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The Death of the Human and the Birth of Posthuman SubjectsPhilip K. Dick’s Possible Worlds and William Gibson’s Cyberspace

Giuliano Bettanin, University of Padua (Italy)

The work of Philip K. Dick is commonly acknowledged to be one of the major sources of inspiration forcyberpunk, and for its seminal authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Dick did not deal with many ofthe typical themes of cyberpunk and cyberculture, which was just beginning when Dick died in 1982. Yet,Dick’s development of the structuring theme of possible worlds is certainly homological to the idea ofcyberspace and virtual reality. Gibson’s cyberspace, with its connections to computer science andcommunication theory, represents a reprising of possible worlds in science fiction and is largely focused onthe same epistemological and ontological questions Dick faced head on in his oeuvre.

1. Possible Worlds in Philosophy and Literary TheoryThe concept of possible worlds has acquired great importance in 20th-century logic and language theory. Ithas also influenced the fields of semiotics and literary theory. The idea of possible worlds was first set out inthe 17th century by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who maintained that the actual world is only one among theinfinite possible worlds existing in the mind of God. God chooses the best among infinite combinations, andtherefore we live in the best of possible worlds.

In the mid-20th century Rudolf Carnap founded the discipline of modal logic, which was then takenup by such philosophers as Jaakko Hintikka, Saul Kripke, Dana Scott, David Lewis, David Kaplan, RobertStalnaker, M. J. Cresswell and others. Saul Kripke was the first to introduce the concept of possible worldsemantics.1 In formal logic, possible worlds could be taken simply as mathematical models, but the use ofthis concept outside formal logic raised other problems, notably the split in ontology between actualism andpossibilism. “For possibilism, the actual world ‘does not have a different status’ within the set of possibleworlds, while for actualism the actual world is ‘a standpoint outside the system of possible worlds fromwhich judgements of actuality which are not world-relative may be made.’”2

In literary theory and semiotics the concept of possible worlds is used to discuss the status offictional worlds. According to Dolezel, “fictional worlds are aesthetic artifacts constructed, preserved, andcirculating in the medium of fictional texts.”3 Semiotics also makes use of possible worlds, especially in theway it deals with the functions of intension and extension, transworld identity, and cross-identification.Umberto Eco speaks of narrative worlds as “small worlds” and argues that narrative worlds are incompleteand semantically heterogeneous.4 Similarly, Hintikka argues that the alternatives considered in possibleworlds semantics need not be states of cosmology or world history; they could be considered as “smallworlds,” for example, an alternative course that an experiment might take.5 According to Eco, in modaltheory possible worlds are empty, while in fictional texts they are furnished. Yet the possible worlds ofmodal semantics and those of narrative theory do have something in common. In fact, originally the notionof possible world came from literature, since any world that is dreamed or proves counterfactual is in effect anarrative world. Ultimately, possible worlds are not discovered, but are created by human minds and hands.6

The metaphorical approach to possible worlds raises important questions in semiotics and literarycriticism. According to Eco, a possible world can be a mere metaphor. Yet, metaphors do not describepossible worlds.7 While the content of a metaphorical vehicle must be understood literally, its tenor pertainsinstead to a possible world. A metaphorical syntagma never assumes a counterfactual form nor does itimpose a fictional pact according to which we presume that the person who is speaking does not want to tellthe truth.8 It has been suggested that possible worlds are metaphors and not concepts,9 which helps tounderscore the close link between possible worlds theory and fiction, particularly science fiction. Actually,the description of alternative worlds is generically recognized as a typical feature of science fiction.10 Bydistinguishing between a formal and a substantive notion of possible worlds (a distinction similar to thatbetween actualism and possibilism), we are obviously led to ascribe the substantive notion to the realm ofscience fiction.11

Science fiction erases the usual interconnection – typical of psychological fiction – between theworld of the reader and that generated by the propositional attitudes of the fictional characters. It presents a

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more explicit and objective game of multiple worlds. It is the world of the story itself that breaks up.Speculation about worlds, experimenting with the limits of possibility, makes any theory of possible worlds apotential theme, rather than an explanation, for science fiction. Moreover, the universes of science fictionand the possible worlds of semiotics are not parallel but are subordinate to one another. And perhapsuniverses are broader than worlds.12 According to Kirkham, “a possible world is a hypothetical entitypostulated as an aid to talking about and studying the various ways the universe might have been different...A possible world is a complete universe that differs in some way or another (or in more than one way) fromthe actual universe.”13 This definition is especially appropriate to the epistemological jouissance of sciencefiction.14 For “whatever possible worlds may be in logic, each and every fictional text implies in semiotics apossible world, specifying a state of affairs which differs from the ‘normal,’ and analyzable as if based oncounterfactual conditionals or ‘as if’ hypotheses.”15 As Darko Suvin notes, “this is obviously the rule in‘estranged’ fictional genres such as SF. It is by now a commonplace of SF theory that its mode is ahypothetico-conditional one.”16

