Anonymous Environments In Neuromancer, Gibson"s urban world is no more than a capitalist dystopia. The global city is one devoid of history, of personality, of emotion, of landmarks. It has no boundaries and continues on forever in its anonymity. Because of this, the city exists only as a representation of those people temporarily within it.  The environment is described in terms of technology. Here we have a city that is less than city and more like web: a web defined by its users.   The BAMA is the quintessential example of the sprawling metropolis, only this urban jungle sprawls the world from Boston - Atlanta (and somehow we can't help feeling even more). The trashed environment  reflects urban decay as does the color of the sky.   "The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" [Neuromancer, p. 3]. Since there are no landmarks, alternatives must be found to regular routing systems. In order to negotiate ones way through the sprawl, one must sort and pick through years and years of junk history. The sprawl is garbage collected in a world where no-one wants to be.  "They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap" [Neuromancer, p. 48].

 

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