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suggests that such a domination comes with a price in relation at
least to the environment. The presence throughout the film of float-
ing advertisements extolling the virtues of off-world colonization
suggests a world that is no longer a desirable place to live.
Blade Runner
came out at a time when new technology was
becoming far more visible in mainstream culture. The early '
s
saw the development of the Apple Macintosh, the machine that
made computing 'friendly' and accessible (and for the launch of
which Ridley Scott directed an advertisement of record breaking
expense in
Blade Runner
style); the emergence of Techno music, the
paradigmatic dance noise of the post-industrial urban landscape,
and the beginnings of 'deconstructionist' graphic design. William
Gibson's science fiction novel
Neuromancer
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resonated perfectly
with these elements of the
zeitgeist
. Though not responsible either
for originating the term, or for the ideas it came to embody,
Gibson's topic is the paradigmatic work of 'Cyberpunk'. In it he
'coalesced an eclectic range of generic protocols, contemporary
idiolects, and a pervasive technological eroticism combined with a
future-shocking ambivalence'.
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An eclectic set of influences, includ-
ing Raymond Chandler, Burroughs and Michael Herr, author of
Vietnam reportage classic,
Dispatches
,
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are combined to produce a
dystopian vision of the near future, in which the nation state is
of negligible importance and the world is dominated by high-
tech corporations, or as Gibson calls them as part of an insistent
orientialism,
zaibatsu
. Everywhere vast conurbations have spread,
such as Chiba City in Japan or the Sprawl on the Eastern Seaboard
of the United States. The most important space in
Neuromancer
is
the non-space of the computer networks, or, in Gibson's by now
famous term, 'cyberspace'. Gibson's vision of a three-dimensional
realization of networked computer data is by now both famous and
influential. This description he gives in
Neuromancer
has become
canonical.
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