Apocalypse and Other Matters: Questions for Questions John Francis Crews Here are my interests as they involve Gibson and his world of the commodity, technology fetish. 1. Is there any possibility for pleasure in the world of Gibson? What is ephemeral? 2. Wh at is an apocalypse? Can we define what that might be, as it is referred to differently in each book? 3. What happens to how social groups evaluate human life? Remember the various people we meet in the Trilogy... How do we value it? It's dur ation? It's persistence? 4. Has the human program subverted evolution? How is technology a player in the increasingly augmented society of the Sprawl? 5. Connecting Gibson with another author, Frank Herbert of Dune also envision s a rather large metaphysical universe, populated with similar analogues- surfers of the conscious and unconscious psyche of the human. In this universe, humans have expanded their location(s) throughout the universe, become independent of artificial inte lligence, and have experienced a similar craving for the soul. This is after the butlerian jihad, a universal rejection of the thinking machines caused by a rebellion of those AI forms. For any truly esoteric readers, when is Gibson's jihad coming? I n his conception of the world, when will the anxiety of an increasingly obsolete and limited human body/mind ? That is to say, what are the conditions, do you think, that will cause humans to recognize their own limits and react violently? And can we trace sentience or define it in other than human terms? (Think of the movies Terminator II, Ghost in the Shell, and the emergent intelligence Wintermute-Neuromancer). Brought to you
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