William Gibson's Neuromancer As Cyberpunk: A Thematic Study

This book is an in-depth and comprehensive critical study of American-Canadian William Gibson¿s Neuromancer (1984) within the critical discourse of cyberpunk, cybercriticism and cultural studies. It lays emphasis on how the coming of the computer networking transformed human lives and relations forever and ushered in a new vision and a new attitude towards human lives, inaugurating a plethora of new themes in literature. It discusses a distinctly new philosophical vision for the new technological age ¿ when the human becomes the cyborg. Placing Gibson in the line of science fiction writers, it is an exploration of what high technology can do to society in general and the human being in particular. Virtual reality here is seen as a technology that allows a transgression of boundary between natural/artificial, male/female, human/machine, time/space, physical/non-physical, death/life and a concept that fragments the self into multiple personalities, challenging the original definitions of the self and identity. It also explores corollary themes as redefinition of the body and the reinvention of the electronic space and studies the metamorphosis of the human into the posthuman.