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Optical Prose: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

Leonard Sanders

　　　　　　　　... like the moon, whose orb

　　Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views

　　At evening from the top of Fesole,

　　Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,

　　Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.

　　　　　　　　　　　John Milton, Paradise Lost 1. 287-291

　　Cyberspace.... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of

　　every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light

　　ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city

　　lights receding ...

　　　　　　　　　　　William Gibson, Neuromancer

　　'Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is？'

　　'A component？ Like a capacitor？'

　　 Willson Gibson, Count Zero

I

Optic Glass

　Of all the telescopic observations made by Galileo during the seventeenth century,

the most popular and sensational was that of the moon, an event recalled in a memorable

passage in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) through the famous comparison

of Satan's shield to the moon1. Milton had met Galileo during his visit of 1638 to Italy;

Galileo was in Tuscany under house arrest by the Inquisition, and "whether or not he

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ever looked through Galileo's telescope, Milton seems to have been fascinated by it"

(Potter, 40). In the poem Satan's shield is compared to the disc of the moon as it is seen

not with the naked human eye but "through optic glass"2. Alastair Fowler's annotation

for this passage in Paradise Lost notes that Galileo's findings provide an "evidential

basis" for the world in which the action of Milton's 'cosmic' poem is to take place.

　Milton's concern with astronomy is that he "draws analogies from the observable

rather than the theoretical nature of the heavens in order to illustrate his philosophical

and theological statements" (Broadbent, 133). As commentators on this passage have

shown, the famous comparison of Satan's shield to the moon says more than the obvious

fact that both objects are large, round and shiny. Satan's shield is of "ethereal temper",

but as we draw nearer to it through the 'optic glass' it turns out, like the moon, to be a

'spotty Globe' and the spots and irregularities indicate a loss of perfection. In ParadiseLost Milton was able to use both the new astronomy of Galileo, and the old astronomy

(based on a traditional, earth-centered view of the universe) "to point a contrast between

the fallen and unfallen world" (Potter, 42).

　This image, according to Harinde Marjara in Contemplation of Created Things:Science in Paradise Lost, "like many other scientific images in Paradise Lost is notdrawn from everyday experience, but needs to be mentally visualized by readers. Unless

the readers are familiar with Galileo's astronomical observations, they will not register

the full impact of the image" (60-1). As has been pointed out by Broadbent, "Milton's

sense of cosmic perspective is expanded by Galileo's discoveries" (134). Yet we must

also keep in mind the metaphorical link, that the appearance of the moon as a continent

has no direct relationship to Satan's shield; it is the extended simile that enhances the

imaginative impact of its gigantic size, forming an image which is beyond everyday

human experience. Thus space in Paradise Lost becomes much more than topical

scientific reality; it is also forms the aesthetic shape of the poem.

　Marshall McLuhan has remarked "that the personal and social consequences of any

medium － that is, of any extension of ourselves － result from the new scale that is

introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology"

(226). In our own time we can perhaps take the example of the Hubble telescope,

which has provided a wealth of information to astronomers since being delivered to

space by the shuttle Discovery in April 1990. The telescope captured the best views of

Mars ever obtained from Earth. It also provided the first convincing proof by an optical

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telescope of the existence of black holes. Astronomers credit Hubble with a long list of

noteworthy observations and discoveries, as "it uses a collection of instruments to pick

apart the universe, one observation at a time. ...'who we are and our place in the cosmos'" 3.

　Another significant example, and the topic of this paper, can be found in the creation

of cyberspace. Cyberspace, according to Katherine Hayles, "represents a quantum leap

forward into the technological construction of vision" (38). The implications have been

explored in the genre of writing known as cyberpunk, and the two writers most often

associated with it, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Science fiction critic Darko

Suvin has noted "Gibson and Sterling, who, by both accessibility and the critical attention

paid them, seem to be the most popular, and who are taken to be the most representative,

writers of this trend ... as the positive and negative poles of cyberpunk"(351). In the

introduction to Burning Chrome, a landmark collection of cyberpunk short stories by

Gibson, Sterling notes the presence of "a complex synthesis of modern pop culture,

high tech, and advanced literary technique" (x).