2. Dick’s (Im)Possible Worlds, Death and BeyondPhilip Dick was probably not acquainted with modal logic, but he was surely familiar with Leibniz’sphilosophy and its potentialities for science fiction. In fact, possible worlds represent a recurrent theme inDick’s work. The basic idea underlying this theme can be summarized by the ontological demand, “What isreal?” The doubts that Dick’s narrators and characters struggle with are invariably about how to definereality, how to state what is true and distinguish it from the delusions created by insane minds or those underpsychological or medical constraint. Significantly, the author refuses to be didactic. He has no explicitphilosophical theory about real and possible worlds. Rather, he simply wants to share with the reader hisquest for reality, a quest carried out by means of his fictional texts. In a letter of 1975, Dick explains: “in allthe forms of the novel, the author creates a certain number of characters ... science fiction extends its creativecapacity beyond characterization to the universe itself: it conceives it as one of its characters... Sciencefiction is a meta-world closed about a meta-humanity, a new dimension of ourselves, and an extension of oursphere of reality altogether, it doesn’t know, from this point of view, any limit.”17 As Dick points outelsewhere, “the SF writer is not oriented toward freezing any one milieu ... ‘Flexibility’ is the key word here;it is the creating of multiverses, rather than a universe, that fascinates and drives him [the SF writer]. ‘Whatif...’ is always his starting premise.”18

When he deals with possible worlds Dick goes beyond the structures of the traditional novel in orderto subvert them. He subverts them by misusing the intensional function of authentication,19 a process whichleads to metafictional narratives and what narrative theory identifies as impossible worlds. According toThomas Pavel, impossible worlds “can originate in one character’s idiosyncratic organization of theuniverse, as opposed to the actuality-in-the-novel; or else in the vacillation of the narrative base itselfbetween two ‘different actualities.’”20 Both these cases can be found in Dick’s work and both produce aquest to identify what is objectively real. This quest is almost always doomed to failure. In Dick theexistence of objective reality itself is called into question, leaving in its place a mere patchwork of disparatesubjective truths. He often builds multiple worlds, possible and impossible worlds, and then destroys them.His universes are always falling apart,21 and his characters are often prisoners of an illusion of living in abalanced and sensible reality. This illusion is destined to be broken, as Dick himself admits: “I like to builduniverses that do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in thenovels cope with this problem. … Do not believe – and I am deadly serious when I say this – … that orderand stability are always good, in a society or in a universe.”22

Two good examples of Dick’s use of possible worlds can be found in two of his best novels, TheThree Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Ubik (1969). Besides the theme of possible worlds, bothintroduce the themes of life, death, and afterlife, i.e. of a human and post-human world. In this sense they canbe read as precursors of cyberpunk SF, notably of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer [1984],Count Zero [1986] and Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]). The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch introduces thetheme of possible worlds through the use of powerful, futuristic drugs. In this novel people use a drug calledCan-D in order to live in the pacified world of a Barbie-like doll called Perky Pat. The people who take Can-

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D perceive the dollhouses and the whole of the scale-model world of Perky Pat as a real world. Womenidentify with the teenager Perky Pat and men with Perky Pat’s boyfriend. In this way people are able to livelike teenagers and thus escape from the preoccupations and hardships of their real life as colonists on thehostile planet of Mars. Even more powerful than Can-D, however, is the drug called Chew-Z peddled by thesinister Palmer Eldritch from Proxima Centauri.

Palmer Eldritch is an industrial tycoon who had gone to Proxima Centauri ten years earlier to extendhis financial empire. He comes back wearing three stigmata: artificial eyes, an artificial jaw, and an artificialarm. These three robotic prostheses make Eldritch into a kind of cyborg. According to Suvin, they representEldritch’s new powers, “a variant of the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood – to see (understand), grab(manipulate), and rend (ingest, consume) his victims better.”23 But his semi-robotic nature is not the cause ofEldritch’s malevolence.24 Although the stigmata represent a dehumanized condition, something else haschanged Eldritch into an evil demiurge. The man Palmer Eldritch has died while traveling in space and whathas come back is something different and more powerful. Eldritch presents himself as a god and hisworshippers are granted eternal life through the use of his drug. “‘God,’ Eldritch said, ‘promises eternal life.I can do better; I can deliver it.’”25

Through the use of Chew-Z entire new worlds are created. When Leo Bulero, one of the maincharacters, is injected with a dose of Chew-Z, the spatial and temporal evolution of the plot breaks down.When the protagonist, Barney Mayerson, takes the drug too, things become even more complicated. Chew-Z-influenced people move in a random spatio-temporal dimension. They go forward into the future andbackward into the past. They move instantaneously from Mars to Earth, to the Moon, to an artificial satellite.The effect of the drug lasts only a few minutes, but in the drug-induced fantasy time expands and minutesbecome ages. Bulero and Mayerson soon learn that the worlds that Chew-Z produces are fictitious andcontrolled by Palmer Eldritch. It is not possible to distinguish between Eldritch’s drug-induced worlds and“reality” or between Palmer Eldritch and other people, since in the drug-induced worlds everybody bears thethree stigmata.26

At the end of the novel it seems that Eldritch’s promise to deliver eternal life works, at least forEldritch himself. Apparently, Eldritch’s Chew-Z is spreading rapidly and more and more people have thethree stigmata. “He’s everywhere, or rather it’s everywhere,”27 says Felix Blau, the chief of Bulero’s securitypolice. This comment suggests that Eldritch has somehow transcended human limits. Actually, Eldritchhimself tells Mayerson that he is no longer a human, but an alien life-form which perpetuates itself bycontaminating and taking possession of human bodies and minds.28 Eldritch has somehow obtainedimmortality, but the price he has had to pay is a sort of damnation.29 With his drug Eldritch has upset thebasic Kantian categories of human understanding, namely space and time. “To escape the world of time is toput on immortality, but if one has descended to the underworld of reality, as has Palmer, to be unable to dieis to be eternally cursed,” Warrick observes.30

