The sprawl of cyberspace : urban spatiality, temporality, and individuality in snow crash, ender's game, and synners

Abstract

The progression of cities, as Henri Lefebvre observed, can be studied as the slow spread of its heterotopic peripheries over its dominant space. This margin-to-center motion is usually accompanied by a change of the individual’s mindset, notably affecting their concepts of space, time, and identity. Thus, this thesis will trace how the cybercity—the newest addition to the urban evolution and formerly a heterotopic periphery of human life—has expanded into the dominant space of the physical city, therefore imposing its understanding of spatiality, temporality, and individuality on the contemporary post-industrial city, rendering it a hybrid of the virtual and the physical. To demonstrate this claim, this thesis will examine each aspect of the cybercity’s influence in representative literary works of the cyberpunk genre, namely, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and Pat Cadigan’s Synners.