The Sinister Labyrinth: A Postmodern Study on Gibsonian Space in Neuromancer

Jincy Joseph

St. Thomas College, Pala, India

ABSTRACT

The computer networking era caused a new vision or the transformation in many aspects of our lives. In 1980’s Gibson changed science fiction genre forever by his classical hit Neuromancer. Cyber literature is a concept derived from the digital literature, that is, the literature created on the computer and presented by the means of computer. Cyberspace is a virtual space where identity is fluid. Cyberpunk fiction analyse the existent human situation with the help of new technologies even if their settings are in the future. William Gibson’s Neuromancer deals with present human condition in the age of information. William Gibson first introduced the concept of cyberspace in his work Neuromancer as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation…” Gibson’s cyberspace is a fantasy world, which is very attractive and seductive to the senses. He uses the human-machine hybrids- cyborgs, as the characters in the novel. Cyberpunk is an expression of postmodernism. According to thinkers like Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and Francois Lyotard, postmodernism as discourse is the result of an entire array of changes. The postmodern thoughts like simulacra and heterotopia are well established in Neuromancer. The novel portrays the hero as an antihero, not to attain victory over the evil, but to survive, by using their intelligence in the oppressive world conditions. The characters in the novel are the fictional mapping of our bodily and social reality. Neuromancer is the modern Robin Hood tale, in which ordinary people are empowered by the technology.

KEYWORDS

Cyber literature, Cyborg, Cyberspace, Identity, Postmodernism