Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology

by Anna McFarlane

This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the ‘godfather of cyberpunk’, William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of ‘gestalt’ psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked identities found in cyberpunk, the author draws out relations with key cultural moments of the last 40 postmodernism, posthumanism, 9/11, and the Anthropocene. By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical level, as well as on an aesthetic level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts. Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology.

Genres: Science Fiction

180 pages, Hardcover

Published August 19, 2021

About the author

Anna McFarlane is James Murray Beattie Lecturer in Fantasy Literature at Glasgow University, coming there from Leeds University where she led the Medical Humanities Research Group. Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome Trust-funded Future of Human Reproduction project at Lancaster University, she co-edited The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022), and The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (2024), and wrote Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing through the Mirrorshades (2021).

Reviews

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/bsfa-award-best-non-fiction/

This is an in-depth analysis of the writing of William Gibson, an author who is much admired by many people, but who I personally find almost unreadable. I read to the end but my views were not changed.

[August Bourré · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent study of William Gibson’s oeuvre, though with some misreadings in the final essay (some of which are clearly cultural; McFarlane, who is British, seems unaware that the term “jackpot” is also older American slang for “untenable situation”).