　What is of particular interest here is the interrelation between a new technology and

representation; the passages quoted above use a simile － Satan's shield is 'like the

moon', Gibson's cyberspace 'like city lights receding'. Sterling's preface to the cyberpunk

anthology Mirrorshades notes "Gibson's extrapolative techniques are those of classic

hard SF, but his demonstration of them is pure New Wave" (xi). In this paper I will

explore this relation further through a sampling of passages from Bruce Sterling's CrystalExpress, together with William Gibson's fiction, in particular Neuromancer. Central tothe discussion concerning the evocation of cyberspace is the 'virtual' image. In TheVision Machine Paul Virilio has defined the virtual image as "the formation of optical

imagery with no apparent base, no permanency beyond that of mental or instrumental

visual memory" (59). He also identifies "one of the most crucial aspects of the

development of new technologies of digital imagery and of the synthetic vision offered

by electron optics: the relative fusion/confusion of the factual (or operational ...) and

the virtual: the ascending of the 'reality effect' over the reality principle" (60).

II

Visual Mechanisms

　In many ways cyberculture is an environment saturated by electronic culture. This

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has produced a new language and image repertoire to describe it. In an article entitled

"Literary MTV" George Slusser takes up cyberpunk as a new style, "a mode that is to

traditional narrative as MTV is to the feature film" (in McCaffery, Storming theReality Studio, 334). He finds, citing Gibson's Neuromancer as an example, therein

images "condensed, sharpened, creating an optical surface" 4; that this is "optical prose"

marked by "images no longer capable of connecting to form the figurative space of

mythos or story" and that it is proof that words have succumbed to the "fragmenting

speed, the instantaneity and monodimensionality of the visual image" (334). Thus

"language, in the sizzle and flash, loses its narrative moorings" (340) and "the body of

narrative is giving way to the disembodied image" (343). Cyberpunk style is

characterized by "words that float right out of any syntactic or semantic structure capable

of organizing them into a sustained narrative or message" (340-1).

　For cyberpunks "technology is inside, not outside the personal body and mind" (Suvin,

352). Bruce Sterling has employed the term "visual mechanisms" in order to describe

the prosthetic devices implanted in the body. In a piece of writing in Crystal Expressentitled "Twenty Evocations" we find the following description:

Optic Television: It was astonishing how much room there was in the eye

socket, when you stopped to think about it. The actual visual mechanisms had

been thoroughly miniaturized by Mechanist prostheticians. Nikolai had some

other devices installed: a clock, a biofeedback monitor, a television screen, all

wired directly to his optic nerve" (104).

There are numerous examples in cyberpunk writing which refer to a direct neural link

between the brain and the computer through eye implants (Crystal Express, 103) andimplanted lens. In Neuromancer we find one of the characters with eyes which were

"vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants" (33); in the short story "Burning Chrome"

Rikki is anxious to get hold of Zeiss Ikon Eyes; the eye monocle or monocle rig is a

feature of Idoru (338). Another example are the 'mirrorshades' which Darko Suvin

finds to be "a two-way transaction between the wearer and his social environment" and

"both mask the gaze and distort the gaze"(358). In Neuromancer Linda wears

mirrorshades: "the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lens

seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones" (36).

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　Another technology of perception that features prominently in cyberpunk is

holography. The earliest piece of Gibson's writing is "Fragments of a Hologram Rose".

The story concerns a man named Parker reminiscing alone in an apartment during a

"brownout," defined as a temporary decrease in power supplied to network devices.

Having been left by his girlfriend, he fills in his time accessing an ASP (Apparent

Sensory Perception) deck, a device which can record physical, emotional, and sensual

states happening and then play them back. The experience leads him into a philosophical

dimension, where a postcard of a hologram rose shredded in the waste disposal unit

seems to symbolize the fragmented nature of the self: "we're each other's fragments."

At the end of the story Parker lies in darkness recalling the thousand fragments of a

hologram rose. Gibson adapts the terminology and visual effects of holography to

convey an updated metaphysical complexity whereby each fragment which reveals

the whole image of the rose "reveals the rose from a different angle".

