ABSTRACT
We have alluded to the unique sensitivity possessed by creative individuals, their ability to detect and anticipate changes in networks or matrices and, drawing on Deleuze’s observations of artists as the ‘symptomatologists of society’, have spoken of the diagnostic value of literature. Given this perspective, the science fiction subgenre of ‘cyberpunk’ offers, within the context of the themes of this book, a particularly cogent example of the diagnostic and prognostic powers of fiction. Consider in the first instance the genre’s inaugural text, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, from which the above quotations are taken. Written in the early 1980s, it was here that the term and concept of cyberspace was first articulated; indeed, the text uses ‘cyberspace’ and the ‘matrix’ as synonyms for an autonomous, interactive data-space. Other examples could be cited: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) is often credited as the first instance of the use of the term ‘avatar’ to describe an individual’s virtual representative.
