ABSTRACT
The relationship between cyberpunk literature and social theory is, if anything, recursive. In particular the fictional world of cyberpunk has been seized on by some as a resource of analytic insights into the new dimensions of human or even post-human existence. Cyberpunk and sociological analyses which draw upon it have a 'habit' of 'folding into' each other in a recursive relation between the fictional and the analytic. For example, issues of public space and urban surveillance are themes taken up by William Gibson throughout his work, but most fully in Virtual Light. Indeed, the work of Gibson has been held up as the prime exemplar of postmodern poetics. In effect, Gibsonian cyberspace represents an imagined merger between the Internet and virtual reality systems. The idea of the cyborg has its clearest expression not in Gibson but in the form of the 'avaters' in Snow Crash by N. Stephenson.
