SOURCE: Hayles, N. Katherine. “How Cyberspace Signifies: Taking Immortality Literally.” In Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin, pp. 111-21. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Hayles argues that Gibson's fiction blurs the boundaries between cyberspace and the real world.

Through their individual imaginations, writers can evoke a world that differs in significant respects from the society in which they live. But in the very act of creating difference authors necessarily reinscribe similarity, for presuppositions eluding their artistic or linguistic grasp always far outnumber the few they can consciously modify. Most science fiction stories that imagine immortality fall into this category. Treating mortality as an independent variable that can be altered to show the effects on society, they create narratives whose thematics deal with immortality but whose underlying processes of signification...