Nicolas Nova highlights a very interesting quote from Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s paper “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?”, which I also will quote in full:

“Neuromancer reached the hackers who had been radicalized by George Lucas’s powerful cinematic evocation of humanity and technology infinitely extended, and it reached the technologically literate and socially disaffected who were searching for social forms that could transform the fragmented anomie that characterized life in Silicon Valley and all electronic industrial ghettos. In a single stroke, Gibson’s powerful vision provided for them the imaginal public sphere and refigured discursive community that established the grounding for the possibility of a new kind of social interaction. As with Paul and Virginia in the time of Napoleon and Dupont de Nemours, Neuromancer in the time of Reagan and DARPA is a massive intertextual presence not only in other literary productions of the 1980s, but in technical publications, conference topics, hardware design, and scientific and technological discourses in the large.”

As much as we like to consider the influence of technology on our stories, fictions and narratives, it is a fascinating thought exercise to think about how some of those fictional and cinematic narratives have come to influence, positively and negatively, our conception of the technological future. Sadly, we get only the tiniest glimpses inside mental wonderland of individuals. I, for instance, have seen my understanding of technology and the future shaped by influences that range from an early encounter with a book about Einstein to the hidden workings and mechanical claptrap of The Price is Right. But it isn’t hard to understand that very few of those pondering this part of our future– and even fewer of those who are actively working on bringing it about– can do so without these widespread ideas sneaking in.

Who can think of artificial intelligence without invoking the voice of HAL? Who can consider humanoid, or even human-task capable, robots without a bit of Asimov, Star Wars, and Blade Runner shaping their thoughts? Our conception of virtual worlds is heavily influenced not just by Gibson and Lucas, of course, but by Stephenson and Star Trek. And in a dizzying way that can lead to sleepless nights, all of these are heavily influenced by a variety of ubiquitous classical texts and authors.

Perhaps that is the definition of one kind of truly great speculative writing or cinema, that which creates a disruption in what we expect so great– and yet so plausibly and/or believably (and those two are not equivalent!) that you can’t help but be shaped by, or in reaction to, it.

Incidentally, the paper first appeared in Cyberspace: First Steps, a volume edited by Michael Benedikt. I look forward to tracking the essays down. And for inquiring minds: no, it’s probably not the same Michael Benedikt who put together one of the earliest and most influential anthologies of the english language prose poem… which itself created a norm for that very young kind of writing whose influence– a kind of soft, minimalistic surrealism– is still strong today.