Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's Count Zero

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. "Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's Count Zero." SFS #65 = 22.1 (March 1995): 63-86.

Second essay in a trilogy of essays beginning with IC-R's "The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson's Neuromancer" essay (with the third essay on Mona Lisa Overdrive). Claims that Count Zero fails as a "penance" or "antimancer" to Gibson's Neuromancer, because "Gibson's counterforce is too abstract and theoretical to affect the language of power that drives the action of both novels." (RDE, 15/08/02)

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EXPANSION: The article has no Abstract at the end — but this from the long, first-person headnote that replaces it (italics removed). IC-R starts from the thesis from the opening of "Sentimental Futurist"

that Gibson's fiction returns continually to the question of how artists can represent the human condition in a world saturated by cybernetic technologies that not only undermine earlier ethical and aesthetic categories, but also collapse the distance between the sense of real social existence and science-fictional  speculation. The cyberspace novels' protagonists all work to restor value and meaning to their lives through techno spheres that have appropriated the realm of transcendence. In Neuromancer, Gibson depicts a world in which every character is an actor and/or a work of art, for all are functional parts of a transcendentally evolving artistic creation: Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool's grand unified Artificial Intelligence [AI], the consciousness of cyberspace. The novel's vision and style resemble those of Italian Futurism's[1] image of futuristic technological transcendence. Also like the Futurists,[2] Gibson creates a language of ecstatic fusions with technology, though unlike the Futurists, he also expresses regret at the loss of traditional affections. Hence, Neuromancer expresses a sentimental futurism [and Count Zero is a flawed "penance for Neuromancer]. (p. 63)