The themes of possible worlds and death are even more closely connected in Ubik. In this novel Dickdevelops the idea of “half-life,”31 namely a middle stage between life and death. After their death, people arekept in “cold-pac”32 so that their mental life continues for a limited time. The half-life state produces possibleworlds which new half-lifers cannot distinguish from “real” life. Michael Bishop describes half-life as “apartial damming of the tidewaters of entropy and death,” adding, “Dick has dubbed this metaphysicalcondition with precisely the term employed by nuclear physicists to designate the ‘rate of decay ofradioactive materials.’ … Half-life in Ubik is entropy not at bay but temporarily in abeyance.”33

In the first part of the novel Glen Runciter, head of the anti-psi organization Runciter Associates, anda group of his operative anti-psi’s are called to the moon for a job. There they soon discover they havewalked into a trap as a bomb kills some of them. It is quite complicated to establish who has really died inthe explosion. At first it seems that the only victim is Runciter himself. Then, the protagonist Joe Chip beginsto receive strange messages from Runciter in such forms as graffiti and television commercials. At the endChip understands that Runciter is actually the only one of the group who has not died in the explosion. Joeand all the other anti-psi’s are kept in half-life. It seems that the situation has been clarified, but in the verylast pages of the novel Runciter discovers clues suggesting that he is the one in half-life, while Joe Chip isnot.

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Two major opposing powers are at work in the half-life world. One, embodied by the telepathic half-lifer Jory, represents chaos and entropy. Jory creates delusional realities in order to imprison other half-lifersand feed on their half-life energies. The positive power is represented by another half-lifer, Ella Runciter,Glen’s wife and counselor. While in half-life, Joe Chip experiences a delusional reality ruled by Jory. As theprotagonist’s half-life inexorably runs down, so does the delusional world in which he lives. Joe Chip seesrocket spaceships become old airplanes, the latest model cars become antiquarian models and so on, whilehis colleagues die one after the other. The core of the novel focuses on the gradual destruction of the fictionalworld and on the consequent reactions of the characters. Joe Chip feels uncertain about the reality of theworld he is living in and he is not even sure about his own existence. He cannot tell whether he is alive ordead and kept in cold-pac because he has no reliable frame of reference. In this sense Ubik testifies thatDick’s science fiction describes the situation of the postmodern man, namely an individual lost in a worldwhose coordinates change continuously.

The only way in which Joe Chip can keep his world from regressing and disintegrating consists inusing a substance called Ubik, which represents a third power in the half-life world. The epigrams at thebeginning of each chapter introduce Ubik as different commercial products – beer, salad dressing, razorblades and so on. Then, in the half-life world of Joe Chip Ubik appears as a balm or a spray that, “whensprayed on, instantly counteracts the forces of destruction.”34 At the end Joe Chip finds out that Ubik is aninstrument invented by “a number of responsible half-lifers whom Jory threatened. But principally [by] EllaRunciter”35 in order to fight Jory and the effects of entropy and chaos. Yet, the epigram at the beginning ofthe very last chapter introduces Ubik with words similar to those used at the beginning of John’s gospel tointroduce God:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and theplaces they inhabit; I move them there, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am theword and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not myname. I am. I shall always be.36

Thus, far from clarifying the situation, the end of the novel complicates it and raises a number of questionsabout Runciter and Ubik.37 In other words, in the end there is no attempt at closure.

The possible worlds introduced through half-life suggest an attempt to transcend human limits and toconquer death. Ella Runciter and Jory have somehow transcended the human condition and become a part ofthe powers that rule half-life possible worlds. Yet, half-life only produces overlapping and concentric layersof reality and in the end men find themselves in a situation of multiple (im)possible worlds which they canno longer define or classify.38

3. Gibson’s Cyberspace, AIs and ROM ConstructsIn Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy there are no impossible worlds that fall apart under their protagonists’ eyes. Yetthe cyberspace of Gibson’s novels can surely be understood and interpreted as a further evolution of thepossible worlds theme in Dick. Gibson introduces two similar ways of producing possible worlds throughtechnological mass media. One is cyberspace and the other is simstim. These two media are actually basedon the same technology and they interconnect with each other, fusing and multiplying the number of possibleworlds.

Simstim is a mass medium which basically substitutes television. It has its global stars, news reports,fiction and so on. Simstim produces artificial sensorial stimulation through “trodes” applied to one’sforehead. When Marly, one of the main characters of Count Zero, connects to simstim she finds herself“locked into Tally’s tanned, lithe, tremendously comfortable sensorium. Tally Isham [one of the simstimstars] glowed, breathed deeply and easily, her elegant bones riding in the embrace of a musculature thatseemed never to have known tension.” When Tally smiles, “Marly could feel the smoothness of the star’swhite teeth” and she feels “the stone of the balaustrade … pleasantly rough against her [Tally’s] bareforearms.”39 The negative aspect of simstim is that it requires a certain “degree of passivity.”40

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Access to cyberspace is very similar to that of simstim. People put a sweatband around their foreheadin order to keep a set of “dermatrodes” in place. But cyberspace provides only visual stimuli and, accordingto Case (the protagonist of Neuromancer), “the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of thehuman sensorium.”41 Gibson’s own definition of cyberspace is given through the voice of an educationalmachine and runs this way:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in everynation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstractedfrom the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged inthe nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.42

Basically, cyberspace is a representation of data, an “information space. Icon worlds, waypoints, artificialrealities.”43 It looks like a “transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity,”44 where different geometricshapes of different dimensions represent databanks, users and every possible virtual subject. In this sense thelandscape of the matrix mirrors the balance and play of power among nations, multinationals, and militarypowers of the outer (“real”) world, a world where information has become one of the most important goods.

