Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades by Anna McFarlane (review)

Reviewed by: Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshadesby Anna McFarlane Simone Caroti All Tomorrow's Gestalts. Anna McFarlane. Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades. Routledge, 2022. 168 pp. 160 hc, 36. 71 ebk. The title highlights the change. Already in The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2021) and in Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022), both of which Anna McFarlane co-edited with Lars Schmeink and Graham J. Murphy, the title's choice of wording—"Cyberpunk Culture"—indicates the completion of a forty-year transformation process. Cyberpunk, which began life as a localized movement in literary science fiction, has now become a multimedia, multi-platform repository of cultural and aesthetic practices that involve every kind of text available to our civilization—novels and short stories, film and television, comics, video games, tabletop board games and RPGs, art, photography, music, and fashion. The Companionmakes this transformation into one of its central critical and discursive standpoints, while Fifty Key Figurespresents us with a list of creators that, taken together, embody the history and contemporary practice of cyberpunk culture. If the Companionconstitutes the multifaceted guide to the many tributaries of cyberpunk culture, Fifty Key Figuresrepresents a who's-who directory to the guide. And then there is the book under review here. McFarlane is the sole author, but the connection to the works mentioned above becomes explicitly clear in the introduction when, referring to the Companion, she writes that "This monograph contributes to this body of scholarship by bridging the visual emphasis of cyberpunk and its implications for posthuman ontology" (2). McFarlane's aim in this book is to discuss the novels of William Gibson, whom she credits with spearheading cyberpunk's renewal of science fiction during the mid-1980s, as documents to his work foregrounding the twin influences of visual culture and posthumanism. In her analysis, we can see Gibson's work as a prescient embodiment of the practices, parameters, and indeed values of cyberpunk culture. McFarlane traces out Gibson's posthuman/visual influences using a critical lens of her own devising. She calls it "gestalt literary theory, " a term she derives from the gestalt school of psychology as exemplified by the work of Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, which first became available End Page 322to English-speaking professionals in the early 1920s. Gestalt psychology argues against John Locke's tabula rasamodel of perception, positing instead that "the human mind imposes a form, or 'gestalt, ' onto visual information from the outside world. This allows information to be understood without overwhelming the subject with raw data through privileging some information over others" (3). Gestalt perception is therefore characterized, for example, by pattern-recognition processes, by the tendency to simplify the individual features of outwardly similar objects in order to group them together more easily, or by the privileging of relationships between elements in a given data set over the individuality of those elements. Gestalt literary theory derives from the original a focus on the same processes in literary texts. Its connection to William Gibson, a writer who repeatedly uses the term "gestalt" in his novels and who titled one of them Pattern Recognition, is particularly strong. McFarlane explains that the creation of this new discipline in literary criticism allows her, in the present book, to read Gibson's novels, and indeed literary sf in general, as embodiments of threshold literature, fictional entities capable of welding together such seemingly separate realities as art and science, human and non-human, pre- and post-human. Throughout this book, McFarlane looks at Gibson's texts both as examples of gestalt writing (in the story, relationships between detailed agents take precedence over the agents themselves) and as engines of gestalt perception: that is to say, we are meant to walk away from a Gibson novel with the feeling we have witnessed the weaving of a network of connections between otherwise separate entities. The book is divided into seven chapters (plus the introduction), which analyze Gibson's novels in order of publication. Accordingly, the first two chapters tackle the first two series, the S prawltrilogy (1984-1988) and the B ridgetrilogy (1993-1999). Starting. . .