Mona Lisa Overdrive

Hence, Count Zero presents several Cyberpunk themes and concerns such as the discussion of cyberspace or virtual reality, genetic manipulation, organ transplantation, and surgeries that combine the human body to machines through prosthesis, computer networks and control of information and power relations through these nets, changing economic systems due to new formations, computer pirates known as “hackers”, artificial intelligence and cybernetics.

too. She is able to connect to virtual world physically without using cyberspace decks, which is rarely seen in the cyberspace. Mona is hired to undergo cosmetic surgery and replace Angie by some unknown individuals who plan to abduct Angie.

The second story line centres on Kumiko, who is a teenage Japanese girl.Her father is a Yakuza Boss and sends her to England, to protect her from the dangers of his own life. However, Kumiko finds herself in danger in London. She meets Sally Shears, who was once Molly (in Neuromancer) and gets involved in a kidnapping and blackmailing plan with Mona against Angie Mitchell. Finally, in the last story line Slick Henry who is an artist from the underprivileged parts of the city, is introduced. He is hired to look after Angie's catatonic lover, Bobby, who's body is nearly dead while he continues to live in the virtual world. He receives no explanation about the situation but only says: "He's under, baby. He's on a long trip.

He needs peace and quiet" (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 11). The plot line about Kumiko, which is treated in thirteen chapters focuses on Kumiko‟s growing up, from childhood innocence to adulthood understanding. Thus, the plot structure takes the form of an Erzienhungsroman. Although Mona Lisa Overdrive has a much more compacted plot structure than the Neuromancer and Count Zero, it is still a narrative written by using conventional writing techniques as opposed to its postmodern concerns.

The final plot line follows Angie Mitchell, Simstim star who is known from the Count Zero. Her father places biochips implants into her brain that provides her direct access to the virtual world without any connection mediums and that makes her a direct target of some companies.

At the end of the novel, Angie is murdered and replaced by her double through Mona who looks like her after many plastic surgeries. Thus, Gibson crates a chance for himself to deal with various Cyberpunk themes through use of multiple plot lines in the last novel of the Trilogy.

When the three works are studied in detail, it appears that Mona Lisa Overdrive is much more focused on the idea of cyberspace than the previous works of the Sprawl Trilogy, which were more interested in action. Gibson tries to answer questions about matrix and the cyberspace through the dialogues of the characters.

For example, Continuity explains the matrix and cyberspace to Angie in a quite remarkable way and this explanation gives the reader an idea about the structure of cyberspace‟s nature and omnipotence:

“The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes.

One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a “hidden people”. The other, involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself.”

“That the matrix is God?”

“In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being‟s omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix” (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 107).

Thus, Gibsonian cyberspace finds explanations in this work, as having its own “God” in its own limits that appears as a general program that has dominance

over the entire matrix. Thus, the idea that cyberspace is, in Baudrillard‟s term, a simulation of the real world is proved once again with this assertion. In the work, the individuals are subject to its own rules and laws as soon as they insert themselves into the matrix. The skilful hackers are in a way rebels in this system, who try to find holes in it in order to change power relations.

However, as presented in Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero, cyberspace appears to be a chance for immortality. Characters such as Case, Bobby, Angie, 3Jane and Virek prefer the bodiless and endless life in cyberspace to the concrete life outside the matrix. Bobby, for example, nearly kills his flesh, a process that started in the previous work of the Trilogy, and he casts off his body to live in cyberspace in this work. His body is barely kept alive by medical support and he lies as if he is dead. Slick, one of Gentry‟s friends in the factory where Bobby‟s body is kept, cannot understand his situation:

It’s eating him, Slick thought, as he looked at the superstructure of support gear, the tubes, the sacs of fluid. No, he told himself, it’s keeping him alive, like in hospital. But the impression lingered: what if it were draining him, draining him dry? He remembered Bird‟s vampire talk (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 68).

Not only immortality, but also the production of babies becomes a concern of technological experiments in Gibson‟s work:

The first occupants of the vault were ten pairs of cloned embryos, 2Jane and 2 Jane, 3Jane and 3Jane…There were numerous laws forbidding or otherwise governing

the artificial replication of an individual‟s genetic material, but there were also numerous questions of jurisdiction (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 104).

