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Yoke, Carl B., and Carol L. Robinson, eds. The Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the "Father" of Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. 333 pp. Hardback. ISBN 0-7734-5467-5. $120.00.
William Gibson first catapulted to success on the wave of eighties-era cyberpunk, but his fictions remain central for ongoing interrogations of our increasingly technocultural milieus. His work has been the subject of edited anthologies and peer-review articles, many of them devoted chiefly to his Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Neuromancer. Carl B. Yoke and Carol L. Robinson's The Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the "Father" of Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Critical and Interpretive Essays is the latest entrant into this arena, and its strength is its willingness to move beyond Neuromancer and engage Gibson's wider corpus of work. Neuromancer remains a center of attention, but this collection of fifteen essays also sheds light on the Sprawl stories ("Johnny Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel," "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," and "Burning Chrome"), Count Zero, Mona Usa Overdrive, ldoru, and Pattern Recognition, although Virtual Light and AZZ Tomorrow's Parties do get short shrift (Spook Country was not released at the time of production) . It was wholly refreshing not to have to wade through an entire Neuromancer anthology, and the promise of diverse critical engagements of Gibson's oeuvre continued to draw me forward. Unfortunately, Yoke and Robinson's Cultural Influences of William Gibson remains in many ways a promise unfulfilled.
Yoke and Robinson map the genesis of their anthology to a conference session held at the Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film in 2001. Contributor solicitations followed over several years, including several ICFA (International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) offerings. This turns out to be the first problem with the collection. Too many of the essays read like they are transcribed conference papers and not fully developed critical essays; consequently, there are noticeable gaps in the essays' critical ideas and moments of analytical underdevelopment. For example, Joseph M. Dudley ("The Body as Data in an Information Economy: Multiple Levels of Discourse in 'Johnny Mnemonic'") problematically (mis) represents "soft sf as drawing "much plot and character inspiration from other genres, such as historical fantasy and the western, and...