William Gibson's Neuromancer is a dark, romantic depiction of a
future full of isolation and information. Heaps of information are organized
in a massive virtual analog known as the matrix. For the main character
of Neuromancer, Case, however, the matrix is much more than a place
of information storage. It is not just the object of a career or an adventure,
it is a way of life. Case experiences the matrix--cyberspace--as "a
place of rapture and erotic intensity, or powerful desire and even self-submission
(Heim, 62)." Early on in Neuromancer, Case,
exiled from the matrix, exhibits and erotic yearning for it. In the
matrix, things attain a supervivid hyperreality, and ordinary experience
seems dull and unreal by comparison. For Case, the matrix is a perfect,
erotic utopia, a return to the womb (the word matrix comes from
the Latin for mother). Throughout the course of the
novel, all that Case does is in terms of the Matrix. Neuromancer provides
with a striking and pessimistic view of the future, one where information
overshadows, and then infiltrates the individual. Case is among the first
of a new breed of cybercowboys who embrace the matrix and thrive in it,
able to manipulate it for their own purposes.
