In Neuromancer the idea that if you had information then you had power is also presented. It implies that lack of information puts you automatically in an unfavorable position that eventually could be detrimental for you. It also suggests that if the wrong people are able not only to access information but control it, it is possible for them to take control over our society, affect our lives, and if this incredible power of information is used in an immoral and unethical manner, our civilization as such could be threatened. With its irrational assumptions about the rational, technological reality rejects by its very nature the necessity of human sensibility. Thus technology, once again is allotted the place of the monster-maker, the antithesis of all that is valued as eternally human. This information and power that technology has inherent in it, has the potential of dramatically transforming human values. The characters of Neuromancer are portrayed as people selfish and indifferent to other human beings. They cannot risk being concerned with someone else because it renders them vulnerable. The book never exemplifies any sort of family structure. So far in the novel everything is a business association. Most of the characters seem to be devoid of displaying emotions for other beings. Everyone avoids personal relationships to protect themselves from the devious ways of others. For instance Molly and Case engage in a rather intense relationship, however, neither of them display any significant emotion for the other after the fact. Such a state of human alienation and deceptive affiliation with the inhuman, represented by the matrix and the all sorts of artificial objects–nanotech, console jockeys, sim-stim, microsofts, etc. depicts the unhappy lot of such a society and its inevitable doom. It seems as though the first signs of nature’s retaliation are coming into sight and becoming more and more apparent.
The most shocking departure from nature, as presented in Neuromancer, is the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays in the book in the face of Wintermute and Neuromancer. We should note that although Neuromancer does not enter the novel as an active “character” until near the end, Gibson seems to regard “him” as crucial to the theme (enough so to name the novel after “him”). The same importance and weight are given to Wintermute who on the other hand is clearly present throughout the book. Cyberspace, as an entity created with computers by humans is the “natural habitat” for an AI. In Wintermute’s case Lady 3Jane’s mother has the founding vision for Wintermute. All of Wintermute’s programming comes from Marie-France, including the code from the jeweled head. “She [Marie- France] imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI’s, our corporate decisions made for us,”26 says Lady 3Jane. Marie-France’s hope was to extend the human world into cyberspace by using artificial intelligences to make life more convenient. How strikingly similar are the creations of victor Frankenstein and the owners of Tessier-Ashpool. They both represent something artificial, imitating human life. The creators, however, have not forgotten to render them superior to man by making them, not necessarily more attractive, but stronger and more powerful. And how similar are their needs; after all the monster in Frankenstein feels the need of a mate, and having discovered the irrelevancy of human life, he wants to live outside of the human community. In Neuromancer the all-powerful AI at the end of the book states it has found a someone of his “own kind”27 and how ironical are the words of Case when he says to the AI, ” I don’t need you” when, in fact, it is the AI that does not need humankind. If we trace back the evolution of the AI in Neuromancer we see how Wintermute’s original programming gave him an instinct to evolve.28 He is “born” (in as much as Frankenstein’s creature was “born”) like a child in this manner. As time progresses, Wintermute learns to manipulate people and computer systems to suit his need to evolve . At this stage he represents an adolescent learning to be independent in the world, which is identical to the monster’s experiences with the family in the countryside. Finally, Wintermute joins with Neuromancer to produce a larger, more complete artificial intelligence. In a sense Wintermute is reproducing, like a human, to improve his race. This is precisely what the purpose of Frankenstein’s creature was – the inception of an effective chain outside humanity – a frightening possibility of a new and uncontrollable signifying chain, one with no rules and grammar.29
As in Frankenstein, the motivation that lies behind the creation of this unnatural form of “life” – the AI is that of ameliorating human life combined with an obsessive desire for immortality and self-fulfilling egotism, verging on narcissism. NAME=”toc30″> The artificial intelligence is nothing more than a tool of achieving the creators’ idea of immortality, “Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity”30 and again the creators are deadly mistaken. This is seen when Neuromancer reveals who he really is to Case. He tells him, “I call up the dead….I am the dead and their land”.31 If seen as a biblical allusion, this statement relates Neuromancer and who he is to God and heaven as the after-life but it sounds more as a dreadful declaration of the omnipotence of the new creation. We realize that humankind has unleashed powers beyond its control. It has overstepped the acceptable limit; and how convincing this conclusion sounds nowadays. William Gibson has said in an interview that Neuromancer, though set in the future, is about the present. The world that Case and Molly inhabit is fundamentally our own, according to Gibson. It represents both what we have become and what we are on the verge of becoming. Even if Gibson is only vaguely accurate in his vision of this future/present, many of the issues he raises in the novel are already on the horizon and, indeed, being battled out in courts, corporate boardrooms, and on the streets .
