In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature

ii Acknowledgments iii Chapter 1 Cyberpunk Fiction and the Secular 1 Chapter 2 Fighting the Freaks: Religion as Virus in Snow Crash 64 Chapter 3 Encountering Zion: The Secular Sublime in Neuromancer 111 Chapter 4 Exits, Entrances and Alternate Paths: Cyberpunk Cinema 157 Bibliography 199 Curriculum Vita 219

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Religion in postmodern science fiction: a case study in secularity

The rapid pace of software’s development poses serious challenges for any cultural history of computing. While digital media studies often sidestep historicism, this project asserts that computing’s messy, and often hidden, history can be studied using digital tools built to adapt text-mining strategies to the textuality of source code. My project examines the emergence of personal computing, a platform underlying much of digital media studies but that itself has received little attention outside of corporate histories. Using an archive of technical papers, professional journals, popular magazines, and science fiction, I trace the origin of design strategies that led to a largely instrumentalist view of personal computing and elevated “transparent design” to a privileged status. I then apply text-mining tools that I built with this historical context in mind to study source code critically, including those features of applications hidden by transparent design strategies. This project’s first three chapters examine how and why strategies of information hiding shaped consumer software design from the 1980s on. In Chapter 1, I analyze technical literature from the 1970s and 80s to show how cognitive psychologists and computer engineers developed an ideal of transparency that discouraged users from accessing information structures underlying personal computers. Prior to the early 1980s, software designers assumed that users were at least semi-literature in the technical details of computer systems. In response to the expanding popular interest in personal computing, engineers abandoned this assumption and began to design hardware and software for users with little or no understanding of computer systems. Successful software design became defined by the invisibility of computation. Users were made to feel that they were directly manipulating their data. Intimidating command prompts were hidden, and the complex operations performed through them automated behind simpler, visual metaphors like

Transparent cultures: Imagined users and the politics of software design (1975-2012)

Although cybercartography is a new field of study, its arrival has long been rehearsed in popular culture and entertainment, including novels, films, Web sites and digital games. The widespread representation of cartographic, navigational and location technologies in popular texts have created cultural expectations that far exceed the current technical limits of mapping tools. At the same time, these popular narratives enable a growing familiarity with the concept of cybercartography that cannot but shape the way users approach the cybermaps of the future. This chapter will explore cybermaps as a popular concept, examining some of the cybercartographic interfaces (both real and fictional) that have been imagined and implemented in printed fiction, hyperfiction, Web sites, films and digital games. Through various forms of cultural analysis, I will show how the stories we tell about cybermaps today can inform future cybercartographic theory and practice. Note: View the SIM City Screen Capture Images on the Accompanying CD-Rom.

Chapter 13 Mapping play: What cybercartographers can learn from popular culture

Cyberfiction offers a tantalizing view of what a completely networked world might be like; yet even with distance transcended by computers and phone links, the real world persists as an important component of these narratives. Examin- ing the representation of real spaces in cyberpunk fiction not only reveals the narra- tives' reliance on events in ''real'' space but also shows how their assumptions about organizing space and distributing power are more colonialist than futurist. In con- junction with this geography, these narratives also employ the genre most closely associated with colonialism—namely, adventure. The reliance on first-world/third- world divisions leads us to question why these seemingly innovative narratives would rely on ''old'' geographies and ''old'' genres in their re-vision of a new, postdistance world. The innovations of Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers offer sharp contrast to the stan- dard texts of cyberfiction, particularly classics by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. The difference shows that only by questioning narrative structure, interrogating the conventions of genre, and mapping a geography of real space that is closer to home can cyberpunk narratives stop reinscribing technological change in terms of the exotic and begin to explore the repercussions of technology on the scale of the famil- iar. This change in narrative and geographical imagination must happen in order to achieve the aim that all these fictions seek: that is, to challenge our understanding of what this new technological power will enable.

E. L. McCallum

Papers

Mapping the Real in Cyberfiction