　As the title of the story suggests, the narrative of "Fragments of a Hologram Rose"

revolves around an 'incongruous' juxtaposition: 'hologram', one of the 'metaphors of

the new technology' according to Hollinger (Storming the Reality Studio, 215) and'rose' with its pseudo-mystical and literary connotations. This order of juxtaposition is

a noted feature of cyberpunk writing, other examples being juxtapositions of

American culture with Japanese culture, and high tech with the subculture of the street.

The references to holography are ubiquitous in cyberpunk. Bruce Sterling's CrystalExpress: "When Nikolai Leng was a child, his teacher was a cybernetic system with a

holographic interface" (102); in Gibson's Neuromancer, there are numerous associations

with Night City, where the holograms "shifted and flickered" (50) and neon marked

out the place at the heart of it, Ninsei: "Down on Ninsei the holograms were vanishing

like ghosts" (35). There is a building called Metro Holografix (62), and a memorable

description in Neuromancer of a holographic cabaret (165-7) and to what is projected

through holography, i.e. a "holo-construct" (181).

　Furthermore, discourses on holography are linked to potent cyberpunk themes

concerning the relation between technology and memory: "memory's holographic －

the holographic paradigm is the closest thing you've worked out to a representation of

human memory" (202). A more detailed description of the hologram and the image it

presents is found in Neuromancer and functions as a gateway to Villa Straylight:

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'Freeside' Armitage said, touching the panel of the little Braun hologram

projector. The image shivered into focus, nearly 3 meters from tip to tip. ... He

reached into the skeletal representation and pointed ... Armitage walked to the

opposite end of the projection. The interior detail of the hologram ended here,

and the final segment of the spindle was empty. This is Villa Straylight." (132-3)

An important source for holography in cyberpunk might well be the influential physicist

David Bohm's use of the analogy of a hologram for thinking about implicate order

"because of its property that each of its parts, in some sense, contains the whole"

referred to in Fritjof Capra's widely read The Tao of Physics first published in 1976(Gibson's short story 'Fragments of a Hologram Rose" was written around 1977). Capra

writes that "if any part of a hologram is illuminated, the entire image will be

reconstructed, although it will show less detail than the image obtained from the

complete hologram." Admitting the analogy is somewhat limited, Capra notes its

usefulness for Bohm is that "the real world is structured according to the same general

principles, with the whole being enfolded in each of its parts"5.

According to D. Emily Hicks "The model of holography presents itself because it

creates an image from more than one perspective" (and in "Fragments of a Hologram

Rose" we can recall in this context Gibson's similar terminology, 'from a different angle').

A holographic image is formed as follows:

Holography provides a provocative multidimensional model for visualizing

the production of deterritorialized meaning/nonmeaning. A holographic image

is created when light from a laser beam is split into two beams and reflected

off an object. The interaction between the two resulting patterns of light is

called an "interference pattern," which can be recorded on a holographic plate.

The holographic plate can be reilluminated by a laser positioned at the same

angle as one of the two beams, the object beam. This will produce a holographic

image of the original subject. (xxix)

In her book on the multidimensional text Hicks is concerned to apply the model of

holography to 'border writing', which refers to writing originating in the boundary

space between the United States and Mexico. Hicks finds that many border tropes,

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metaphors, and images juxtapose traditional culture and technology, and this

juxtaposition forms the basis of border writing, which is "rooted in a critique of

technology" (xxx). Interestingly she provides an example from Gibson: "the border

machine and holography would meet in the matrix in border cyberspace" (xxix).

III

Bright Lattices, Optical Illusions

Katherine Hayles, examining the links between computer technologies and

representation, has found Gibson's achievement is based on "two literary innovations

that allow subjectivity, with its connotations of consciousness and self-awareness, to

be articulated together with abstract data" (37). One of these innovations is 'point of

view' (abbreviated as 'pov'): thus, in cyberspace "point of view does not emanate from

the character; rather, the pov literally is the character (38, italics in original). When the

pov disappears, so does the character, "ceasing to exist as a consciousness in and out of

cyberspace" (38). The second innovation is the presentation of cyberspace, "created

by transforming a data matrix into a landscape" (38). Gibson's achievement, then, is

his recognition that a fundamental category, like space and time, can be used "as a

conjunction to join awareness with data" and such innovations take "informatics beyond

the textual surface into the signifying processes that constitute theme and character"

(39).

