Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives

The second sets up "The Political Economy of Cyberpunk" by reproducing Tom Moylan's "Global Economy, Local Text: Utopian/Dystopian Tension in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy" (1995). In the second section, "The Political Economy of Cyberpunk," the initial essay by Tom Moylan, "Global Economy, Local Texts," distinguishes between Gibson's Sprawl trilogy's early dystopian vision of a world that "preservéis] the memory of a better place even as [it] delineate [s] the contours of an oppressive society" and its later anti-utopian drift into supporting the status quo through "reification and commodification" (91). Murphy suggests that "the spiritualizing or technoenchanting of cyberspace is temporally recursive" and that "spiritual space is then a physical space possessing a geographic location," as Lyda Morehouse's AngelLINK series demonstrates in its depictions of communities in which the religious and atheists, humanists, scientists, and angels all interact.