Gibson employs developments in the field of genetic engineering due to advancements in science and technology in Mona Lisa Overdrive, too. Mona is hired to undergo cosmetic surgery and replace Angie: “Gerald‟s a cosmetic surgeon.

You‟re having some work done. All of it reversible later, if you want, but we think you‟ll be pleased with the results. „Anyone ever tell you how much you look like Angie, Mona?‟” (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 120). Thus, it appears that the body becomes something that scientists may apply any kind of experiment to, or even play with, in Cyberpunk fiction.

Gibson deals with “technological transformations” in the Sprawl Trilogy and Lyotard highlights that technological transformations have a considerable impact on knowledge in The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1984:4). To Lyotard, “two principal functions” “already feeling the effect” are “the research and transmission of the acquired knowledge” and “genetics provides an example with respect to the first function” (ibid, p.4). This theme of genetics is one of the major subject matters of Gibson as it is also seen in Mona Lisa Overdrive. The science of genetics, for Lyotard, “owes its theoretical paradigm to cybernetics” (ibid, p. 4).

Gibson‟s definition of the economic powers in relation to technological powers finds an explanation in Lyotard‟s emphasis on the change in the structure of nations and corporations due to economic powers in the world in The Postmodern Condition. He explains how nation-states are threatened by multi-national corporations as it also appears in Gibson‟s trilogy:

Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperilling the stability of the State through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multi-national corporations.

These new forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have, at least in part, passed beyond the control of the nation-states (Lyotard, 1984: 5).

How the development of computer technology and telematics makes the question more complex, as pointed out by Lyotard, is also exemplified in Gibson‟s work. Lyotard underlines the problem of control that comes to the fore as these corporations develop more and more everyday:

Suppose, for example, that a firm such as IBM is authorized to occupy a belt in the earth‟s orbital field and launch communications satellites housing data banks. Who will have access to them? Who will determine which channels or data are forbidden? The State? Or will the State simply be one user among the others? New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question: “who will know?” (Lyotard: 1984, 6).

Therefore, it is possible to say Gibson touches another warning in the work.

He foresaw the problem of the secrecy and privacy of personal lives and legal issues some time before the Internet turned out to be a way of interfering in other‟s lives and issues. For the twenty-first century reader who is familiar with social networks such as “Facebook” and “Twitter”, the hacker characters in Gibson‟s work, who are

paid for their talent to play with computerized data, might not seem innovative and interesting, but when it is considered that he wrote his works before the Age of Internet and while writing his novels he used only a typewriter, his prophetic approach appears to be more fascinating. This problem of access to information is another subject highlighted by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard shows that “functions of regulation and therefore of production” as being “withdrawn from administrators are entrusted to machines” as it is seen in the Mona Lisa Overdrive (Lyotard, 1987:7). Since information becomes the most important concern in the postmodern, post-industrial world, “the central question is who will access the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made” (Lyotard, 1984: 14). To Lyotard, access to data became and will become possible as a type of privilege. This means that the groups who want to hold power should find new ways to access data, such as trained and talented “hackers” as in Gibson‟s works. Likewise, Ben-Tov argues that, in the work of Gibson, “people don‟t generate information; information generates people” (Ben-Tov, 1995: 180). To her, human beings have become “incarnated” into information, and they do not regard themselves as God‟s creations as is set out in the Holy Scripture. This argument might be acceptable but still human beings are in need of a God in the matrix as well. As we have seen, some parts in Count Zero and Neuromancer questioning if the matrix has a god or an artificial intelligence which can be omnipotent like a kind of creator.

In addition, one of the writers of The Cyberculture Reader, David Tomas describes information as “a new kind of blood in this post-industrial cyborg world”

(Tomas, 2000: 183), and this is illustrative of the world Gibson creates. In the New

Rose Hotel, Gibson states that “it oxygenates the economic ecology that sustains multinational corporations” (New Rose Hotel, 1986: 107) The formation of cultural identity in the age of cyborgs depends on information technology, as Thomas underlines in the following quotation:

These part human, part cybernetic systems are sites of unusual manifestations of technological exchange and technological advantage. They are also sites of emergent cyborg cultural identities, identities that constantly appear and disappear in the wake of continuously upgraded information technology and biotechnology (Tomas, 2000: 176).

This era is defined by John Christie as “an age where information technology increasingly dominates archival, productive and communicative processes and binds them increasingly within a unifying and global network” (Christie, 1990: 37).

