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Monday, March 21, 2011

Neuromancer part II

One prevalent theme in the story of Neuromancer is Gibson's playing with the idea of humanity.  He has some very interesting commentary on what it means to be human.  More often than not, though, he raises more questions than he answers.  One example is Case.  From the outside, he looks like a normal human, but once we learn more about his character, we find out that he has been greatly influenced by technology.  Both the mycotoxins that originally damaged him and the surgery to reverse the damage are technological alterations.  And it only gets more robotic, mechanical, and computerized from there.  For instance, Molly has the blade implants under her fingernails; even Ratz has a prosthetic arm.
From there, the idea of "human" becomes more skewed and blurry.  For instance, Dixie's ideas, knowledge, and memory are preserved in a ROM.  But he is unable to feel, create new memories, or gain any knowledge.  He is only able to organize and reorganize what he already knows.  Is he human?  His body is dead, but the memory of him carries on.  Further, he begs Case to destroy his ROM so he can, essentially, stop being trapped in a memory.  Therefore, he is able to feel.  It seems as though that is a truly human emotion, even if he is only a computerized shadow of himself.
Another human-bending concept is the idea of Wintermute and Neuromancer.  Both RAMs (random access memory), the two entities can create new ideas and memories themselves with the vast database they to which they have access.  This is very similar to the act of human thinking, though they do not have human bodies.
Further, the idea that Dixie and Case "flat-lined" (meaning their hearts stopped and they were dead) and then came back to life shows that humanity can come in different forms.  While Dixie is dead but preserved in a ROM (does that mean he's really dead?), Case is very much alive through the end of the story.  Is he less alive because he has once died?

1 comment:

  1. I think that one of the things implied by Gibson in Neuromancer was that "being human" and being "alive" is only an idea. There never has been any sort of definition for it, and there probably never will be - the idea of what is human and what isn't is entirely arbitrary according to the viewer. In Case's case, he died once, but he was still alive because he consciousness was preserved; he only experienced physical death, but his mind was still alive. In the same way, one could say that ideas of great philosophers and their continued existence means that they are still alive - Jefferson, Aristotle, Locke, Machiavelli, as long as their ideas are still around, they are still "human," and very much alive, since the only way to kill someone who lives on as an idea is to erase them from existence entirely, something that is nearly impossible.

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