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ARB has been offered a review copy of Anna McFarlane’s Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades (Routledge).
If you are interested in reviewing this book for ARB, please reach out to the editors using the form below to express your interest.
From the publisher:
This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the ‘godfather of cyberpunk’, William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of ‘gestalt’ psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked identities found in cyberpunk, the author draws out relations with key cultural moments of the last 40 years: postmodernism, posthumanism, 9/11, and the Anthropocene.
By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical level, as well as on an aesthetic level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts.
Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology.
About the author:
Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow with a project investigating images of traumatic pregnancy in fantastic literature. She is the co-editor of Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (2016), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink, 2020), Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (with Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink), and The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.
If you are interested in reviewing this title for ARB, please fill out the form below, and let us know why you might be suited for it. While we welcome new writers, please point us towards any of your reviews or other writing if possible (personal blogs or Goodreads are fine). If there are multiple books or essays you’re interested in (see what we’ve Called for Review and have Available for Review), please list them in the order you’re interested in reviewing them.
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