Table of Contents

Introduction: gestalt psychology and cyberpunk; 1. Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy; 2. Chaos in the Bridge trilogy; 3. Perception in Pattern Recognition; 4. Psychoanalysis in Spook Country; 5. The parallax view in Zero History; 6. The haptic interface in The Peripheral; 7. Agency, and Gibson in the twenty-first century

About the Author

Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow with a project investigating images of traumatic pregnancy in fantastic literature. She is the co-editor of Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (2016), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink, 2020), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink), and The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.

Reviews

William Gibson’s novels are phenomenological reports from the frontiers of global technoculture. In this study, Anna McFarlane demonstrates how the visuality of Gibson’s writing textures and shapes the subjectivities of both his characters and his readers. She situates her complex readings at the intersections of gestalt psychology, autopoiesis and chaos theory, psychoanalysis and posthumanism, and ecology to produce a work of ‘gestalt literary criticism.’ Gibson’s fiction is at once the focus of this very productive approach and a case study demonstrating its efficacy. In gestalt perception, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the same might be said of McFarlane’s study: this is one of the most insightful and convincing readings of Gibson’s fiction published to date, as well as an incisive examination of science fiction as ‘a literature of the interface.’ Professor Veronica Hollinger, Science Fiction StudiesCyberpunk is a field deeply important to the current moment of our world and its technological advancement. Anna McFarlane’s Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology is a well-timed contribution to the understanding of how cyberpunk shapes our self-perception in technologized times from one of the most innovative scholars currently working in the UK. Dr Lars Schmeink, author of Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction