It’s probably not a good idea to post a twenty-year-old book chapter online. Especially one which really confirms the old gag about nothing dating faster than the future. This chapter on virtual realities and cyberspace was written on a big beige box PC with Windows 95. Getting online at this point meant wheezy dial-up. Not much of a consensual hallucination, in other words.

On the other hand, cyberpunk appears to be trendy again (do we need a special issue on this, people?) so maybe this might be of interest. The edited collection it was published in is probably fairly hard to track down now, and snippet views of the book are a pain in the neck, so I thought I’d re-publish it anyway…

So here’s the pre-published version of what became this chapter:

‘The virtual realities of technology and fiction: reading William Gibson’s cyberspace’ (1999) Crang, Crang, and May (eds.), Virtual Geographies: bodies, spaces and relations (Routledge), 205-21.

Kneale Virtual Geographies 2019 

James Kneale