Cyberspace
(Did you mean the Mike Cheater and Keith Coslett fanzine?)
Cyberspace in science fiction refers to a place that seems real but is generated by a computer system and has no real existence — the space of virtual reality.
In the real world, it has come to mean “the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs” (OED), “the online world of computer networks and especially the Internet” (Merriam-Webster). It is used to describe the global network of interdependent information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks and computer processing systems.
The term appears to have been independently coined by Danish artist Susanne Ussing (1940–1998) and architect Carsten Hoff (b. 1934), who called themselves “Atelier Cyberspace” in the late 1960s for a series of installations and images titled “Sensory Spaces,” which had nothing to do with computers, and later by cyberpunk author William Gibson in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” (Omni, July 1982): “it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven’....”
In the present sense, it was defined and popularized in Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer:
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
In the the 2000 documentary No Maps for These Territories, Gibson said, “All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.”
- Entry in The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
- Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
| Fanspeak | 1984— |
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