De-Constructing Cyberpunk Worlds

Science-Fiction is not only a resource for potentialities of possible futures, but also serves as an archive of past futures and their contemporary reflections on social changes. Within the estranged worlds of the narrations, the authors present the contemporary imaginaries of how society should (or should not) develop in the future. William Gibson’s Neuromancer is an important example of this archive. In a dizzyingly detailed description, Gibson depicts a dystopian future dominated by the prevailing irritations and common uncertainties about the future caused by the all-encompassing changes of the 1980s, a decade in which western societies were entering an era of late capitalism with new global market structures and the embedding of new technologies in the everyday life on a unprecedented scale. Within his world Gibson extrapolates the technological potentialities of new and emerging digital technologies like virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a digital Cyberspace, which is similar to what is today known as the internet, and lays out the implicit sociotechnical imaginaries of his generation. Reciprocally, his novel fostered and distributed the structure of feeling of the ‘80s on a larger scale, as it became one of the pioneer works of the emerging Cyberpunk movement – a influential vision of the future of outgoing 20th century. This essay is exploring the sociotechnical imaginaries by analyzing the role of new technologies within the power structures of Neuromancers storyworld.