mind, inhabits a simstim construct of the Guell Park in Barcelona, a “virtual reality.” Virek will do anything, use anyone, kill anyone, to escape his imminent death. The possibility that he may be able to replicate himself electronically and dwell eternally and omnipotently in the cyberspace matrix or, via means known to the entities of cyberspace, be transplanted into human bodies drives Virek to extraordinary deeds and leads eventually to his liberation from life—at the hands, so to speak, of Baron Samedi, the electronic loa of death.

Bobby Newmark, whose computer hotdogger handle “Count Zero Interrupt” gives the book its title, lives—if it can be called living—in a lower-middle-class Jersey slum called Barrytown. His mother survives on welfare allotments and six hours a day of simstim soap operas, while Bobby dreams prefab fantasies of fame as a console cowboy, even though he can barely read and knows next to nothing about life beyond the Big Playground outside his housing complex. Bobby's desperate need to get out, to get to the Sprawl, to life, is matched only by his naivety and ignorance. Ironically, he gets himself killed (momentarily) the first time he slots some ICE-cutting software and tries to steal a little data.³ Yet it will be his facility with a c-space deck and his link with the cybernetically augmented Angela Mitchell that finally lead—in Mona Lisa Overdrive—to Newmark's transcendent removal, via the Aleph device, into a new state of electronic being.⁴

Christopher Mitchell has invented—with the help and direction of the intelligences which now inhabit the cyberspace matrix—a “biochip” technology that enables a whole new generation of computer construction. Developing the new biochips has brought Mitchell escape from the graduate students' dorms, fame, and finally fortune with Maas-Neotek. It has also brought a lifetime's sequestration in Mass-Neotek's mesa-top arcology in Arizona for himself and his daughter. His only escape from his corporate masters, other than death, can come through being “extracted” from the grasp of Mass-Neotek by quasi-military corporate raiders from another zaibatsu, Hosaka, and this will merely mean for him imprisonment by a different employer. Mitchell cuts his own throat rather than continue in the employ of a corporation that is about to vivisect his daughter Angela in order to remove the biochip implants in her brain.

Mitchell's daughter Angela has been a prisoner of her father's science since her infancy. As the price for Christopher Mitchell's scientific success, Angela's brain has been implanted—at the direction of cyberspace intelligences—with biochip devices. She escapes Maas-Neotek and Hosaka, but she never escapes the demands which are placed on her by the electronic intelligences, the Divine Horsemen, which have more or less created her. Angela's implants give her the great mental power to interface directly with the matrix; however, she is compelled by the loa to make the connection. She has no choice in the matter until she finds a designer drug which seems to free her from loa control. In fact this drug was commissioned by Sense/Net's corporate A-I—called “Continuity”—and subtly rewrites the programming of the biochips in her brain in order to prevent Angie's communicating with the cyberspace loa. While this highly addictive drug does free her from her compulsion to serve the loa, it is at the cost of another, much less satisfying kind of imprisonment. Angela shakes her drug addiction, but, like her lover Bobby Newmark, will free herself from the loa and her technological chains only by entering (being electronically copied into) the Aleph. At the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive, their bodies die, but their patterns “live” on as RAM structures in the Aleph, with the implication that these, with the Finn and Colin, will move on somehow to live eternally in a transcendent “dataverse” or “virtual reality.” They have joined the other “ghosts” in the new Nature-machine (c-space “after it changed”) and seem on their way to integration with some nonhuman greater spirit, perhaps the “Grand Met” of the voodoo paradigm, at novel's end.

Among the other principle characters of Count Zero are Marly Khrushkova and Turner, the mercenary expert in corporate executive relocation or “extractions.” Marly, a small gallery owner and art connoisseur, is a prisoner, first of her dependency on her lover Alain and later of Josef Virek's plan to achieve electronic apotheosis. Marly's role in the novel seems to be to reveal and reject the vision of freedom which Virek seeks so desperately, a megalomaniac's dream to be “free, eventually, to inhabit any number of real bodies … Forever” (219). Marly's imprisonment is symbolized by her claustrophobia. She feels increasingly confined by the structure of control and observation generated around her by Virek, and it seems to be this sense of entrapment which reveals Virek's evil to her and drives her to warn the “boxmaker” she has been hired to find for Virek. It is a sign of Marly's commitment to escape that she voluntarily endures a series of technological enclosures (two spacecraft, the orbital space station, and the Tessier-Ashpool data cores) in order to reach the place—both psychological and spatial—where she can assert her freedom by warning the boxmaker of Virek's threatening intent. Her rejection of Virek's selfish use of technology to control others, of the bonds and false promises of safety through technology, is signified by her claustrophobic rejection of a spacesuit's protection. At novel's end, Marly prefers death to enclosure, freedom to continued service to the no-longer-human Virek. Although Marly cares nothing about technology—indeed, she seems the least comfortable of all Gibson's characters with things mechanical—she is saved, quite incidentally, when the loa destroy Virek for threatening Angela with a superior technology that rescues rather than restrains.