In conclusion, I would rather refer to our present economic reality to support my assertions so far. I would like to point out that sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure of our world. Would be the science and technology referred to in Shelley’s Frankenstein or the powerful information and computer technologies implied in Gibson’s Neuromancer, the underlying idea is the same – profound change and transformation in every aspect of human life is imminent, to such extent that life itself is being transformed. It is this unambiguous danger to our human community that is hidden in our reliance on technology and its equivocal inventions that these two works, in essence, convey. My example, illustrating the veracity and perspicacity of the theme of technology, as presented in the examined works, would be from the present reality. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labor-control systems, medical constructions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labor, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics – this single product of technology, but what astonishing power is hidden behind it. Microelectronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals; microelectronics mediates the translations of labor into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures – just to name a few of the paths of electronics as we know them today . The logical question one can ask is whether science and technology are really going to improve the world, will new technologies really improve human communication, or inadvertently make it more difficult? Will our lives be better? Although ambiguity and uncertainty are highly probable in our future, it is important that we continually ask the right questions, supply the best answers and share them in our society. This is why science-fiction is so important in investigating and raising such questions. It is our responsibility as humans to address them accordingly before it has been too late.
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Bibliography:
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Penguin books, 1992.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Books, New York. Ace edition, 1984.
Botting, Fred. Making monstrous. Frankenstein, criticism, theory. Manchester University Press, 1991.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley. Her Life, her Fiction, her Monsters. Methuen. New York, London, 1988.
Boyd, Stephen. York Notes on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Longman York Press, 1992.
Modern Critical Views on Mary Shelley. Edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1985.
The Information Technology Revolution. Edited and introduced by Tom Forester. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985.
Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. A Philosophical Inquiry. The University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Technology 2001. The Future of Computing and Communications. Edited by Derek Leebaert. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Third printing, 1991.
Michie, Donald and Johnston, Rory. The Knowledge Machine. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Man. William Morrow and Company, Inc., NY., 1985.
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1 Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree (1973).
2 Rosenbrock, Howard. A New Industrial Revolution? pp.635-37
3 Rosenbrock, Howard. A New Industrial Revolution? p.
4 Botting, Fred. Making Monstrous. pp.198-9
5 Introduction to Frankenstein, Penguin Edition 1992, p.xli
6 Rosenbrock, Howard. A New Industrial Revolution? p.636
7 Interview for “Raport”, Sweden’s largest TV-news program. Interviewed by Dan Josefsson, November 23, 1994. Source: Internet.
8 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin edition 1992. p.47
9 Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley. p.112
10 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin edition 1992. p.47
11 Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley. p.110-113
12 Merchant, Caroline. The Death of Nature. p.193
13 Boyd, Stephen. York Notes on Frankenstein. p.52
14 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin edition 1992. p.162
15 Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley. p.114
16 Masuda, Yoneji. Computopia. /Parameters of the Post-industrial Society/ pp.631-4back to the text
17 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Penguin edition 1992. p.39
18 In an interview, to the question of what is cyberspace, Gibson replied: “Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the Second World War we’ve increasingly done so many things that we think of as civilization. Cyberspace is where we do our banking, it’s actually where the bank keeps your money these days because it’s all direct electroni