Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Technodemons of the Digital Self 239dritch). There are some subtle features that connect Neuromancer with thedemonic and the underworld, but the moral division into good and evil isnot apparent; Neuromancer is governed by collage, multiplicity and heterogeneity.Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer, is a “cyberspace cowboy” – a“retro” appellation coined by Gibson that half-ironically appropriates theearlier SF “space opera” tradition with its solitary cowboy figures. The namingand imaginative application of “cyberspace” is William Gibson’s mostimportant contribution to SF, and this idea continues to evolve into realworldapplications as computer programmers and interface designers arepursuing it as their goal. 157 Simultaneously, this interest in the actual implementationof cyberspace threatens to obscure the actual complexities ofGibson’s work. There are important anxieties and an irreducible ambivalencefiguring in the descriptions of this extraordinary “space.” 158Even if Ritz is not a literal demon, he works in a world that can trace itsgenealogy to Dante’s Inferno; it is a “borderland of older streets, an areawith no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart.” 159 Earlier in his career,Case had lived for “the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,” now he hasexperienced “the Fall” – sleeping in “coffins,” he inhabits a shadow worldwith chthonic and infernal connotations. It is a domain of night, its daytimeresembling suspended animation, “under the poisoned silver sky.” 160 Againstthis contrast, cyberspace is charged with eschatological and celestial associations;it is a release from “the prison of flesh,” making its appearance as“lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind.” 161 The actual workingsof this system are left sketchy. The interface demands that the “disembodiedconsciousness” of the operator is “projected into the consensual hallucinationthat was the matrix [i.e. cyberspace].” 162 The commentators have beenquick to pick up on the roots of such an idea in intellectual history: the independentreality of Platonic Ideas, the noösphere of Teilhard de Chardin,“World 3” of Karl Popper, the memes of Richard Dawkins – cyberspace wasseen as the fulfilment of an age-old dream of embodying, entering and directlyinteracting with the clarity and purity of the conceptual realm. Cyberspaceseemed to connect with the ancient images of the Heavenly City:“weightlessness, radiance, numerological complexity, palaces upon palaces,peace and harmony through rule by the good and the wise, utter cleanliness,157 See such studies as Cyberspace: First Steps (Benedict 1991), Virtual Reality (Rheingold1991) Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies (Shields1996).158 The author himself did not particularly feel at home with computers; Neuromancer,the paramount interface fiction, was written with a manual typewriter (see “Gibson’sTypewriter” by Scott Bukatman in Dery 1994, 71-89, and “Author’s Afterword” by WilliamGibson in the electronic edition of his cyberspace novels by the Voyager Company[New York, 1992]).159 N, 13.160N, 12-13.161 N, 12, 67.162N, 12.