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Example research essay topic: Jorge Luis Borges William Gibson - 1,222 words

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Fantasy paper/Science Fiction Perhaps no theme has so attracted the febrile imaginings of postmodern scholars as the creations - and the technological culture - of cyberpunk literature. Cyberpunk science fiction is the apotheosis of post-modernism, in one assessment, dystopian anticipation, in the lights of another, and the only art systematically dealing with the most crucial political, philosophical, moral, and cultural issues of our day, as envisioned by a third. (Schroeder, 331). For such fervor there is solid backing. A great theme in cyberpunk literature is the Matrix, an abstract representation of the relationship between data systems, in the words of William Gibson (Gibson, 169). Enormously complex and almost impossible to map, the geometry and particularities of this cybernetic space are not qualities easily defined. Among the unearthly delights of the Matrix is assessing its elusive dimensions.

The broad cyberpunk literary movement, as it is often described blends fast-paced and imaginative writing with a pungent if admiring wariness for computers. Rather more importantly, cyberpunk takes an often-savage delight in roaming the information networks that especially personal computers make possible. Altogether gone is the bland worship of technology that once defined science fiction; no part survives in cyberpunk. Instead there is edgy opposition, awareness of the intrusive give-and-take of everything from hi-tech drugs to the mirrored sunglasses that are a common motif in cyberpunk writing - reflective shades slamming shut unilaterally and peremptorily the window to the soul. Yes, cyberpunk is alienated, but hardly alien. Punched into cyberpunk writing and the world it anoints lies a remarkable new frontier of geographical exploration and discovery, couched in a most visceral form: cyberpunk delves through the canyons of the mind by navigating pure information.

For all its estimable presence, the Matrix poses nasty dilemmas, including notable quandaries for the geographers and other traders in the information of places who live and breathe for maps and the mappable. While conventional libraries are challenged by computer data, so too are the descriptive powers of cartographers - not a group, as Jorge Luis Borges once suggested, generally known for being easy to intimidate (Borges, 71). What is the structure, the map, of this informational nether world? That it exists is certain enough. Net statistics show a rate of growth that leaves no doubt about the current existence of this world that is exposed in bits and bytes.

The world created is cyberspace - a territory of facts and lies; of binary naughts and ones; sustained by data packets, ethernet's, and network links; a virtual reality existing in the eyes of the beholder. Cyberpunks occupy the dark fringes of a data world with two distinct realms. On the side of convention, there is no doubt that computers and computer networks today make up a distinctive landscape. Its familiar geography, although fast-changing, is worldwide and increasingly tenacious and inescapable.

This, to hackers and authors of cyberpunk fiction, is The Matrix, an ever-growing net of information: data kept in storage ranging from small computers to gigabyte servers, accessible from ethernet's or cellular satellite uplink's, all the stuff of new space, with a dollar worth in billions, if not trillions. Not mapped, maybe not even mappable, cyberspace is information, technology, data, credit reports, corporate secrets, encrypted government files, the rawest of resources in the most sophisticated of forms. Reach them by jacking in, an appropriately suggestive cyberpunk phrase that puts the human mind into the machine. Cyberspace, in Gibsons Count Zero, is: the infinite reaches of that space that wasn't space, mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hot-cores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline (Gibson, 39). Dramatic and important, the Matrix has a mundane, everyday reality - but it is also the far-reaching, violent, and apocalyptic landscape of information technology that is addressed most directly in the mental maps of cyberpunk science fiction authors. They chart where the search for information, the pirating of data, the culture of the keyboard cowboys manipulating the latest cyberspace decks and consoles, will go.

With the vision of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Kathy Acker, Vernon Vice, John Shirley, and other writers who might be collared with the cyberpunk label, the now of cyberspace transmutes to a dystopian, anarchic, yet somehow conventionally heroic future: a quintessentially post-humanistic form. From the all-enclosed capsule that provides a life-support system in space to the cities on earth that snatch a space from nature, humans seek to control their environment by building it, rather than accepting it as given. The extent of their desire - and their success - places humans at the end of a spectrum in this regard (Mazlish, 42 - 43). Cyberpunk fiction embraces varied conventions that form the pavement surface sealing its means to an end. The central aim of many of the narratives, aside from the essential telling of a carefully plotted and finite story, is describing how computers and information technology mature and the place these devices assume in future life. Nothing elite sticks to the visions; it is a mainstream vernacular or popular culture where hacker and rocker meet.

The visions are often alarming. Cities degenerated. Corporate defections brokered as mercenary military operations. Drugs rampant. Gang violence casually fatal. Organized crime is well organized, with the Yakuza and an engagingly heterogeneous world culture (sporting a Japanese flavor) triumphant.

Turing police monitor artificial intelligence sources, trying to guarantee that artificial intelligences don't become too bright or self-aware. There is beauty too: Perfect holographic reproductions of works of art. An abandoned orbiting world of junked satellites. The spare challenge of placing computer viruses that, properly seeded, penetrate security barriers.

The impeccable vision of virtual reality - the world of data, perceived in four dimensions, a realm to walk and explore and glide, with only the limits of personal ability. And the great charm is that all this already exists. The information Matrix, console cowboys, vast multinational corporations, implants, the Yakuza, viruses, and killer ice are only a few of the cyberpunk authors' tools, part of a post-modern literary landscape of computers, networks, people, and power. There are motes in cyberpunk writing that are entirely contemporary, but also bits and slices of vision and information so abrupt as to be unthinkable. As a bottom line, the literature of cyberpunk science fiction is profoundly dystopian, while preserving an almost absolute faith in the ability of individuals, acting alone, to outwit and avoid any universalizing culture. Free will - to explore, flaunt, steal, pioneer - is as much a part of the conception of cyberspace and the cyberpunks as it ever was on the American frontier.

The ethos is alive. That so fraught a vision is sated with initiative may seem ironic. But that is part of the postmodern mix, and what makes cyberpunk writing and the apocalyptic landscapes of information technology that cyberpunk authors create and embrace, so altogether memorable. Bibliography Randy Schroeder. New-Criticizing William Gibson, Extrapolation, no. 4, 1994 William Gibson, Burning Chrome in Burning Chrome, New York: Ace, 1986 Jorge Luis Borges, Of Exactitude in Science in A Universal History of Infamy, E. P.

Dutton, New York, 1972 William Gibson, Count Zero, New York: Ace Books, 1986 Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993


Free research essays on topics related to: virtual reality, information technology, jorge luis borges, william gibson, science fiction

Research essay sample on Jorge Luis Borges William Gibson

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