SOURCE: Stevens, Tyler. “‘Sinister Fruitiness’: Neuromancer, Internet Sexuality and the Turing Test.” Studies in the Novel 28, no. 3 (fall 1996): 414-33.

In the following essay, Stevens presents a thematic analysis of gender, technology, and individual identity in Neuromancer, noting Gibson's complex portrayal of artificial intelligence and sexuality.

“yeah. I Saw Your Profile, Case. … You Ever Work with the Dead?”1

The immediate subject of this essay is a set of anxious, confusing, and at times threatening questions posed by computer-mediated communication technology, popularly known as “cyberspace” and most immediately recognizable in the Internet. It also takes as its subject a related set of perhaps more abstract questions about the possibilities of intelligence within our computers. I have chosen to analyze in this essay three moments within the culture of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the development of cyberspace, moments that might be classified as either “fiction” or “real life” (inasmuch as those...