SOURCE: Fabijancic, Tony. “Space and Power: 19th-Century Urban Practice and Gibson's Cyberworld.” Mosaic 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 105-30.

In the following essay, Fabijancic discusses the motifs of space and vision in Gibson's fiction within the context of modern multinational capitalist society.

Modernity may be broadly defined as a mindset which privileges the new and fashionable over the old and traditional, and in this sense it becomes one of the central ideologies according to which life is understood in multinational capitalist society and culture. Insofar as an investigation of the dynamics of capitalism requires attention to the “material” base of this ideology, a problem with many depictions of modernity therefore lies in the overemphasis on “time” and too little attention to “space.” This emphasis on the temporal can be seen, for example, in those accounts which view modernity as beginning with the Renaissance's revolutionary “conviction that history had a specific direction...