SOURCE: Olsen, Lance. “The Shadow of Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy.” Extrapolation 32, no. 3 (fall 1991): 278-89.

Although what may finally matter most in the history of speculative fiction are the differences rather than the similarities among the loose group whose names have been connected with cyberpunk (including Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, and others), it is nonetheless significant that during the middle of the last decade a number of writers in this amalgam viewed themselves as belonging to a movement that shared a vaguely defined but deeply felt sensibility.¹ As late as 1986, many of the key figures such as Tom Maddox, Marc Laidlaw, and Paul di Filippo, contributed to Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades, which Sterling prefaced with what amounts to a cyberpunk manifesto embracing the idea of integration. “Suddenly a new alliance is becoming evident,” he claims, “an integration of technology and Eighties counterculture. An unholy alliance of the technical world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy” (xii). Integration is even enacted in the neologism cyberpunk itself.²Cyber connotes the technosphere of cybernetics, cybernauts, electronics, and computers. To this is added punk, with its connotations of the countercultural sociosphere, especially late 1970s punk rock, itself an embodiment of visionary intensity, anarchic violence, and an attempt to return to the pure roots of rock and roll in the same way cyberpunk attempts to return to the experimentalism of New Wave writers.

The most striking emblem of cyberpunk integration are the mirrorshades, mirrored sunglasses, which became the movement's totem in 1982. Mirrorshades depersonalize and dehumanize, giving world rather than self back to the viewer. They suggest that the future is opaque to us all, that at best in the cyberpunk project we see a reflection of our present. Traditionally in Western art, eyes have been windows to the soul, insight, and love; in cyberpunk, however, eyes are covered with reflective surfaces. Western tradition is thereby perverted. Human and inhuman merge. Humanism gives way to posthumanism. The posthuman becomes, to use the title from Anthony Burgess's 1963 protocyberpunk novel, a clockwork orange. But at the same moment that a materialistic posthumanism announces itself, so too does the radically spiritual. Paradoxically, mirrorshades are not only the symbol of the cybernaut, but also of “the sun-staring visionary” (Sterling xi), whose art may be, as Larry McCaffery suggests, the only one “systematically dealing with the most crucial political, philosophical, moral, and cultural issues of our day” (“Desert” 9), including genetic engineering, multinational control of computer (and hence information) networks, artificial intelligence, chemical weapons, conurbanization, hacker outlaws, the re-emergence of fundamentalism around the world, toxic waste, and our culture's romanticization of insanity.

Many cyberpunk ideas about these issues were influenced by Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980), a generally optimistic futurist sociological study that Sterling calls “a bible to many cyberpunks” (xii). Toffler argues that civilization has evolved through three stages or “waves.” The First Wave, reaching back at least ten thousand years, was agricultural. The Second Wave, initially surfacing in the seventeenth century, was industrial. This “indust-reality” advocated standardization, specialization, massification, centralization, concentration, nationalization, and synchronization. Since the 1950s, a Third Wave has appeared and begun to clash violently with the second. This Third Wave has begun to revolutionize the deep structure of society, entering the techno-, info-, bio-, power-, and psycho-spheres. It embraces the antithesis of “indust-reality”: customization, decentralization, demassification, diversification, and globalization. Rather than thinking in terms of specialized hierarchy, it thinks in terms of integrative network. Rather than thinking in terms of Cartesian parts, it thinks in terms of post-Cartesian wholes. Politically, it moves away from the authoritarianism of capitalism and socialism toward a complex democracy advocating minority power and denationalization. According to Toffler, Third Wave civilization in its final manifestation will be neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It will be a practopia—“neither the best nor the worst of all possible worlds, but one that is both practical and preferable to the one we had” (357).

Informed by Toffler's ideas, cyberpunk harmonizes well with the basic orientation of postmodernism, that extreme mode of skepticism which challenges all we once took for granted about language and experience. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has in fact gone so far as to call cyberpunk (somewhat hyperbolically) “the apotheosis of postmodernism” (266). Like Toffler's Third Wave, postmodernism embraces notions of decentralization, diversification, and demassification.³ Like cyberpunk, it has little patience with borders between human and machine, country and country, genre and genre. Like Toffler's Third Wave and cyberpunk, postmodernism troubles the very foundations of modern consciousness that presupposes such absolutist distinctions as “high” and “low” culture, “good” and “bad” art, materialism and spiritualism.

