“Wintermute was hive mind . . . Neuromancer was personality.” Hive mind and personality, common project and collective consciousness on one hand, individual thought and analytical impulse on the other, inseparable and irreducible to each other in William Gibson’s groundbreaking 1984 novel Neuromancer and in William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture . This book is as much the result of the thoughtful input and collegial support of a large group of people who helped make the project possible as it is the result of the brilliant individual chapters our contributors have composed. We therefore see the acknowledgments section as an opportunity to thank all those for whose help we are immensely grateful and as a way to foreground the possibilities and complexities that make reading and editing collections of critical essays so intellectually and socially rewarding.
We begin with our wonderful contributors, and we thank them for their ideas as much as for their collegiality and professionalism. Special thanks go to Charlie Yu, whose words have been as inspiring to us as Gibson’s. We are also deeply grateful for the support and guidance that we have received from the whole team at University of Iowa Press. Samuel Cohen has been an enthusiastic champion of this project from the very beginning, and he helped us navigate each step of the process leading up to this book’s publication. We had the great pleasure of working with Ranjit Arab, whose enthusiasm matched Sam’s own, and with Meredith Stabel, who brought this book to completion.
We thank a group of people who are part of the wider hive mind that made this book possible, people whose helpful input, encouragement, enthusiasm, and support contributed to the development of this project: Mark Bould, Madhu Dubey, Mark McGurl, China Miéville, Joshua Clover, Haerin Shin, Grace L. Dillon, Veronica Hollinger, Keren Omry, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Fredric Jameson. We thank Lee Konstantinou and an anonymous reader, both of whom provided helpful notes and their enthusiasm for this project. In addition, we thank the following colleagues and friends for their support and intellectual camaraderie: Rod Bantjes, Bret Benjamin, Bev Best, Tim Bewes, Kyle Bohunicky, Sarah Brouillette, Nicholas Brown, Jamie Owen Daniel, Alice Haisman, Susan Hegeman, Rafael Hernandez, Mitchum Huehls, Alyssa Hunziker, Caren Irr, Madison Jones, Helen Jun, Derrick King, Tim Lanzendörfer, Neil Larsen, Carolyn Lesjak, Walter Benn Michaels, Maureen Moynagh, Jason Potts, Mary Roca, Emilio Sauri, Malini Johar Schueller, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Paul Stasi, Matt Tierney, and Phil Wegner. We extend our thanks, too, to the Marxist Literary Group and the Marxist Reading Group.
Mitch R. Murray thanks his longtime best friend and now wife, Samantha Grenrock. Support from the University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and from the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholarship, and the hard work of United Faculty of Florida—Graduate Assistants United made completing this book possible. Finally, he thanks Mathias and Phil, who taught him that science fictional worlds are possible.
Mathias Nilges thanks his wife, best friend, and favorite being across all timelines and dimensions, Maïca Murphy, his family, Mollie and Willow, and also Madhu Dubey for teaching him everything he knows about science fiction.