Therefore history, present and future times are turned into data collections that can be kept in memory devices and shared through a network, as happens today in our world.

Arthur Kroker presumes that the generations in the twentieth century are “the last of the human species born without data skin or cyber organs” (Kroker,1996:32).

This prophecy is shared by Gibson in that, in the world of early twenty-first century, man loses his organic form through either genetic manipulations or surgery applied to his neuro-system or other organs. The term "cyborg", a human with some machine parts in his body, dates back to the 60´s, when a scientist Manfred Clynes described it while talking of the advances in biomedical engineering. Mary Shelley‟s

Frankenstein might have inspired Cyperpunk authors, since Frankenstein himself may be regarded as one of the first cyborgs in literature, however, when the definitions of different types of human-machine combinations are considered, it is more like an early android (an automaton that resembles a human being –the definition is taken from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse /mechanical+man), an artificial life form. However, its effect on Cyberpunk can be clearly seen. For example, Bobby Newmark in Count Zero is “made” by scientists as it is explained in the first chapter of the work. In the Cyberpunk novels of Gibson and Sterling experiments on living organisms, or changing their structure and having control on them are frequently seen motifs. This theme of man inside a machine finds a place in the postmodern discussions. Baudrillard and Haraway also point out that cyborg is the central theme that dominates contemporary science fiction. Man and machine become a couple that cannot be thought of separately, and this is quite postmodern in terms of blurred boundaries. Gibson‟s novels present this theme by focusing on the invasion of the mind and the body by intelligent machines. Mechanical organs are very common in the cyber world created by Gibson. For instance, the first novel of the trilogy Neuromancer starts in Chatsubo, a bar frequented by hackers and the bartender Ratz is described as follows: “Ratz was tending the bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay” (Neuromancer, 3). Likewise, Mona Lisa Overdrive is full of references to the man-machine combinations, and presents the body as a machine that can be reshaped. For example, the parts of the body are presented as parts of a machine that can be replaced with other‟s as in the case of the retinas of Newmark that are used to unlock the doors:

“Retina identification. Either this is Robert Newmark or someone who bought his eyes” (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 129). Therefore, man is turned into a combination of machine and flesh, a kind of cyborg, the lost parts of the body can be replaced by suitable objects such as metal, ceramic plastic alloys or electronic devices. The hand of Ratz which is not prosthetic, is described as the “good hand”. This use of the word

“good” for the natural hand appears to be significant in that technology that is reflected through the prosthetic limbs of Ratz is seen as the problem itself, which is a characteristic of Cyberpunk novels. Technology, even if it is in the service of man, is not used with the “good” and the “beautiful”.

In addition to changing parts of the body, Bell and Kennedy notes in The Cybercultures Reader that identity is also subject to change. It is no longer something internal, essential, fixed or trustworthy: it is something which”exists cyberculturally either as a series of memory implants or as the composite of our digitized personal records; moreover it can be faked, even erased” (Bell and Kennedy, 2000:4). The memory is open to operations like deleting, processing or loading by other people. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, for example, how memory is erased or changed is explained in the tenth chapter. Slick Henry, who commits crimes is caught, judged and sentenced. However, he cannot remember the whole time in prison since some parts of his memory are erased, he remembers only what he had done –which was stealing cars- and some details from his prison time.

He couldn't remember when he hadn't been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could... That was why he had built the Judge, because he'd done something -- it hadn't been anything much, but he'd been

caught doing it, twice -- and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn't been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars.

Stealing rich people's cars. They made sure you remembered what you did (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 64-5).

Later he adds that they make him remember only what they want him to remember:

“Korsakov's, they called that, something they did to your neurons so that short-term memories wouldn't stick. So that the time you did was time you lost, but he'd heard they didn't do it anymore, or anyway not for grand theft auto” (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 64-5).

In fact, Gibson explains that computers simply stand for human memory in his work. He is mainly interested in the ways memory works and how memory is easily subject to revision as is seen in the example of Angie Mitchell.

All the characters in the Trilogy are connecting to the virtual world either through decks or physical abilities and cyberspace is presented as a unlimited source of visions. It is also a tool used to control information and thus, power.

