The Status of Nature in Williams Gibson's *Neuromancer*

I'm teaching a "History of the Novel" class this semester. And I decided to end the class with William Gibson's Neuromancer. We began with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and now we're ending with a cyberpunk. "What a strange juxtaposition!" you might say. Indeed. Why did I decide on this?

Well, here's my thought succinctly: I'm intrigued by the "status of nature" in both of the novels; more specifically, I'm interested in how the "status of nature" has changed from Robinson Crusoe to Neuromancer.

In Robinson Crusoe nature is something that the protagonist stands off from. Robinson finds himself thrown into nature after a shipwreck. He's trapped in a context that the novel figures as being outside of civilization.The island is a natural space untouched by man, a kind of primal/edenic space unsullied by any sort of cultivation. When we focus on the "status of nature," the narrative of Robinson Crusoe comes to resemble the story of a man-engineer-artist domesticating, changing, organizing, cultivating nature. Not only does Robinson adapt to his island, he makes the island adapt to him through the art of agriculture, engineering projects, the organization of social orders (e.g. his relationship to his "savage" servant Friday).

In Neuromancer nature has a completely different status. It's almost "choked out" by the industrial civilization of Gibson's imagined dystopic future. Nature has somehow disappeared and the mechanized system of human society has been completely swallowed up by it. The world has become a technological system that folks navigate like a macro-computer as users rather than, say, as in Robinson Crusoe, a space of unknown limits pervaded by mysterious unexplored regions. Consider how Case, Molly, and Armitage get around: they shoot from one continent to another on sub-orbital jets; they "tube" from one side of the sprawl to another; the leave the "gravity well" behind and linger in a totally artificial satellite-resort. Indeed, "nature" in Neuromancer has been reduced to a kind of non-entity, completely submerged in the industrial civilization.

Or has it?

I'm questioning this framework now. Why? I'm thinking of Freeside, the satellite resort where the Villa Straylight is and where the "climax" of the action takes place. On Freeside, if you remember, they have grass and gnarled trees; the food they serve in the restaurants here is not cheap "synth" material but actually real (I'm thinking of the passage where Molly criticizes a hung over Case for not eating his "real and expensive" steak). Hmm... It's interesting. To an extent Freeside is the most artificial of spaces in Neuromancer: a satellite created by humanity. It's fully artificial, an arcology, i.e. an artificial ecology. And yet! It's on Freeside where Case actually encounters nature. He smells fresh cut grass for the first time; he sees trees; he eats real steak. Hmm...on Freeside is where this hacker has a visceral confrontation with nature as such.

Could it be that the transformation of the "status of nature" we glimpse in these two novels represents something like the traditional problem of mimesis? When does artistic representation become so accurate, so fully realized, that the philosophical/metaphysical distinction between imitation and original stops making sense? Stops being useful. 

Has authentic nature in Neuromancer become just as artificial as the computer intelligence that structures and conditions the narrative? Perhaps.