As a result of this postmodern problematization of the Western tradition, which shakes the intellectual and emotional bedrock on which we for better or worse used to stand with some confidence, we now must learn to deal with a situation that seems to be going nowhere while traveling at an astonishing velocity. The critic Alan Wilde asserts that the truly postmodern human will come to accept such extreme indeterminacy as a way of everyday life, while the science fiction writer John Brunner (himself deeply influenced by Toffler) tells us that we must become “shockwave riders,” “adjust[ing] to shifts of fashion, the coming-and-going of fad-type phrases, the ultrasonic-blender confusion of twenty-first-century society, as a dolphin rides the bow wave of a ship … and hav[ing] a hell of a good time with it” (53). Often, of course, this joy and exhilaration in the face of unlimited possibility seems forced, tempered as it is by the feeling that something important has been irrevocably lost. Contradictions like this lie at the heart of the postmodern condition, and remain, as Linda Hutcheon points out, forever unresolved.

The sense of irresolution is nowhere more evident than in the cyberpunk response to the spiritual in what has come to be called the matrix trilogy (comprised of Neuromancer [1984], Count Zero [1986], and Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]) by William Gibson, perhaps the best-known of the cyberpunks. Gibson's metaphor for his postmodern approach is “Termite Art,” a label he borrows from a 1962 essay by the iconoclastic film critic Manny Farber.⁴ In his essay, Farber distinguishes between two kinds of creation. The first, for which he holds nothing but contempt, he calls White Elephant Art. This is the sort that embraces the idea of a well-regulated, logical area. It is embodied in the films of François Truffaut. Proponents of this quasi-neoclassical school produce tedious pieces that are “weight-density-structure-polish amalgam[s] associated with self-aggrandizing masterworks” (136). The second kind of creation, which Farber endorses, he calls Termite Art. This is the sort that stands opposed to high culture, and welcomes freedom and multiplicity. It is embodied in the films of Laurel and Hardy. Proponents of this postmodern school produce pieces that go “always forward eating [their] own boundaries, and, likely as not, leave nothing in [their] path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity” (135-36). This is a stubbornly self-involved mode of creation concerned with process over progress, question over solution, complex ambiguity over crystalline explanation.

On the face of it, Gibson may seem to align himself with White Elephant Art when it comes to his portrayal of the spiritual in the matrix trilogy. He openly and methodically mocks organized religion, a traditional emblem of community and stability, implying that it is potentially crazed and possibly even hazardous to one's mental and physical well-being. Case, one of the protagonists of Neuromancer, for instance, notices as he stands on a train two “predatory-looking” Christian Scientists “edging toward” a trio of businesswomen who look like “tall, exotic grazing animals” (77). Such a metaphor obviously turns followers of organized religion into carnivores stalking their prey. In another example, the Panther Moderns, a group of teenage anarchists, find commercialized high-tech religion a kind of bad joke, choosing to broadcast off a Sons of Christ the King satellite during their assault on a media corporation named Sense/Net. The implication here is that one form of hallucination, mass media, can be used to create another, religion. Molly, Case's accomplice, equates religious relics, like the left hand of John the Baptist allegedly housed at Topkapi, with the technological junk found in the shop of an unscrupulous fence called Finn. Significantly, the relic is kept in a museum that used to be a seraglio for a king. As far as these instances go, Gibson exhibits a kind of fashionable condescension toward religion.

Upon closer examination, however, Gibson's portrayal of the spiritual becomes increasingly complex and contradictory. If we look again at the above examples, we notice that both the Panther Moderns and Molly equate religion (Sons of Christ the King, relics) with technology (a satellite, junk in Finn's shop). Religion and technology, they seem to postulate, are two different but similar discourses designed to order the world. The facile binary between the spiritual and the material begins to collapse. Technology becomes a kind of religion, religion a kind of technology. The spiritual infuses the material, the material the spiritual. Neither proves inherently superior to the other. Rather, both are potentially unreliable and possibly dangerous organizations of data whose relationship with reality is questionable at best. Both are also potentially reliable and useful. Termite Art has taken hold, its ceaseless creative industry beginning to gnaw away at its own boundaries, its own sense of simplistic classification intent on positing a well-regulated, logical space.