In the final part of this paper I want to explore some of the ways in which cyberspace

might be conceived by imagining the matrix as a three-dimensional landscape. In

Neuromancer, we come across the following description of the cyberspace experience:

He closed his eyes .... Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala

of visual information .... A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky .... beginning to

rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding － And flowed,

flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick ... opening to the stepped scarlet

pyramid of the Eastern Seabord Fission Authority burning beyond the green

cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the

spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. (68)

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To a certain extent the passage depends for its effect on recognizable visual cues, such

as 'sky', and recognizable shapes, for example 'disk', 'pyramid' and 'cube'. There are

also references to more traditional viewing patterns － 'stepped', and 'high and very far

away'. These perspective-oriented viewing practices are familiar, and we can cite Potter's

discussion on Milton's Paradise Lost whereby "classical and medieval descriptions of

the world as seen from above in dreams or visions always note the smallest details

despite the tremendous distance separating the observer from his object. This same

combination of extreme distance with extreme clarity is seen in the account of Raphael's

view of earth from the heavens, but Milton justifies it by comparing it with the view

through a telescope" (Potter, 40).

　The force of the passage may emanate from a similar 'combination' or juxtaposition

of more conventional visual details with references to heightened visual awareness,

encapsulated in the 'fluid neon origami trick'. Throughout Neuromancer there are othersimilar combinations, often conjoined into one sentence: "the plateaus of the Eastern

Seabord Fission Authority in the infinite neuorelectronic void of the matrix (139).

Thus cyberspace is presented as a landscape which is familiar to the reader, "Up the

construct said ...they ascend lattices of light" (40); yet it is also an unfamiliar 'nonspace':

"cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled" (139). In other works there are binaries like 'up/

down' and 'near/far' 6 that map out the cyberspace landscape in order to render advanced

cyber-optical effects. In the novel Idoru the 'optical surface' is full of references to theconventional perspectives which arise from terminology such as 'resolution/focus' (144)

, "far away, like a picture in a magazine" (173), and "clicked through a series of images

... linear perspective (192) alongside advanced cyber-optical effects associated with

'pattern-recognition' (193), 'fractured images' (290), or a character who "looked in all

directions" (207). Cyberspace, then, marks out " a regime of representation within

which pattern is the essential reality, presence an optical illusion" (Hayles, 36).

Fabijancic notes in Gibson's presentation of cyberspace the "accent on visuals and

his use of heightened language becomes something like pure exhiliration", that "his

high-speed language is suited to the high speed of "biz", the high of cyber-travel, the

depthless rhetoric of multinational capitalism". Moreover, Gibson "dramatizes the

spectacular simulational surfaces of late capitalism through his visually-charged style".

Thus there are 'optical' effects associated with 'speeding up and slowing down'. We

can recall McLuhan's observation: "Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory

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with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and

postliterate" (232). Here Neuromancer provides some illuminating examples: "the

images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding" (45);

these are "hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.

Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred fragmented mandala of visual information" (68).

How do we account for this new 'technological construction of vision'? By way of

conclusion, we can perhaps turn to Jean Baudrillard's stimulating writing on the nature

of optical illusion. In an article entitled "Trompe l'oeil or enchanted simulation"

Baudrillard notes that with "the disintegration of this hierarchical organization of space

that privileges the eye and vision, of this perspectival simulation － for it is merely a

simulacrum － something emerges ... a tactile hyperpresence of things" (62-3).

Moreover, and noting that "the trompe l'oeil is no longer confined to painting" (64) hepoints out that whereas "the Renaissance organized all space in accord with a distant

vanishing point, perspective in the trompe l'oeil is, in a sense, projected forward.... The

eye, instead of generating a space that spreads out, is but the internal vanishing point

for a convergence of objects. A different universe occupies the foreground, a universe

without horizon or horizontality, like an opaque mirror placed before the eye, with

nothing behind it" (63-4).