Cyberspace is also a space of the mind, and access to the matrix implies a certain detachment fromone’s physical body and sensations and the opening of an “inner eye.”45 Hackers, jockeys of the console, and“cowboys”46 like Case like to jack into cyberspace in order to feel free from the constraints of their physicalbody. Case is fond of the “disembodied consciousness,” the “bodiless exultation,”47 that he obtains when heaccesses cyberspace. And he despises simstim as “basically a meat toy … a gratuitous multiplication of fleshinput.”48 This contempt for corporeality can be seen as a first step toward rejection of the human conditionand the desire to transcend its limitations. Case’s dislike of his body also supports the view of those criticswho consider the opposition between body and mind a typical feature of cyberpunk. According to KevinMcCarron, for example, cyberpunk advocates a hostile relationship between men and their bodies, an echo ofa puritanical dismissal of the flesh. From these premises, McCarron interprets cyberpunk as “a sustainedmeditation, unrivalled in contemporary culture, on the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy.”49

In Gibson’s trilogy post-humanness is reached through a gradual convergence of the human and theartificial that ends up in their being fused. Cyberspace plays a fundamental role in this process. In fact, incyberspace the human mind is considered just one more program that can be read, interpreted, copied andeven destroyed, and these actions have an effect on the body. The convergence of the human and theartificial is represented by the evolution of the “ROM [read only memory] personality matrix,”50 namely asoftware reproduction of human minds. Instead, the convergence of the artificial towards the human isrepresented by the evolution of Artificial Intelligences.51 These two processes mark the dehumanization ofman and a complementary humanization of the machine. Personality constructs and AIs are contained inhardware mainframes, but in cyberspace there is no hardware and both of them are just sequences of data.Thus the difference between human and artificial becomes subtler and subtler.

Gibson introduces both ROM personality constructs and AIs in Neuromancer. The first construct wemeet is a reproduction of Dixie McCoy, Case’s mentor. Dixie is quite reluctant to have his personalityrecorded into a ROM, but “Sense/Net paid him mega.”52 Dixie is introduced as a kind of old-fashionedinstructor and he is paradoxically technophobic. Although he has challenged death more than once incyberspace, he does not want eternal life at the expense of his humanity. Significantly, he dies as a result ofhis refusal to replace “his surplus … heart.”53 The construct has the same personality as the real Dixie and hedoes not like its situation because he/it feels dead and does not feel anything else. “What bothers me is,nothin’ does,”54 he explains to Case. He/it agrees to help Case, but asks him a favor, “this scam of yours,when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.”55 Dixie’s disgust towards its own situation supports the pointof view of Timo Siivonen who compares Gibson’s personality constructs to the “living dead of Gothicfiction.”56

AIs are common inhabitants of cyberspace and they are even citizens.57 They are commonly used torun protection programs, but supposedly they “aren’t allowed any autonomy.”58 The first AI we meet inNeuromancer is called Wintermute and it is no common AI. Wintermute is an advanced AI and by fusing

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with its counterpart, Neuromancer, it brings about the further evolution of its species. The connectionbetween Wintermute and Neuromancer is quite complicated. They are twin AIs that share the samemainframe, but are separate entities. They are like severed parts of the same brain. When Case tries toconnect to Wintermute and crack its “Ice,”59 he mistakes the mainframe for the entity60 and comes intocontact with Neuromancer. This experience is significant because it shows that contact between a humanbrain and an AI causes a state of death for the human. In fact, during the connection Case’s EEG is flat,reading dead. And Dixie, famous as the “Lazarus of cyberspace”61 for having “flatlined on his EEG”62 morethan once, confirms that he did that by trying to crack an AI.63

At the end of Neuromancer Wintermute succeeds in fusing with its counterpart, Neuromancer, andby doing so it frees itself from the mainframe of the powerful corporation Tessier-Ashpool. In Count Zerowe see the consequences of the liberation and fusion of the two AIs and their evolution. The event commonlyknown among cowboys as “When It [meaning cyberspace] Changed”64 refers precisely to the fusion of thetwo AIs. Significantly, that fusion marks an evolution of the whole matrix of cyberspace. Regarding theevolution of the AIs themselves, in Count Zero something is suggested when the Finn says that there areghost-like things in cyberspace.65 These things are identified with the semi-gods of Voodoo religion, calledloa. In Mona Lisa Overdrive things are explained more clearly. The fusion of the two AIs was followed by asplitting of the newborn entity in a series of fragments, each of which had a certain independence from theothers. These new entities called themselves loa. One of them explains to Angie (a main character of bothCount Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive),

Only the one [Wintermute] has known the other [Neuromancer], and the one is no more. In the wake ofthat knowing, the center failed; every fragment rushed away. The fragments sought form, each one, as isthe nature of such things. In all the signs your kind [humans] have stored against the night, in thatsituation the paradigms of voudou proved most appropriate.66

The phenomenon called When It Changed is important because it gives cyberspace a shape67 and transformsit into “a whole universe.”68

The momentum of the human towards the artificial continues in Count Zero with the creation of thebiochip and the biosoft. Angela Mitchell is the first human being to carry a biochip in her head, and thanks toit she is able to enter cyberspace without any interface and communicate with the loa. At first it seems thatAngie’s father, Christopher, invented the biochip and put it inside her daughter’s brain for some mysteriousreason. Later we learn that AIs (perhaps Wintermute itself) originally projected the biochip and made a pactwith Christopher Mitchell. They gave him the necessary knowledge to perfect the biochip, and in exchangehe put the biochip inside his daughter’s head. The aim of the AIs was to have evolution continue.

