Presenters
Abstract
A work of literature is a fiction in which we immerse ourselves to experience things that we often do not have access to in the real world. Likewise, virtual reality video games are fictions that players immerse themselves in to have experiences that are inaccessible, or perhaps unacceptable, in the real world. What cyberpunk and its literary progeny offer us then, is a double level of fiction for their readers: the “real” narrative world, and the artificial world in which the characters immerse themselves. In fiction, as in life, the separation between realities, real and virtual, is persistently unstable, in spite of their arguably objective, stable ontological status. This presentation will discuss the canonical Neuromancer along with the recently published homage to 1980’s culture Ready Player One and fantasy series A Modern Witch and attend to the role of virtual realities and the slippage between the real and the virtual that occurs in the texts. How strictly do these different narratives maintain the divide between real and virtual? Does the intrusion of the virtual world have a positive or negative influence on the “real” world and vice versa? When does the narrative/narrator completely erase the divide between the worlds? Does genre influence how the virtual is used? Considering these questions allows us to reflect on the anxieties that produce these narratives and that have underscored debates about reading and art for centuries: what happens to humans and human civilization when the fictional becomes the real?