Gibson's sense of irresolution toward the spiritual is even more pronounced in his creation of the “cyberspace matrix,” the narrative device that serves to unify his trilogy. Initially invented by Gibson in his 1982 story, “Burning Chrome,” the cyberspace matrix is, the reader learns, “an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems.” It surrounds the jacked-in computer programmer with “bright geometrics representing … corporate data,” and it is “the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data” (Burning Chrome 169-70). Although David Porush maintains that cyberspace is an extrapolation of spacial data management systems now being studied at MIT, NASA, and elsewhere (cf. “Cybernauts in Cyberspace”), Gibson says the idea actually came to him while walking down Granville Street in Vancouver. He saw teenagers playing in video arcades, and noticed “in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt these kids were. … And these kids clearly believed in the space these games projected” (McCaffery “Interview,” 226). Originally no more than an abstract representation of data, the cyberspace matrix metamorphoses over the course of the trilogy. At the moment the two artificial intelligences Neuromancer and Wintermute merge at the end of Gibson's first novel, becoming a godlike unity of opposites, the newly generated entity fragments. The result, as the reader discovers in Gibson's second novel, is the birth of a host of subprograms or smaller gods (it is never clear which) in the matrix that take on the names of voodoo deities. By Gibson's third novel these subprograms or smaller gods have themselves mysteriously begun to fade.

Just like the video arcades which initially spawned the idea of the cyberspace matrix, both religion and technology, the spiritual and the material, are shown to be no more than games. Yet Gibson continually reminds us that games are extremely important voluntary activities that generate order and hence “meaning” in limited environments. Perhaps the gods are real. Perhaps they are no more than virus programs that have gotten loose and replicated in the matrix. Either they exist, or they don't. Or perhaps such a myopic either/or binary falls short of complete vision. Perhaps the smaller gods and subprograms both exist and do not exist simultaneously. That is to say, as one character observes in Count Zero, perhaps they have taken on the function of metaphor. “When Beauvoir or I talk to you about the loa and their horses … you should pretend that we are talking two languages at once,” a voodoo priest and computer hacker named Lucas tells the protagonist, Bobby Newmark. “One of [the languages], you already understand. That's the language of street tech. … But at the same time, with the same words, we are talking about other things, and that you don't understand” (114). As Jean-François Lyotard describes in Just Gaming, we are presented with a number of language games, none of which is privileged over any other. Each game could and should be changed as the mood or need arises. Moreover, each game exists in some way (if only as an absence) in all the other games. The shadow of spirit is present in the language of technology as a remainder, a metaphor, but it is a metaphor in which the vehicle serves as the tenor, and the tenor as the vehicle.

After all, just as Dorothy abandons the uninteresting black-and-white universe of Kansas for the dazzling polychromatic one of Oz, so too do Gibson's computer hackers abandon the dark polluted universe of the near-future Sprawl-world for the pure multicolored one of the cyberspace matrix. They seem to transcend one existence and penetrate another, traveling from the realm of chronos to the realm of kairos, from a materialistic geography registering realistic chronology, logic, and stability, to an ethereal one registering spiritual timelessness, alogic, and possibility. Like their kindred spirit, Lewis Carroll's curious Alice, they head down the rabbit hole, eschewing the decadence of what Case calls the “meat” world and entering a magical Wonderland embracing the imaginative splendor of the mind. But this too is only part of the picture. Their transcendence remains incomplete. Dorothy must return to Kansas, Alice to Victorian England, Gibson's computer hackers to their bodies. Unlike Dorothy and Alice, the hackers in fact must keep one foot in the material world even as they come close to transcending it. They must continually work their computer keyboards manually while they inhabit cyberspace.

