While analyzing Gibson’s novel and comparing it to all kinds of scientific and technological projects or with vulgarized or techno-prophetical literature, what is striking is not so much the absolute originality of techno-scientific developments that one can find in Science-Fiction literature. What really changes is the setting or rather, the context, and the social environment. For too many scholars, engineers or popularisers, the social world is disconcertingly simple: everything goes, as if technologies were invented in a social vacuum, as if the surrounding world did not exist or at least, was motionless, without constraints and resistance. A utopian world, rigid and stiff, outside time and space. In contrast however, Science-Fiction re-establishes technologies in fiction, narratives, movement, society. In such a society, there are power struggles, needs for domination, there are human beings, desires, conflicts. Despite the apparent freedom or liberation provided by cyberspace, the characters in Neuromancer are no less typically submitted to constant coercion. Torn between the interests of multinationals, states, criminal organisations or autonomous artificial intelligences (usually very powerful), these characters do not really have free reign in having their bodies transformed. The labour market somehow dictates their choices. There is a sort of generalized competition leading to the wildest corporeal transformations. For instance, let us consider the ensuing consequences for a computer scientist: does he or she really need a body for programming? A contract killer, a prostitute, a packer in space? Wouldn’t it be useful to have several supplementary arms?

Couldn’t an actor or actress be forced to have a camera implanted in the eye? One can imagine all sorts of examples. Rather than paying the services of a translator-interpreter, wouldn’t it be faster and more advantageous to get an electronic implant in the brain? What is certain is that the reach of bodily transformations goes far beyond surgical or medical aspects. There are more important consequences and more data to consider: who can or must modify himself/herself, how and according to what criteria? It is not a simple task. In Gibson’s novels, the body thwarts the soul’s wandering and its disappearance into cyberspace. A key-passage shows Case, the hero, or rather “antihero”, during a coupling session to cyberspace: he is trapped by an artificial intelligence which has created a virtual space in order to keep him for neutralization. Things are very well organised: the hero finds himself on the beach of a fictitious ocean, where calm and serenity prevail. Linda, Case’s deceased lover appears, numerically reconstituted. Case is not far from giving way to this illusion and forgets to come back to reality, thus abandoning his body and leaving it to die. In a world of absolute mobility and total flexibility, where We did not take the questions of definition into consideration. The basic difference between cyborgs and robots or androids resides in the fusion of a human being with a machine. Despite this minimal criterion, there are thousands of ways to be a cyborg: the implant of a “simple” pacemaker, the complete transformation of the body, the eye-camera, but also artificial limbs and organs, doped athletes, a soul downloaded into a network, etc. everything should constantly move and change, there are elements of stability, foundations that have to be stabilized. Although transformed in thousands of ways, the body in Neuromancer remains a fundamental anchor for one’s identity.

CONCLUSION –

It lacked history, culture, even definition, and could therefore serve as a blank slate for cultural critique and a perfect expression of the desire to escape Lyotard’s postmodern condition. According to Judith Halberstam, a feminist historian and theorist, Haraway’s cyborg was “a condensed image of both imaginative and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” This image was particularly useful for feminists who sought to avoid the ideological dangers of recourse to an “authentic” female identity, which is one of the main postmodern feminist criticisms of second-wave feminism, which will be discussed shortly. However, it seemed sensible to refer to relevant themes and precise examples in order to propose some perspectives for in-depth reflection. The next example is precisely aimed at attracting, once again, the reader’s attention by proposing a final original perspective on cyborgs. This novel does not refer to any philosophical tradition but most of the narrative takes place in law courts. One can easily imagine problems such as succession, civil rights, property which can emerge from that situation. The soul of the character being trapped into a vacuum cleaner, one can ask whether the latter has become the owner of the family house? Is his insurance coverage still valid? Can he keep his passport? Is he still the father of his children? Such pragmatic aspects make us smile. But what would happen if that bizarre vacuum image is replaced by the body of a humanoid robot? The day human beings more closely resemble cyborgs, like Steve Austin and Duane Fitzgerald, will cause these questions to emerge.