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.
Introduction: gestalt psychology and cyberpunk; 1. Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy; 2. Chaos in the Bridge trilogy; 3. Perception in Pattern Recognition; 4. Psychoanalysis in Spook Country; 5. The parallax view in Zero History; 6. The haptic interface in The Peripheral; 7. Agency, and Gibson in the twenty-first century
Connecting William Gibson's 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.