The New Real? an Analysis of William Gibson's the Bridge Trilogy

Abstract

Culture in the postmodern context has often been placed on the graph of supply and demand as commercial goods are. Writers in the post war era have inexhaustibly explored this dimension of culture. A considerable endeavour of this kind can be seen in science fiction with the advent of the new wave of science fiction and capitalism in its extreme stages. Cyberpunk fiction, an off shoot of science fiction, can be seen as an expression of this. It, besides being an expression of futuristic dystopian reality in a high-tech world, highlights the fact that culture is a well planned entity in the post-industrial era, where data is the nucleus of human life and its every enterprise. This paper attempts to read William Gibson's Second Trilogy The Bridge Trilogy as an illustration of the fact that the term culture can be studied as being a commercial product in a postmodern world. The real is obliterated and the virtual has taken its place thereby establishing the new real, as everything relies on data and images generated by high tech mega corporations resulting into the situation in which virtual is being consumed as the new real.