Speaker
Description
Responding to a dual crisis of semiotics, and accelerating computer technologies, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) offer a messianic vision of coding and computer language in the face of the disintegration of stable relationship between the signifier and the signified. The virtual worlds in both texts evoke a fantasy of primordial unity, offering a form of transcendental communication that promises to escape the arbitrariness of the sign. While this semiotic crisis is central to the genre’s critique of late capitalism, my analysis also situates both texts in the broader conversation in science fiction concerning language and control. From George Orwell and Ursula K. Le Guin to Jack Vance, language as a medium of mind control emerges as a leitmotif in twentieth-century science fiction, where language becomes a tool to manipulate the thoughts of its speakers by severely limiting their vocabulary, and consequently, the concepts that are associated with them. Authors such as C.S. Lewis and Robert A. Heinlein, on the other hand, introduce an alien language as a pure form of communication that has a basic and unambiguous correspondence between the aural sound and reality, as opposed to the metaphorical language of humans that leads them to even more abstraction. Gibson and Stephenson stand at the intersection of these two camps of science fiction: language is not only a method of mind control but also a liberating, emancipatory tool of digital world-making. By analyzing the language of crisis of semiotics in Neuromancer and Snow Crash, I argue that these narratives represent a yearning for unmediated access to metaphysical truth. Despite their multicultural cast of characters and their celebration of computer language as an emancipatory and liberating form, both novels are conservative and nostalgic because of their linear, progressive structure, their epic form, and their adherence to Judeo-Christian stories of Genesis.
| Keywords | cyberpunk, Gnosticism, Neuromancer, science fiction, semiotics |
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| m.kabak@iku.edu.tr |