Science & Tech Quote by William Gibson

Gibson builds cyberspace out of pure sensation, then slips in the quiet menace: this is not a tool you use so much as a place you enter, and once you enter, it rearranges what “real” feels like. The phrasing starts clinically - “graphic representation of data abstracted” reads like a manual or lab report - then detonates into awe: “Unthinkable complexity.” That pivot is the engine of the passage. It mirrors the late-20th-century moment when computers stopped being discrete machines and started becoming an environment, a system you could hardly picture, let alone govern.

The imagery does two jobs at once. “Lines of light” and “constellations” borrow the language of astronomy, giving data the romance of the cosmos, while “banks of every computer” hints at institutions, storage, capital: power consolidated, guarded, and increasingly invisible. “Nonspace of the mind” is Gibson’s sly masterstroke. He frames cyberspace as simultaneously external (a network spanning “every computer”) and internal (a mental arena), predicting how digital life would become less a destination than a default layer of perception.

The final comparison - “Like city lights, receding” - grounds the sci-fi in a familiar modern spectacle: the view from above, beautiful and impersonal, suggesting both mastery and alienation. You can see the grid, but you can’t touch the lives inside it. The subtext is a warning disguised as seduction: abstraction feels like transcendence until you realize what it abstracts away - bodies, labor, consequence.