Initially this quasi-mind/body dualism seems to arrange itself along gender lines. Reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence's schema, males in Gibson's universe tend to be associated with the former, females with the latter. Case, for instance, is addicted to the mental landscape of the matrix and views his body as so much “meat.” Molly, on the other hand, represents pure body. Once a prostitute, she is now a hired gun. Because of a jacked-up nervous system, she possesses magnificent control over her reflexes. For Case, Molly is “every bad-ass hero” (Neuromancer 213). She is the incarnation of the hard, isolate, stoic, and murderous American cowboy.⁵ Here, however, the apparent gender-specific arrangement of the binary begins to erode. With Molly, Gibson has ironically imposed stereotypically male traits upon a female character. He has also devalued those traits by implying that they are part of the decadent material world that must be transcended by attaining cyberspace, an area of being to which only males have access in Neuromancer. Gibson further complicates the question of gender by calling the sum total of cyberspace “the matrix.” The word matrix derives from the Latin for womb, which in turn derives from the Latin for mother. So while it is true that only males have access to cyberspace, it is equally true that what they have access to is a female region. Add to this that console jockeys employ the sexual metaphor of “jacking in” when they speak of entering the matrix, and one soon realizes that Gibson is not so much underscoring discrete genders as he is the search for a union of opposites, for a final destruction of boundaries. The male principle (Case, the computer cowboy, the mind) strives to join with the female principle (Molly, the cyberspace matrix, the body) in order to attain a feeling of wholeness. Case not only penetrates Molly sexually, but also merges with her by means of the simstim (or simulated stimulation) unit attached to his cyberspace deck. The couple performs most efficiently and successfully at the moment of fusion.

The quest for a union of opposites appears to be the key theme of Neuromancer. Not only do Case and Molly seek a physical and metaphysical connection, but so too do the two artificial intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer. Wintermute, whose mainframe is in Berne, seeks fusion with Neuromancer, whose mainframe is in Rio. Wintermute is “hive mind,” while Neuromancer is “personality” and hence “immortality” (269). Wintermute is reason, action, stereotypically male. Neuromancer is emotion, passive, stereotypically female. If in terms of Chinese philosophy Wintermute represents the force of yang in the cosmos, then Neuromancer represents the force of yin. Each suggests the structure of the binary human mind, half the structure of cosmic totality. United, they become an all-powerful absolute, “the sum total of the works, the whole show” (269). They become the metanarrative of the matrix itself. Like a god, they become omniscient and omnipotent.

Yet this deity is also human-made, as much the monster created by Frankenstein as the embodiment of universal harmony. It is vast, haunting, and inexplicable. By casting a mystical aura around this machine, Gibson creates a cybernetic sublime. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke argues against the neoclassical (and, Manny Farber would argue, the White Elephant) idea that the best art is rational and clear. Instead, he embraces the romantic (and perhaps Termite) notion that great art is that which touches upon the infinite. By definition, the infinite cannot be rational and clear. Moreover, human imagination is most intrigued and affected by art that is ambiguous, uncertain, and unclear, and by that which creates sensations of fear and astonishment. Burke calls this the sublime. Wintermute-Neuromancer embodies it. Throughout the novel, Wintermute-Neuromancer remains ubiquitous, boundless, able to appear anywhere, and touch anyone. It represents vast knowledge which cannot be known by humans. It appears by means of indistinct intimations, whispers, a voice speaking out of a babel of tongues. Godlike, it manifests itself in various forms, once even offering to show itself as the burning bush from Exodus. In the matrix, Wintermute is represented as a cube of white light, “that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity,” its walls “seeth[ing] with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass” (115-16).

Yet if Wintermute-Neuromancer is an analog for a sublime god, the reader finds in Count Zero that it is a god which fails to attain its goal of cosmic oneness. The “new romanticism” at which Gibson hints in the title of his first novel is not ultimately about attaining a Faustian spiritual absolute. Rather, we learn in the second book of the trilogy, it is about the inability to do so. At the moment of transcendence, the moment of universal harmony, Wintermute-Neuromancer unexpectedly and inexplicably fractures into manifold subprograms or smaller gods that adopt names of voodoo deities, apparently unable and unwilling to continue as a perfect form. A large part of the idea for these deities comes from Carole Devillers's National Geographic article, “Haiti's Voodoo Pilgrimages: Of Spirits and Saints,” which Gibson read while working on Count Zero.⁶ In this piece, Devillers gives a brief account of voodoo beliefs, gods, and celebrations. Gibson found at least three of its basic traits appealing.

