Through a Mirror Shade Darkly: The subtle sublime of cyberpunk Part 01

Mirror shades, the iconic emblem of cyberpunk serve to hide the eyes, “the window to the soul, insight and love” behind “reflective surfaces” (Olsen, 278-279), leading one to assume a lack of transcendent elements within the genre. However, buried within the semiotic jumble of hardwire and circuit board landscapes (both inner and exterior) and the yearnings of the rock rebel protagonists in the works of Gibson, Maddox, and Stephenson a sublimated spirituality hides.
The path to this spirituality is convoluted; to uncover it, we must first understand how cyberpunk has restructured mythic/religious narrative, by identifying the transcendent elements (and the writers’ ambivalence toward them) in various cyberpunk writings. In doing so, we will find that most cyberpunk writers could not commit to fully realizing the metaphysical levels of reality they constructed as narrative devices. Ironically, at the end of the path we will discover the trilogy of literature which first ignored its own sublimated spirituality shares the same name for cyberspace as the film trilogy which was able to realize it fully. While cyberpunk seems to state with unanimity that “God, as such, had died” (Bear, 106), it will be shown, that to the contrary, God has merely moved into cyberspace.