Unlike the initially helpless Marly, Turner seems a consummately self-controlled, masterful man of action who owes his life to biomedical advances. The novel opens with Turner's being surgically reassembled after having been blown to bits in New Delhi. While his body recovers, his mind spends three months dwelling in a “ROM-generated simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood” (1). Turner is a mercenary who works for the multinational zaibatsu which run the world politically and economically. Working by contract, somewhat like a ronin or masterless samurai, his specialty is “extracting” high-level executives who would like to change jobs and employers. Since the executives are permanently indentured to their corporations by unbreakable contract, Turner rescues them from the clutches of their corporate masters, quite illegally, using the most high-tech weapons.

A loner, Turner seems to eschew “connection,” leaving the family home early and refusing to return even to his mother's deathbed. The medical simstim was wholly inappropriate. His romantic liaisons are almost entirely commercial, and for good reason, since even casual pickups in the remotest parts of the third world can turn out to be industrial psychologists employed by a zaibatsu to check out an employee's mental health. For Turner, “home” is sexual release (5), and the only person you can really trust is your Swiss agent. For a decisive man, a hero capable of murder in his employer's service, Turner seems as much a victim as Marly, primarily because he has no place to go when he becomes the target of the machinations of others, machinations enabled by the massive technological resources of Maas-Neotek, Hosaka, and Josef Virek. He is harried from one bolt-hole to another, always on the run, and eventually finds himself at the center of everyone's gunsights, as a result of having done his job well by rescuing Angela Mitchell. Ironically, in the end it will be the linkage with Angie, who incorporates the newest and most potent technology of all, a technology of connection, that liberates Turner. Protected by the electronic gods of the machine, Turner finds his true freedom by returning to the family farm, marrying his brother's girlfriend, and starting a family—with sperm and genitalia which were bought on the open market.

The minor characters of Count Zero are often prisoners of technology. Bobby Newmark's mother Marsha, who may represent the masses of the future (and the housewives of today), lives for her simstim soap operas; outside them she has no life.⁵ Jackie, the “horse” of the voodoo/cyberspace loa Danbala Wedo and Aida Wedo, is the helpless captive of technological intelligences, and she is killed by the “black ice” of Josef Virek. Turner's brother Rudy is a homeboy who winds up dead at the hands of Turner's enemies because he is unable to bring himself to leave home. The web of technology that he has created for himself as a defense against the world turns out to be a trap.

However, it should be noted that the residents—mainly blacks—of the Projects, the minimum income arcologies of Barrytown, have domesticated technology, incorporating it in their special social and cultural matrices. They use their technology—geothermal heating to raise shrimp and catfish, for instance—to make what in our time would be slums into truly comfortable homes. They aren't abused by it. This includes dealing with the cyberspace entities, which they relate to through a voodoo paradigm as demigods or loa.

The theme of liberation and enslavement by technology is continued in Mona Lisa Overdrive. Sally Shears, a.k.a. Molly Millions in Neuromancer, reappears and is driven to action by her dead enemy 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, whose control of the T-A data pool allows Sally to be threatened with complete exposure of her life's history. Sally's Yakuza employer, Roger Swain, is himself threatened, and empowered, by 3Jane's data to the degree that he is willing to rebel against his oyabun Yanaka, the head of the once-Japanese, now world-wide, criminal syndicate. Mona Lisa, the Cleveland hooker who gives her name to the final novel, is rebuilt in a few hours to look like Angie Mitchell. This biotechnology makes possible both good and evil. Mona's cosmetic surgery aims to convince the world, when she is killed, that her body is Angela's; but rescued from the villains, the now-beautiful Mona has the opportunity to replace Angie as the next simstim superstar. Even little Kumiko Yanaka, whose troubles seem more psychological then technological, is saved from harm by the Maas-Neotek artificial intelligence Colin, who protects her from the electronic “ghost” of 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool and helps her identify Roger Swain as her enemy.

