Cyberspace

This webpage is very much a work-in-progress At a minimum I need to fill in the details of the references.

Definitions

1. In his novel Neuromancer (published in 1984) William Gibson defines cyberspace as

   A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light arranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

2. Scott Bukatman, writing about the movie Blade Runner says

   Cyberspace is the term used to refer to the space constituted by information technologies, whether presented as an actual physical space … or a metaphorical sense of space, like an extended, immersive computer interface….

Primary Antecedent

It is clear (to me at least) that Vernor Vinge's Other Plane from his 1981 short story True Names is a description of cyberspace pre-dating Gibson's.

Gibson specifically refers to True Names (the concept and the story) in Chapter 21. The short summary of Vinge's story and discussion of the concept seems out of place unless one accepts that Gibson meant it as an acknowledgement.

One might think that the discussion of names and identifies is merely Gibson spinning webs of uncertainty (several characters have aliases or are unnamed). However Gibson surely knew about Vinge's story before Neuromancer. Furthermore, in Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer) a book editor talks about an author whose book she is editing:

There's a great deal of gray prose about the nature of Mass Man. With caps, Mass Man. He's big on caps. Not much of a stylist.

Gibson is, more than anything else, a stylist. It is possible that he is humourously playing with self-reference, as Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes says in reference to a fictional newspaper story, which, you will allow, is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of the average story-teller.. I think that this is far more likely to be another reference to Vinge and the fame Neuromancer brought Gibson compared to Vinge.

I am prepared to accept that Gibson's vision of cyberspace is more of an urban jungle than earlier conceptions and that he coined the term cyberspace, but not that he invented the concept.

References

Scott Bukatman

Blade Runner

© 1997 by Scott Bukatman

Published by the British Film Institute

ISBN 0-85170-623-1

Quotation from page 54.

Arthur Conan Doyle

A Case of Identity

in the collection Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

William Gibson

Neuromancer

© 1984 by William Gibson.

Quotation from Chapter 3.

William Gibson

Count Zero

© 1986 by William Gibson.

Quotation from Chapter 15 (entitled Box)

Ridley Scott (director), Hampton Fancher and David Peoples (screenplay authors)

Blade Runner

Vernor Vinge

True Names