Two Books About Cyberspace

The first is Neuromancer written by William Gibson in 1984. This book spawned a SciFi genre called “cyberpunk”. In it, Gibson used the term “cyberspace” (coined a few years earlier in a short story) and described a networked data-space called the “matrix” that was basically a VR interface for the internet. Pretty amazing considering the internet had barely existed for about a year before the book came out.

The second is another William Gibson book written 23 years later called Spook Country. In contrast to the far future setting of Neuromancer, this story is an alternative history of the near (like, 12 months) past. Locative art (where virtual scultptures are situated in real locations) is part of the plot.

I think these works are important to the project because they’re both by GIbson and show a change in his understanding over time. This is from an interview with Gibson in 2007:

When I started, I thought that the “locative art” stuff would work the way immersion technology did in my earlier fiction. Then I started liking that it wasn’t going to do that…cyberspace is inverting, turning inside out. I have a feeling that being aware of being connected will be an anachronism, because we’ll be connected all the time. I have this inkling that the whole idea of cyberspace is going to seem fabulously quaint in 20 or 30 years. ~ http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/35536/