The technophilic body: on technicity in William Gibson's cyborg culture
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 1989 Number 8
The technophilic body: on technicity in William Gibson's cyborg culture
David Tomas pages -
Abstract
Tomas looks at William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels and short stories in relation to the human body, technophilia and the cyborg. He argues that body modification quickly spills into techno-modification and technofetishism, and that in such works there is a model of technological kinship (‘technicity’) which displaces ethnicity in Gibson’s imagined highly creolised cultures and subcultures. There are repercussions for identity and memory - where exactly does memory inhere, in the meat of human flesh or in a computer chip? Tomas argues that while cyberpunk owes much to the history of Science Fiction, its proximity to real-world technological developments lends it an added importance as a genre, with a function of preparing its readers for potentially very real dilemmas and situations.
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To cite this article
David Tomas (1989) The technophilic body: on technicity in William Gibson's cyborg culture, New Formations, 1989(8), -