|
In William Gibson's Neuromancer, cyberspace is a sophisticated cartesian map, an abstract manifestation in architectural space of a multinational economy. Accessed through an Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, coordinates reveal corporate geometries, massive pyramids that echo the urbanscapes lit by blossoming flares in the opening scenes of Blade Runner. Impossibly dense quantities of information circulate, linked everywhere by a web of communications lines.
|
|
Cyberspace is an extrapolation of the current state of affairs in the technological world. In Islands of the Net, a cyberpunk novel by Bruce Sterling, this process of
electronic expansion is described as the amalgamation of existing technologies, through a series of links that leave no artifact untouched:
|
|
...[T]he Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex.
Tape recorder-VCR-laser disc. Broadcast towers linked to microwave dish to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber optic cords hissing out words and pictures....
All netted together, a global nervous system. It was easy to make it sound transcendentally incredible. (Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net, 17.)
|