Renegar, Valerie R. and George N. Dionisopoulos. "The Dream of a Cyberpunk Future? Entelechy, Dialectical Tension, and the Comic Corrective in William Gibson's Neuromancer." Southern Communication Journal, vol. 76, no. 4, Sept. 2011, pp. 323-341. Print. We argue the comic frame, as described by Kenneth Burke, can serve as a vehicle for critical self-reflection and social critique. William Gibson's Neuromancer is a work of cyberpunk science fiction that details a future that closely resembles the present. The book exemplifies this process of encouraging self-reflection because it calls the trends of the present into question by imagining what kind of future they will construct. Gibson's future is simultaneously exciting and devastating. The dialectical tension between these oppositional ideas opens up a discursive space for audiences to begin the process of critical self-reflection about the technological trends of …show more content…
While the network society provides mobility primarily for elites, it nevertheless offers possibility for subaltern masses to be visible within its networks. The network society, then, would seem to offer less masculine domination than the earlier moment of imperialism, an idea Gibson reinforces by dissolving the globalized manager Armitage. And yet managerial power does not dissipate with Armitage; the hacker Case, seemingly an outsider to power, emerges as a kind of manager by the novel's end. Similarly, the subaltern subjects who seemed to gain power throughout the book's plot—most notably the Rastafarians—are ultimately subordinated to the imperial power represented by