SOURCE: Grant, Glenn. “Transcendence through Detournement in William Gibson's Neuromancer.” Science-Fiction Studies 17, no. 1 (March 1990): 41-9.

In the following essay, Grant discusses the theme of transcendence through technology in Neuromancer.

1. People as Systems

Cyberspace. Simstim. Meat puppets. Prosthetic limbs, cranial sockets, and mimetic polycarbon. The vivid and bizarre details of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) tumble off the page like the jump-cut images of music videos, hallucinations, nightmares. Disturbing, distorted figures walk this cityscape, people who imitate machines, machines that imitate people. …

Many readers find themselves thrashing about in this chaotic environment, seeking a pattern that will decode the message, separate signal from noise. Some critics accuse the author of dealing only in surfaces, of presenting merely a facade of hipness. But there are intelligible themes hiding here, stored in the data-structures of the Tessier-Ashpool intelligences, encoded in the auto-destructive behavior of Gibson's characters, inherent in his flashy prose-collage technique. Not...