Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has remained a classic, or that he had anything to do with science fiction or reflected any serious political thought. But at least in one respect the juxtaposition is useful in showing how dystopia can swing around into the utopian without missing a beat, the way depression can without warning become euphoria. Indeed, I’ve suggested elsewhere that much of what is called cyberpunk (which begins with Neuromancer) is utopian and driven by the “irrational exuberance” of the ’90s and a kind of romance of feudal commerce; but I had Bruce Sterling in mind rather than the more sober Gibson, whose postmodern overpopulation (“the sprawl”) comes before us rather neutrally, even though its tone is radically different from the older Malthusian warnings of Harrison and Brunner. But Neuromancer and the novels that followed it were certainly not utopian in the spirit of the blueprints of More and Bellamy, or Fourier and Callenbach. Indeed, I would argue that the Utopian and still energizing work of the latter, Ecotopia (1968), was for the moment the last of its kind. ...

Gibson’s novel too is a microcosm of the totality: a hacker, a female ninja, a dead man, a Rastafarian, a holographic illusionist, as well as a crazed army veteran whose schizophrenic mind has been possessed by the Artificial Intelligence who turns out to be the god in this particular complex machine. It is an intensified collection of skills visited on characters who are all maimed or incomplete in one way or another, most notably the dead man whose mind has become the program in the organizing mainframe. They all thus complete each other in one way or another but insofar as their collective (and thereby utopian) act turns out to have been a ruse devised by the two mega-computers in the service of their alliance and transfiguration, this utopian dimension is thereby displaced by a more conjugal if not religious one, and its deeper content repressed (virtually by definition the destiny of any impulse as such).

We might also note in passing that the excitement and euphoria we have attributed to cyberpunk are closely related to what Rem Koolhaas calls the “culture of congestion,” the reveling in the overpopulation of a world city in which the center is everywhere and there are no longer any margins (or where the margins have become the center, if you prefer); and this is of course yet another profound expression of the utopian impulse as it celebrates collectivity in general, and not just in particular. It is to be sure also a projection of globalization as such, and another not so remarkable prophetic anticipation of that third stage of capitalism some also call postmodernity.

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If Neuromancer were a literary novel, we might well want to conclude that it is really “about” precisely this opposition, between the mental experiences of cyberspace and these deeply physical ones of love and desire, of memory. But it is not a novel in that sense, and the very rewriting of this experience of the meat in terms of “a sea of information,” in terms of coding and reading, is enough to convey the book’s ideological or philosophical bias.