The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics And Art In William Gibson's Neuromancer - Research and Read Books, Journals, Articles at Questia Online Library

The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics And Art In William Gibson's Neuromancer - Research and Read Books, Journals, Articles at Questia Online Library: "Gibson is, nevertheless, one of the most inventive and ambitious artists in
SF, perhaps in spite of Neuromancer's success in mixing hard SF and scin-
tillating lyric. Unlike most SF, Gibson's writing is concerned with art, in
overt and subtle ways -- specifically, with SF as a medium for art. His critics
miss the point when they take exception to the prominence of style over
such putative hard SF qualities as fidelity to scientific plausibility in project-
ing the future. 1 I would argue that the lasting values of Gibson's works lie
precisely in his careful and complex crafting of an SF language that simulta-
neouly expresses a lyricism of estrangement and an allegory of the present.
Where traditional SF repeats obsessively the delusion that it is a form of
epic representation of the fate of humanity, Gibson's fiction returns, as to a
tonic, to the question of how artists can represent the human condition in a
social world saturated by cybernetic technologies."