The last novel of the Trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, set in the same world – a combination of near future and cyberspace- as the previous novels, employs in a comprehensive way, the Cyberpunk themes and concerns such as cybernetics, genetic engineering, impacts of advanced information technology, hackers, virtual life and an economically changed global world.

In conclusion, William Gibson is a creative Cyberpunk writer, whose art is compared to that of Picasso by Olsen, who defines his art as “a lie that tells the truth”

(Olsen, 1992: 4). Gibson is a postmodern writer in his “breaking through history in a new way” which Fredric Jameson refers to postmodern characteristics of science fiction. With the works of such writers, science fiction becomes “conscious of our present as the past of some unexpected future, rather than as the future of a heroic national past” (Jameson, 1988: 18).

Gibson draws an imaginary world in which characters are free from their flesh, and can move as they wish by being a part of the endless heaven of data, cyberspace. According to Katherine Hayles, in the Sprawl Trilogy, “the catalyst is the deceptively simple premise that a landscape of computerized information can literally become a space through which consciousness can move” (Hayles, 1996:

112). This idea is accepted as the creation of a new kind of space. The idea of cyberspace creates a shift in the evaluation of reality. The characters in Gibson‟s work are fighting for reality created by information instead of matter and energy.

Information remains distinct from matter and energy although its transfer depends on them. According to Gibson, the dominant scientific metaphor of the end of our age is information (McCaffery, 1990:136, Interview with Gibson). Thus, he thinks that human beings should face it and try to understand what it means (McCaffery, 1990:136, Interview with Gibson). Characters such as Bobby and Case refuse to be a part of the real world of matter, since they experience a different kind of existence in techno-space, “a realm in which a control over the dataspheres of capitalism is restored” (Bukatman, 1993: 16). However, in such systems, humans operate as cells or mere units of data, and the artificial mind becomes a body of its own, like Wintermute or Neuromancer. In Gibson‟s Trilogy the relationship of humanbeings and machines is presented not only as complementary but also as a kind of

opposition of ontological essence. Machinery completes man‟s body and mind but, on the other hand, when one of these parts starts to oppress the other, the oppressed one starts to react. Wintermute, for example, resists against the intervention of human beings and “wants” to unite with Neuromancer to complete itself. Thus, machines, in a way try to free themselves from another form of being, which appears as a common theme in popular literature and movie industry of the twentieth century:

such popular works as Terminator: Rise of the Machines (2003), Transformers (2007), and Tron (2006) include machines that rise against humanity these are in a similar struggle not to be colonized by human race. As Homi Bhabba points out,

“mimicry” is the master principle in the formation of identity in the Colonial subject (Bhabba, 1994:172). The machines and human beings that struggle against each other for the sake of not being subordinated start to present each other‟s features, as in Bhabba‟s theory. However, this hybridity fails to include a complete identity of any one part. In the end neither the machines, nor the human beings can triumph over the other entirely as in the relationship of Wintermute and the human beings in the Trilogy. Wintermute may also be described as a divided self that is trying to complete its identity and it is not certain what the result of this union would be.

Gibson‟s description of the Cyberpunk city as different from the traditional concrete descriptions, as fields of data, is also postmodern in that sign and spectacle dominate. The cities described by Gibson present the characteristics of what Paul Virilio calls the “overexposed city” which is intense and dynamic and continually being reconstructed by electronic screens and lights as in the description of Virilio (Virilio, 1997). Virilio argues that of real space has disappeared as a result of the impact of information technologies. Virilio puts forward that the perception of time

and physical space is replaced by the computer screen and television set which results in the loss of identity, collective memory and history (Virilio, 1997). In Neuromancer, the Sprawl is described as an overexposed city made up of data:

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Met- ropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million mega-bytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta (Neuromancer, 43).

Cyberspace, on the other hand, is characterized as a field like city lights in Neuromancer. On the other hand, as in Virilio‟s theory, the cities depicted in the work, are no longer made up of architecture, but look like a flow of light and images.

Japanese life, culture and technology also appear frequently in the work of Gibson and other Cyberpunk writers, since the technology created and designed by Japanese people were dominant in the world during the 1980s and 1990s. For the Western world, it is like a kind of legendary power difficult to predetermine, that threatens to dominate the whole world. This interest becomes more apparent in the third work of the trilogy in the story line about Kumiko and her father. Yakuza, the Japanese organized crime syndicate, is referred to throughout the trilogy as the most