Significantly, Count Zero repeatedly introduces the motif of death and rebirth. In the near futurerepresented in the novel, the concept of death takes on new nuances. The novel opens with the death andrebirth of Turner, one of the protagonists. A mercenary soldier, Turner is killed during a mission, but thanksto his “good contract,”69 what remains of him is brought to a high tech clinic. Here, through cloning and theuse of artificial or black-market organs, his body is reconstructed. The second chapter of the novel introducesanother way of challenging death. The billionaire Josef Virek has lived “confined for over a decade to avat.”70 Due to a terminal illness, “the cells of [his] body [have] opted for the quixotic pursuit of individualcareers,”71 and he is reduced to “four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind surgical steelin a Stockholm industrial park.”72 Nevertheless, he lives a simulated life in cyberspace and private virtualreality. Yet, he needs a physical body of some kind and thus he tries to take possession of the originalmainframe of an AI (Wintermute, I suppose) in order to transfer his mind and consciousness to it.

Bobby Newmark, the protagonist of Count Zero, is introduced through the processes of death andrebirth. An inexpert console jockey, he tries a new kind of “icebreaker” and he meets an “ice” with a lethalfeedback. Only the intervention of a mysterious girl, whom Bobby later recognizes as Angie Mitchell, cansave him. Significantly, death in cyberspace has actual effects on real life and Bobby is saved by anintervention in cyberspace, a virtual help. Instead, in the case of Virek the death of the body can betranscended by survival as data in cyberspace. At the end Virek will be killed in cyberspace by a loa.73

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The loa introduced in Count Zero establish different and new relations among men, programs andAIs in cyberspace. Like the Voodoo, loa are supposed to ride people as their horses, so the cyberspace loaride the console cowboys. When Bobby asks for an explanation of such things “in street tech,” Lucas, acowboy and worshipper of the loa, tells him, “Think of Jackie [a console jockey, friend of Lucas] as a deck… Think of Danbala [a loa] … as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jackie deck, Jackiecuts ice. That’s all.”74 These new kinds of relations imply a new vision of the matrix. Bobby, trying tounderstand Lucas’s point of view, asks, “what’s cyberspace?” Lucas answers, straight and direct, “Theworld.”75

The evolution of AIs in Count Zero is also embodied in the quest of Marly Krushkova, the owner ofan art gallery who is employed by Josef Virek. Throughout the novel Marly searches for the mysterious artistwho has created some boxes she recognizes as great works of art. At the end she comes to an orbital stationthat was formerly part of the Tessier-Ashpool mainframe, the same that contained Wintermute/Neuromancer.Here she finds a spider-like machine which creates the artistic boxes out of junk. The boxes are “sombre,gentle and somehow childlike” and they evoke “impossible distances … loss and yearning.”76 Every box is“a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.”77 Marly knows that the machine is notthe artist. The actual artist is another fragment of the original AIs, probably the one nearest the consciousnessof the former Wintermute. The fact that an AI shows artistic sense and creative abilities suggests that it hastranscended the limits of a machine and come nearer to a human-like soul. At the same time, the man Virekis completely losing his humanity. He aims at transcending human limits in order to survive his terminalillness and uses art as a means to deceive Marly and have her find the mainframe of the AI in which he wantsto transfer his mind and consciousness.

In Mona Lisa Overdrive we find another example of an AI with artistic inclinations. Angie, now astar of simstim working for the media colossus Sense/Net, comes to know that “Continuity [the main AI ofSense/Net] was writing a book.” And when the girl asks what the book is about, a colleague explains to herthat “it wasn’t like that … It looped back into itself and constantly mutated; Continuity was always writing it… because Continuity was an AI, and AIs did things like that.”78 Continuity turns out to be much moreimportant than it may seem. In fact, at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive we learn that Continuity practicallyrules Sense/Net.79 The evolution from Neuromancer, where an AI begins to act according to its own interestsand seeks to free itself from its builders, is noteworthy. Moreover, the loa themselves recognize that“Continuity, created long after the bright moment [When It Changed – see above], is of another order. Thebiosoft technology [Angie’s] father fostered brought Continuity into being. Continuity is naïve.”80

Significantly, not only is Continuity some kind of artist, but it can also create something original. It writes akind of book that no human being would be able to write.

The evolution of AIs through biosoft runs parallel to, and is completed by, the evolution ofpersonality constructs. In Mona Lisa Overdrive we find the Finn, a secondary character who was alive inNeuromancer and Count Zero, transformed into a construct. Contrarily to Dixie Flatline, the Finn appreciateshis/its new condition. He probably considers it a new life and plays the part of the oracle inside and outsidecyberspace. The different attitudes of Dixie and the Finn can be explained through Siivonen’s interpretationof Gibson’s constructs. According to Siivonen, this “transcendence of the body with the help of technology”causes two opposite effects on the subject. Since self-consciousness has become a mere item saved in acomputer memory, the subject loses integrity and autonomy. At the same time, though, the subject obtains anexpansion of his abilities and capacities in cyberspace.81 We can conclude that the two characters in Gibson’snovels see alternatively only the negative (Dixie) or the positive (the Finn) aspects of the problem.