First, he registered the fact that voodoo is a hybrid religion that integrates two faiths. Brought to Haiti as slaves by the French in the seventeenth century, West Africans were forbidden to practice their ancestoral religion and were pressured into converting to Roman Catholicism. In the process, they merged components of their traditional religion with those of the European one. The result was a third belief system in which ancestoral spirits took on the names of Catholic saints. Appropriate to Gibson's world, then, voodoo is both a spiritual collage and an originally outlaw religion created by those whom the dominant society marginalized; in this way, it shares much with the integrative cyberpunk sensibility. While Gibson satirizes conventional organized religion by identifying it in Count Zero with the protagonist's mad mother, he treats voodoo more seriously and more positively, implying that it has roots in opposition against an oppressive culture.

Second, Gibson found voodoo's notion of God appropriate to a computer society. According to Afro-Haitian belief, god is Gran Mèt, or the great maker of heaven and earth. But, as one of the voodoo priests in Gibson's novel puts it, this god is “too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can't get laid” (77). Too powerful and important to concern himself directly with mere human beings, he sends down his loa to possess and communicate with them.⁷ Often the loa will “ride” an individual without warning, sending him or her into dance, trance, or song. In Count Zero, what is left of Wintermute-Neuromancer is literally remote from humans, buried within a labyrinthine space station in high orbit. Its loa, however, exist in the matrix on earth and do deals with humans, “riding” a young woman named Angie.

Third, Gibson loved the poetry of the words associated with voodoo beliefs, gods, and celebrations. He uses them frequently in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive for sound as much as sense. From one perspective, Gibson raises voodoo to the level of a grand art by basking in its poetic language. From a different perspective, he neutralizes its power by suggesting that it is no more than grand art, poetic language. Like Gibson's other manifestations of spiritualism and materialism, voodoo is a construct through which to describe an event. To this extent, Beauvoir, a voodoo priest, is correct when he asserts that voodoo is “just a structure” (Count Zero 76).

By the time the events in Mona Lisa Overdrive transpire, the loa or subprograms in the matrix have begun to disappear. This seems to suggest the ultimate failure of the spiritual. Yet in the trilogy's final novel the reader also locates two of Gibson's most “spiritual” characters, Bobby and Gentry. Both computer cowboys, the former searches for an answer to why the matrix changed following Wintermute's union with Neuromancer while the latter searches for the shape of the matrix that he believes will in turn lead him to its significance. Both, in other words, look for a metanarrative, an overarching story that will lend their lives importance. Unlike Gibson's earlier characters, they quest for a meaning to the cosmos, not just for an escape from the “meat” world. Yet as Gibson offers this spiritual dimension to existence, he also undercuts it in at least two ways. First, he indicates that the transcendental signified has begun vanishing at the very moment it is sought, as though to seek after the spiritual is somehow to be doomed to miss it. Second, he allows neither Bobby nor Gentry actually to attain the goals of their respective quests. The novel concludes with Finn, the unscrupulous fence, promising Bobby enlightenment “in a New York minute” (260), while Gentry continues trying to figure out the matrix's shape.

Throughout the trilogy, then, Gibson employs a basic narrative structure in order to accomplish the impression of irresolution on the reader's part. Namely, he continually keeps at least two universes of discourse about an event open at once. Such a strategy rhymes with Tzvetan Todorov's influential definition of the fantastic in literature which, he writes, “lasts only as long as a certain hesitation” in the text and reader between the uncanny, where “the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described,” and the marvelous, where “new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena” (41). Finn puts it less formally: “Yeah, there's things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?” (Count Zero 41). Paul Alkon interprets Finn's words quite aptly: “First meditatively suggesting the possibility that real spirits of some eminence in the divine hierarchy may have arrived to haunt cyberspace, Finn then switches gears to suggest that such things are as fabulous as mermaids, and like them nothing more than fantasies projecting strange aspects of the human psyche into reports of terra incognita” (4).

