Cyberspace and the nature of existence
January 5, 2008 1:35 pmLast year I finally got around to reading some books that I should have read years ago. One of those was Neuromancer by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, and I recently bought the two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The prose is pretty dense and so they’re not exactly for the fainthearted, but great reads all the same. In many ways it is remarkable how Gibson foretold of a massively internetworked world and it was he who is responsible for the term cyberspace (as well as ‘the matrix’ please note). Although I can’t quite visualise what Gibson’s cyberspace looks like, it doesn’t seem all that distant in some ways from virtual worlds such as Second Life.
One of the aspects that I find interesting is the way in which AIs (artifical intelligences) are born and evolve in cyberspace, appearing as voodoo gods to some, as well as the consciousness of people being captured in in a biochip so that they survive beyond death, questioning the nature of existence.
A couple of things that date the novels somewhat – Neuromancer was written 25 years ago to be fair – is the number of times that faxes are mentioned, the amount of smoking that goes on (although in a post-WW3 scenario perhaps smoking in public has become accepted again), and that nobody seems to use a mobile phone.
Thoroughly recommended, if you haven’t read the trilogy yet go and buy on Amazon now.
Technorati Tags: cyberspace, william gibson, neuromancer
This post was written by David