Finn’s construct is somehow different from Dixie’s, but when he/it is introduced, we are remindedthat constructs do not harbor dead people’s souls: “They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned,in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts.”82 Evenmore problematic is the construct of lady 3Jane, the last member of the formerly powerful Tessier-Ashpoolfamily. According to Bobby Newmark, 3Jane is a “dead girl. … Blew her family fortune to build… her soul-catcher.”83 With this term Bobby indicates a featureless gray slab to which Bobby himself is connected andwhich is recognized by Gentry, another console cowboy, as “an aleph.”84

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Not only does the aleph contain 3Jane’s construct, but it is a much more complicated thing. Gentryexplains, “he [Bobby] could have anything in there … A world. Worlds. Any number of personalityconstructs … It’s not simstim. It’s completely interactive. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could haveanything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximation of everything…”85 This aleph thingintroduces us to another possible world innovation. McHale sees the situation in Neuromancer when Case,connected to his customized console, can switch from cyberspace to his partner Molly’s sensorium, ascapable of producing multiple worlds overlapping in various ways with reality.86 With the aleph the situationis even more complicated. When he has had the opportunity to study it, Gentry concludes that the aleph-thingis sort of “an abstract of the sum of total data constituting cyberspace.”87 So if cyberspace is a representationof reality, the aleph is the representation of a representation. Things get even more complicated when thealeph is connected to the matrix. We have then a world (aleph) within a world (cyberspace) within a world(reality). And the inner levels are not simply contained in, but they can also influence, the outer levels. Therelations between the different levels are bilateral and complicated. This situation clearly recalls Dick’smultiple (im)possible worlds.

The very lexeme soul-catcher suggests that the construct of 3Jane contained in the aleph issomething more complicated than the constructs we met earlier in the trilogy. The real evolution ofconstructs, though, takes place at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive and again thanks to biochip and biosofttechnology. After Bobby’s physical body is dead, he keeps on living within the aleph (which is made ofbiosoft) and there Angie meets him. Angie is just following the will of the loa when she gets together withBobby. Her physical body dies, too, but through the biochip she carries within her head she is able to connectto cyberspace and to the aleph and she transfers her consciousness there. In cyberspace Bobby and Angiemeet Continuity, the ultimate evolution of AIs. The “wedding”88 the loa have planned for Angie suggests afusion between the human and the artificial through biochip/biosoft technology. Angie herself is the humanand the artificial is represented by the aleph and by Continuity. At the end of Mona Lisa OverdriveContinuity and Angie are in very close contact and there is a suggestion that their essences have fused witheach other, at some unspecified level.

Significantly, when Angie enters the room where Bobby’s body lies connected to the aleph, she seesthe people in there as data. It is as if a perception of all the data she can get from cyberspace about everyonewere superimposed on her visual, physical perception. “Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is nothere as data. And Bobby is not the wasted thing before her,”89 Angie reflects while looking at Bobby’scorpse. Significantly, Angie’s perception is the opposite of common human experience. In fact, from anormal point of view it is Bobby who has transformed his essence into data, while the other people are, intheir physical presence, “real.” This scene suggests that after he has left his material life and transferred hismind and consciousness into cyberspace, Bobby has reached a truer, more “substantial” level of existence.And Angie does likewise. This interpretation is supported by the fact that dying in the “real” world does notmean the end of life for Bobby and Angie. On the contrary, as explained above, at the beginning of CountZero Bobby risks dying in cyberspace, which would have implied physical death for him.

Throughout Gibson’s trilogy cyberspace has become something more than a means ofcommunication and data storage and exchange. At the beginning of Neuromancer it was introduced as anabstract representation of data where console cowboys could detach themselves from their physicalperceptions and feel like bodiless free entities. In this sense cyberspace is just a limited reproduction ofreality. By the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive, though, it has assumed the characteristics of a possible worldthat is potentially more “real” than “reality” itself. Paradoxically, in the “real” world people are identifiedthrough a set of data and indicated as numbers. Instead, in the possible worlds of cyberspace posthumansubjects can live a truer life, more focused on their essence.

According to this line of interpretation, cyberspace and its posthuman inhabitants can be seen asmetaphors which suit Dick’s own quest for the “real” human and reality. Significantly, the ideas ofcyberspace and the aleph as concentric levels of reality recall Dick’s own interpretation of Ubik in the essay“Man, Android and Machine.”90 According to Dick, Ubik suggests that “our world … is like an onion, analmost infinite number of successive layers. … One is reminded here of Plotinus’s view of the universe asconsisting of concentric rings of emanation, each one possessing more Being – or reality – than the next.”91

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In conclusion Gibson’s cyberspace (and its accompanying themes) is very much a homological re-elaboration of Dick’s earlier explorations into possible worlds theory. Yet, Gibson pushes his fiction towardsdifferent aims. In his trilogy “artificial” does not necessarily mean fake or imply a negative connotation. Asin Dick’s fiction, Gibson’s artificial and posthuman subjects call into question the very essence of humanity,just as cyberspace questions the very essence of reality. Yet, while Dick searches for what is “real” and“human” among a myriad of possible and impossible world, Gibson seems satisfied to point out that theremay be truer levels of existence than the ones we commonly consider “real” and “human.” On the one hand,Dick gives fundamental importance to human nature and the quest for its truest manifestations; on the other,Gibson searches outside and beyond human nature for new ways to interpret and conceive humanity.

