ABSTRACT
McCoy Pauley, one of the hackers who mentored protagonist Case in William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer (1984), is also one of the first literary simulacra to exemplify George E. Martin’s (1971) hypothesis in “Brief Proposal on Immortality: An Interim Solution” of achieving immortality by uploading the human mind, a conjectural way for humans to become posthuman immortals. Aligned with Norbert Wiener’s (1954) warning insights in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society about the future of the human species, this chapter traces the intertextual position in which Gibson’s unusual character stands by contrasting his figure with other popular sci-fi personages of the period, such as the replicants in Blade Runner, RoboCop, the Terminator, the Borg of Star Trek, and Neo, the leading role of The Matrix. Subsequently, by shifting to an older intertextual line that goes from The Bible to Eliot’s poetry, the core of the work focuses on Gibson’s warning that transhumanist technology becomes a source of vulnerability and existential anguish when consciousness lacks autonomy and ends up enslaved in the social system as commodified merchandise.