There are useful applications here for gaining insight into Gibson's representation

of cyberspace through Baudrillard's discussion of the trompe-l'oeil. Baudrillard

concludes his discussion with a description of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, Italy, built

by the architect Luciano Laurana in 1468, and the famous studiolos it contains, those

"tiny sanctuaries entirely in trompe l'oeil at the heart of the immense space of the

palace"(65). In fact, in a strange coincidence, Gibson alludes to the Ducal Palace at

Mantua for his depiction of the Villa Straylight, the Tessier-Ashpool orbital home

which Case and Molly access in Neuromancer:

The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping

around corners and through narrow corridors. They seemed at one point to

pass through several meters of solid wall, a flash of pitch darkness.

'Here,' the Finn said. 'This is it.'

They floated in the center of a perfectly square room ....

Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers

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linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped

in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves ... (205-8)

We find that "the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in

the complex" and that, by some startling trompe-l'oeil 'trick' the eye is deceived and

the "paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into

cyberspace like an origami crane" (208). Similarly, the Ducal Palace at Mantua ...

contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments,

beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs"

(307-8).

　Cyberspace in Gibson's writing, then, as Hayles suggests, is created by 'imagining a

data matrix as a landscape' 7. It may be, as Gibson writes in the short story "Burning

Chrome" that "the matrix's illusion of infinite space"(177), it is "like watching a tape

of a prefab building going up: only the tape's reversed and run at high speed", but it is

the matrix simulator in Bobby's loft which generates this illusion. Veltman has remarked

how "virtual reality has played a major role in expanding the scope of perspective"

(221) in art which entails "a fragmentation in the process of creating illusion" (223).8 In

a wider context, Ben-Tov notes in The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and AmericanWriting that cyberpunk as typified by William Gibson's novels "celebrates the afterlife:

cyberspace. In the cyberpunk novel cyberspace fulfills every promise that space travel

did" (179). And if traditional Science Fiction was a model and symbolic means for

producing space technologies, cyberpunk plays the same role producing ... Cyberspace,

virtual reality, technologies of sensory illusion" (177).

NOTES

1. Galileo (1564-1642) had published in 1610 his descriptions of the mountains on the

moon as seen through a telescope (invented in the Netherlands). Siderius Nuncius orStarry Messenger (1610) revealed the existence of four moons of Jupiter, mountains of

the moon, and the true nature of the Milky Way. In 1613 he described spots on the sun

(Potter, 159). Other references to Galileo in Paradise Lost are: "As when by night the

glass/Of Galileo, less assured, observes/Imagined lands and regions in the moon" (V.

257-263); "a spot like which perhaps/Astronomer in the sun's lucent orb/Through his

glazed optic tube yet never saw" (III. 587-90).

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2. Optic glass is the seventeenth-century technical term for telescope, and not poetic

diction. Galileo used a variety of scientific instruments including the compound

microscope, and the thermometer, which he may have invented.

3. The Japan Times, Monday, March 4, 2002, p.8.

4. According to McHale, "Gibson's fiction functions at every level, even down to the

'micro' structures of phrases and neologisms" (Storming the Reality Studio, 309).

5. In a footnote, Capra defines holography as "a technique of lensless photography

based on the interference property of light waves. The resulting 'picture' is called a

hologram" (footnote 13, p. 323).

6. Culler has shown that the notion of relational identity is crucial to the semiotics of

all kinds of social and cultural phenomena: "binary oppositions can be used to order

the most heterogeneous elements, and this is precisely why binarism is so pervasive:

when two things are set in opposition to one another the reader is forced to explore

qualitative similarities and differences, to make a connection so as to derive meaning

from the disjunction" (15).

7. A case could be made to show cyberspace as gendered: "the transition to cyberspace

when he hit the switch was instantaneous ... into her sensorium, ... senses sharp and

bright (72); "cyberspace matrix － cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal

points ... Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign" (71).

8. For a discussion of recent developments in virtual reality and Renaissance perspective,

see Veltman, p.221.

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