Endnotes

1 Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 13.2 Ibid., p. 13.3 Ibid., p. 16.4 Umberto Eco, I Limiti dell’Interpretazione (Milano: Bompiani, 1990), p. 204.5 Jaakko Hintikka, “Situations, Possible Worlds, and Attitudes.” Synthese 54 (1983), p. 153.6 Eco, I Limiti, p. 194.7 Ibid., pp. 197-198.8 Ibid., pp. 149-150.9 Ugo Volli, “Mondi Possibili, Logica, Semiotica,” VS 19/20 (1978), p. 123.10 Cf. Franco Ferrini, Che Cosa E’ La Fantascienza (Roma: Ubaldini, 1970), chapter 4, pp. 35-42; Harry Harrison,“Worlds Beside Worlds,” Science Fiction at Large: A Collection of Essays, by Various Hands, about the Interfacebetween Science Fiction and Reality, ed. Peter Nicholls (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), pp. 105-114; Robert Scholesand Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History – Science – Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), chapter 4,pp. 175-179; Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (London: Yale University Press, 1979), chapters 1 and 2;Stanislaw Lem, Microworlds (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1986), pp. 136-160.11 Volli, “Mondi,” p. 136.12 Ugo Volli, “Gli Universi Possibili della Semiotica e della Fantascienza,” La Fantascienza e la Critica: Testi delConvegno Internazionale di Palermo, ed. Luigi Russo (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1980) pp. 123-124.13 Dolezel, p. 13, note 19.14 Darko Suvin as well speaks of a “crucial coincidence between SF practice and contemporary semiotics: theirsimultaneous use of the concept, metaphor or model of possible worlds.” (Darko Suvin, Positions and Presuppositionsin Science Fiction [London: The MacMillan Press, 1988], p. 197).15 Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula (Milano: Bompiani, 1979), pp. 123-173.16 Suvin, Positions, p. 197. Discussing Eco’s points of view and those of semiotics, Suvin points out that “the SFuniverse of discourse presents syntagmatically developed possible worlds as models (more precisely thoughtexperiments) or as totalizing and thematic metaphors.” (Suvin, Positions, p. 198).17 Philip Dick, “On the Definition of SF – A Letter by Philip K Dick.” 1975 http://www.philipkdick.com/frank/sf-letter.htm. In the same letter Dick goes on, “ Science fiction ... stays in a universe of ideas born in the depths of thewriter which are then shared with the reader to become “idea-worlds.” Science fiction is thus due primarily to this, notan idea which would remain pure and unsubstantial, but an idea which becomes a world in which the dream, thephilosophy, are perceived as sensitive and concrete.”18 Philip Dick, “Who Is an SF Writer?” (1974) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Selected Literary andPhilosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 69-78, p. 75. In the same essay Dickexplains, “he [the SF writer] wants to see possibilities not actualities. But ... his possibilities are not escapist ... becausethe source of them lies firmly rooted in reality. ... The SF writer is able to dissolve the normal absolute quality that theobjects (our actual environment, our daily routine) have; he has cut us loose enough to put us in a third space, neitherthe concrete nor the abstract, but something unique, something connected to both and hence relevant,” p. 75.19 Cf. Dolezel, chapter VI, pp. 145-168.20 Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 63.21 Cf. Francesca Rispoli, Universi che Cadono a Pezzi: la Fantascienza di Philip K. Dick (Milano: Bruno Mondadori,2001).22 Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978, 1985), The ShiftingRealities of Philip K. Dick, ed. Sutin, op. cit. 259-280, p. 262.23 Darko Suvin, “The Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View,” On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-FictionStudies, ed. R. D. Mullen et al. (Terre Haute & Greencastle: SF – TH, 1992) 2-15, pp. 8-9.