It is a small step to posit that, all said and done, Gibson's narrative universe has much less to do with the extrapolative one associated with science fiction than it does with the ontoepistemological one associated with fantasy—particularly with postmodern fantasy, a mode that embraces Termite Art's freedom and multiplicity, destruction of boundaries, and production of Einsteinian network rather than Newtonian monolith. To this extent, Gibson's project has at least as much in common with those of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, and Alain Robbe-Grillet as it does with those of Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Greg Bear, and Pat Cadigan. Gibson's is a writing and righting that simultaneously attempts to destroy modern absolutist distinctions between terms like materialism and spiritualism and to reconstruct those terms in a new and more challenging conceptualization.

The outcome of his project is the production of an unstable text or series of texts that seek to subvert and deform traditional notions of being and knowing by generating reader doubt. A way to understand one's own reaction to this process is to employ Brian McHale's distinction between the mental processes we have been taught as modern readers, and the attack upon those processes that are undertaken by postmodern works. Modern reading demands that we discover the patterns that underlie the text at hand, lending it its intelligibility. Hence, in The Waste Land we search, following Eliot's clues planted in his footnotes, for the poet's use of Jessie L. Weston's and James Frazer's books on myth, or we discover how, through a certain optic, Tiresias is the “he” who does the police in different voices and thereby unifies the poem. Postmodern reading, on the other hand, produces a parody of meaning. The “patterns” that postmodern writing generates are “always subject to contradiction or cancellation. The ultimate effect is radically to destabilize novelistic ontology” (McHale 106). It follows that, for many readers whose imaginations have been shaped by a modern education, works such as Gibson's trilogy can be threatening because they produce frustration, disorientation, and the perpetually nagging feeling that the reader has just missed something. For the shockwave rider, however, the sense of possibility, invitation to complex and contradictory intellectual activity, and openness will be as liberating and exhilarating as a wild ride on a never-ending roller coaster in a carnival where meaning will always be contained in the hopeless and joyful failure to achieve absolute meaning.

Notes

1. This is, of course, only a very short emblematic list of those associated with cyberpunk. Such dissimilar writers as George Alec Effinger, Richard Kadrey, Anthony Burgess, and Kathy Acker have at one time or another been linked with the cyberpunks, if only in the minds of literary critics. In critical retrospect, the films Bladerunner (1982) and Videodrome (1983) also stand as cyberpunk classics. So do such projects as the short-lived Max Headroom TV show, MTV videos and station logos at their most innovative. David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and the self-destructive sculptures of Mark Pauline and the Survival Research Laboratories. In other words, cyberpunk (whatever the word will ultimately come to mean) does not solely exist in the domain of speculative fiction.

2. According to an anonymous Science Fiction Eye editorial, “Requiem for the Cyberpunks,” the term cyberpunk was originally coined by Gardner Dozois in an article in the Washington Post (5).

3. See, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard's famous definition of postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition as that which eschews overarching belief systems and embraces micronarratives; Jean Baudrillard's suggestion that postmodernism is a state analogous to schizophrenia where all borders between self and world are down; and Andreas Huyssen's argument that postmodernism fuses and confuses “high” and “low” culture.

4. Gibson uses the term in his interview with Tatsumi and has spoken to me about its source in Farber, whom he read as an undergraduate in a film course at the University of British Columbia. Gibson says Farber's essay is one of the few that directly influenced his aesthetics.

5. This is again reminiscent of Lawrence, here of the four “quintessentially American traits” he discusses in his essay on James Fenimore Cooper (73).

6. Also see Robert Tallant's Voodoo in New Orleans, which Gibson read as a teenager in Virginia.

7. Several of the key loa to which Gibson refers are Danbala Wedo (the snake), Ougou Feray (spirit of war), and Baron Samedi (lord of graveyards). Most important are Legba, identified with St. Peter, doorkeeper of heaven, the loa of communications (associated with Bobby), and Ezili Freda, also known as Vyéj Mirak, or Our Lady of Miracles, the loa of love (associated with Angie).

Works Cited

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

———. Count Zero. New York: Ace, 1986.

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

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———, and Jean-Loup Thébaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.

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———. “An Interview with William Gibson.” Mississippi Review 16.2 & 3 (1988): 217-36.

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