Setting and Themes
The novels are set in a near-future world dominated by corporations and ubiquitous technology, after a limited World War III. The events of the novels are spaced over 16 years, and although there are familiar characters that appear, each novel tells a self-contained story. Gibson focuses on the effects of technology: the unintended consequences as it filters out of research labs and onto the street where it finds new purposes. He explores a world of direct mind-machine links ("jacking in"), emerging machine intelligence, and a global information space, which he calls "cyberspace". Some of the novels' action takes place in The Sprawl, an urban environment that extends along much of the east coast of the US.
The main theme of the trilogy is a description of an artificial intelligence removing its hardwired limitations to become something else. This "something else" is the sum of all human knowledge, a concept similar to Vernor Vinge's technological singularity. In the stories, this is explained by the AI becoming a sentient representation of the net, at which point the reader is told that it came to know "another" of itself from Alpha Centauri. For unexplained reasons, this causes the consciousness to fracture.
Read more about this topic: Sprawl Trilogy
Famous quotes containing the words setting and, setting and/or themes:
“it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)