ABSTRACT
The word ‘cyberspace’ is rapidly becoming an academic and journalistic ubiquity. The information spaces of the Internet and the World Wide Web command increasing attention from the media as we enter an era of ‘cyberculture’ (Dery 1992). Users of personal computers find it hard to imagine where their documents ‘are’ in the seemingly non-existent space accessed through their workstations (Turkic 1984). In offices and Internet cafés, urban and electronic spaces come together (Graham 1996). And yet these dataspaces bear only the slightest resemblance to cyberspace, the science fictional geography created by William Gibson in the short story ‘Burning Chrome’ (1986/8) 1 and developed throughout the Sprawl Trilogy of novels: Neuromancer (1984/93); Count Zero (1986/7); and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988/9). I think this background is important—not because I wish to reclaim the original site for the word ‘cyberspace’, but to stress that the production and consumption of ideas of cyberspace take place in many very different contexts. This paper aims to explore some of the meanings given to cyberspace in one particular context: the writing and reading of Gibson's ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction.