Indeed, the theme of the liberating possibilities offered by technological change comes to fruition in Mona Lisa Overdrive. This work exists, in a way, to dramatize the promise that the earlier works have explored, the promise that through technology one can have both freedom and dreams. At the end of this novel, Bobby Newmark, once the console cowboy Count Zero Interrupt, and his lover Angie Mitchell, now the great simstim star in Sense/Net's stable, enter—are copied into, are brain-drained into, become “ghosts” of—a massive lump of biochips called an Aleph. This mechanism is capable of containing, as one minor figure says, “everything.” This “soul-catcher” provides a virtual reality for those who “live” in it, although Gibson clearly suggests at the novel's end that existence in the electricity-dependent Aleph is only temporary. Bobby, Angela, the Finn, and the electronic intelligence Colin are on their way to some other condition of being that exists beyond the boundaries of the Aleph, as well as beyond life and Nature as we poor post-romantic mortals know it.⁶

Gibson has been much praised for the power of his vision as well as his style. It seems to me that one reason for the praise heaped on the Sprawl novels, Neuromancer particularly, is that they promise that science can save as well as damn us, that science has the potential to make our dreams come true. These works reflect a fundamentally popular belief in the redemptive powers of technology, a view—the New Wave, Mary Shelley, or Miriyam Glazer notwithstanding—that underlies the genre. It is a view consistent also with the American vision of liberty for the individual, a belief that beyond the frontier lies the opportunity to make a better tomorrow, even if realizing our dreams does involve coping with punks with purple Mohawk haircuts, Panther Moderns, menacing oriental thugs, and the ready availability of designer drugs.

Notes

1. Spinrad credits Tappan King with originally suggesting the term (180).

2. Glazer, commenting on a passage from “The Winter Market,” fails to see the positive joy and value of Lise's long-sought deliverance from her wasted flesh: “With a ‘cry of release,’ grotesquely crippled Lise of ‘Winter Market’ has herself translated into the ‘ROM on some corporate mainframe’ achieving freedom at last from the bonds of … hated flesh” (Burning Chrome 140), (159; emphasis mine).

3. Bobby's murder is provoked by the technology he believes will free him. He is then revived by the intervention of the biochip-augmented Angela Mitchell. Ironically, the same technology that allows her to save Bobby from the lethal ICE threatens her with death at the hands of Virek, Mass-Neotek, and Hosaka.

4. The name “Aleph” clearly links the object to divine creation—the “alpha and omega”—and is perhaps a symbol of God or a godlike being.

5. For Glazer it is the example of Marsha Newmark, rather than Molly, Case, or Bobby, which most truly represents Gibson's vision of the consequences of technology.

6. This “romantic journey” is ignored by Glazer, yet it clearly indicates that Gibson's humanity has achieved, or it about to achieve, that “union with a power greater than the self” that links the “human and the non-human, the natural, worlds” (162).

Works Cited

Gibson, William. Count Zero. New York: Ace-Berkely, 1987.

———. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam-Spectra, 1988.

———. Neuromancer. New York: Ace-Berkely, 1984.

———. “The Winter Market,” in Burning Chrome. New York: Ace-Berkely, 1987. 117-41.

Gilmore, Mikal. “The Rise of Cyberpunk.” Rolling Stone Dec. 1986, 77-78, 107-8.

Glazer, Miriyam. “‘What Is Within Now Seen Without’: Romanticism, Neuromanticism, and the Death of the Imagination in William Gibson's Fictive World.” Journal of Popular Culture 23 (Winter 1989): 155-64.

Landon, Brooks. “Introduction.” In Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Rockford, IL: Easton Press, 1990, iii-vi.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” English Romantic Poets. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: Oxford UP, 1968, 3-24.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with William Gibson.” Mississippi Review 16.2-3 (1988): 217-36.

Spinrad, Norman. “On Books: The Neuromantics.” Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine May 1986, 180-90.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “An Interview with William Gibson.” Science Fiction Eye 1 (Winter 1987): 6-17.