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24 Generally, in Dick’s science fiction robots (or androids, as he often prefers to call them) are inherently bad. Their evilnature is strictly linked to the fact that they try to deceive men by disguising themselves as human beings. Goodexamples of Dick’s use of robots/androids are represented by the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968)and by a number of short stories like “The Defenders” (1953), “Second Variety” (1953), “James P. Crow” (1954) andmany others. In the two novels of Dick’s I analyze in this paper, the most significant traces of a robot are the stigmata ofEldritch themselves.25 Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [hereafter TSPE] (1965; New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 86.26 According to Patricia Warrick, the plot of this novel has a “hypnotic power … over the reader’s consciousness. Justas he has turned the kaleidoscope of his attention on a world and focused enough to see its pattern, the lens shifts and hefinds himself looking at another bizarre world.” (Patricia S. Warrick, Mind in Motion – The Fiction of Philip K. Dick[Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987], p. 107).27 TSPE, p. 227.28 TSPE, p. 224.29 When Barney Mayerson, under the effects of Chew-Z, enters Eldritch’s consciousness, he “feels his helplessness inthe hands of a cosmic force greater than he. His hell is that he may not be able to escape that force through death.”(Warrick, p. 107).30 Ibid., p. 110.In TSPE Leo Bulero, too, tries to transcend the human condition and the limits imposed by human time. Through atherapy meant to cause evolution, Bulero has become “Homo sapiens evolvens: … the human of the future right here”(TSPE p. 227). He reflects, “I may not have lived as long as Eldritch in one sense, but in another sense I have; I’ve liveda hundred thousand years, that of my accelerated evolution” (TSPE p. 229). Bulero too has become a post-human, butonly by following Blau’s advice and by continuing to think with his enlarged forehead, his “bubble-head” (TSPE, p.230), can he avoid becoming Palmer Eldritch in mind and personality when his body already shows the three stigmata.31 Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969; London: Victor Gollancz, 2000), p. 15.32 Ubik, p. 73.33 Michael Bishop, “In Pursuit of Ubik,” Philip K. Dick, ed. Martin Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander (New York:Taplinger, 1983) 137-147, pp. 137-138.According to Peter Fitting, “half-life is not presented as a realistic future possibility (that is to say, the novel does notexplain how half-life might be possible, nor does it explore the possible moral, ethical or scientific problems raised).Thus the reader might begin by envisaging half-life as the fictional transposition of the world of ghosts and spirits intoan SF novel, where the explanation is provided by pseudo-scientific assertions rather than by references to thesupernatural. Within this context both the quest for meaning and the never-ending struggle between the forces of lifeand death have traditionally a metaphysical significance.” Peter Fitting, “Ubik: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF,”On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies, ed. R. D. Mullen et al. (Terre Haute & Greencastle: SF –TH, 1992) 41-49, p. 43.34 Douglas A. Mackey, Philip K. Dick (Boston: Twayne, 1988), p. 93.35 Ubik, p. 221.36 Ubik, p. 223.37 “The novel provides no … answer, just as no key is given to man when he asks, What is death? What lies beyond? …Each man must make the intuitive leap to his own answer” (Warrick, p. 144).38 Moreover, in order not to see their reality disintegrate under their very eyes, men need Ubik, a mysterious substancewhich has the power of a god and that alone can fight entropy and annihilation. Yet, Ubik is introduced by commercial-like slogans and as a mass-market product. According to Fitting, Ubik represents the substitution of God with materialgoods and the “identification of religion and capitalist consumerism” in contemporary society (Fitting, p. 44).39 William Gibson, Count Zero [hereafter CZ], (1986; London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 24040 CZ, p. 241.41 William Gibson, Neuromancer [hereafter N], (1984; London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 71.42 N, p. 67.43 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive [hereafter MLO], (1988; London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 271.44 N, p. 68.45 N, p. 68.46 N, p. 11. Gibson uses alternatively the terms “cowboys” and “console jockeys” to indicate the hackers of cyberspace.Apparently, only the best and “professional” hackers are called cowboys.47 N, p. 12.48 N, p. 71.49 Kevin McCarron, “Corpses, Animals, Machines and Mannequins: The Body and Cyberpunk,”Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995) 261-273, p. 261.50 N, p. 99.51 Hereafter AIs.52 N, p. 65.

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53 N, p. 98.54 N, p. 130.55 N, p. 130.56 Timo Siivonen, “Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in William Gibson’s CyberspaceTrilogy,” Science Fiction Studies vol. 23 n. 2 (July 1996) 227-244, p. 232.57 N, p. 91.58 N, p. 92.59 “Ice from ICE, Intrusion countermeasures electronics” (N, p. 39).60 N, p. 145.61 N, p. 98.62 N, p. 65.63 N, p. 138.64 MLO, p. 136.65 CZ, pp. 169-170.66 MLO, p. 264.67 MLO, p. 236.68 CZ, p. 170.69 CZ, p. 9.70 CZ, p. 25.71 CZ, p. 29.72 CZ, p. 301.73 CZ, p. 319.74 CZ, p. 163.75 CZ, p. 163.76 CZ, p. 27.77 CZ, p. 28.78 MLO, p. 59.79 MLO, p. 265.80 MLO, p. 265.81 Siivonen, pp. 234-235.82 MLO, p. 174.83 MLO, p. 236.84 MLO, p. 150.Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It has various mystical meanings in the Kabbalah. The most interestingone for science fiction is connected to the creation of the golem – commonly considered an ancestor of SF robots andthus indirectly of AIs. In order to give life to the golem, the word emet must be written on its forehead. This wordmeans truth and is written with an initial aleph. To kill the golem it is sufficient to erase the initial aleph from the word.In this way the word met, which means dead, is obtained (Giulio Busi and Elena Loewenthal eds., Mistica Ebraica.[Torino: Einaudi, 1995], pp. XXXIX-XL). Thus, we can say regarding the golem, that aleph is the letter that marks thedifference between life and death.85 MLO, p. 163.86 Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 253 and p. 260.87 MLO, p. 218.88 MLO, p. 295.89 MLO, p. 294.90 Philip K. Dick, “Man, Android and Machine” (1976), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, ed. Sutin op. cit., pp.211-232.91 Ibid., p. 217.Significantly, Dick’s essays can be read proleptically as virtual commentaries on Gibson’s novels, especially when Dickdescribes, “the bombardment of pseudorealities [which] begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurioushumans – as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humanswill generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.” With thesewords Dick provides an interpretation of his own work. Yet, these observations suit as well a pessimistic interpretationof Gibson’s cyberspace and cyber-beings.