SOURCE: Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson's Neuromancer.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33, no. 3 (spring 1992): 221-40.

In the following essay, Csicsery-Ronay posits that Gibson's narrative in Neuromancer addresses the question of how artists can represent the human condition in a world dominated by cybernetic technologies.

William Gibson's career and reputation threaten to imitate the panic narrative logic of his own fictions. Gibson was immediately cited as a form of postmodern apotheosis, on the basis of a few stories and a first novel. But largely because of his own enormous influence on the creators of Virtual Reality and cyberspace, we are speeding away from the stars of his imaginary constellation so fast that cyberpunk, the literary movement Gibson was said to epitomize, has all but vanished in the void. Moreover, since the explosive success of Neuromancer, Gibson has studiously cooled and moderated the...