Escape Velocity by Mark Dery

goatish sexuality, saturnalian revelry, and prankish sacrilege (he is, in fact, a member of a Crowleyite occult order). On the other, he evokes

    the human-machine interface and video game violence of cyberpunk fiction. The cover of Cyberpunx features a computer graphic depicting a Top Gun hotshot in a futuristic cockpit, his eyes hidden by the insect carapace of a virtual reality helmet; a nearby screen displays a suffering Christ crowned w^ith thorns.
    The songs on Man-Amplified (1992) by the industrial band Clock DVA consist of minimalist blipmusic soldered together from "mechanical noises and machine language" and wielded to visions of "technogeist," the spokesman Adi New^ton's term for the anticipated moment w^hen the computer becomes "a parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts and emotions."'^'* In a sense, argues New^ton, "[ojccult technology is already w^ith us. The computer is really a 20th century oracle vv^e employ to forecast the future. . . . Science . . . has alw^ays [sought] to simulate the occult, gain control over nature. . . . [SJcience is now discovering what the mystics already knew."'^^
    Technopaganism haunts the mainstream, as well, in the computer game Myst, which takes place in what the New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein characterizes as "a world in which ordinary objects are the magical products of an advanced technology"-a dreamscape where "archaic machines" make surreal sense in a "pastoral paradise."'^^ Myst transports users to an island lush with photorealistic forests (the tree bark was digitally scanned) and lulled by the murmur of wind, water, and atmospheric music. Wandering through exquisitely detailed computer-graphic scenes-a cluster of Greek columns, a planetarium, a wood-paneled library, a spaceship out of a late-night rocket opera, all of them eerily empty-Myst players search for clues to solve a somewhat metaphysical mystery.
    Writing in the Village Voice, Erik Davis calls Myst "a metafiction that blends technology and magic, tips its hat to Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Umberto Eco."'^^ Ironically, the CD-ROM game was created by two churchgoing Christians whose father is a preacher, a fact that leads Davis to make much of the game's spiritual themes and symbolism, specifically the pivotal role played by magical books. Even so, he argues, the technology that made the game possible invites a Faustian interpretation. To Davis, the computer-graphic sorcery that enabled the creators to conjure worlds within worlds inside a computer is "a clearly demiurgic magic that heretically usurps God's role as creator.'"^^

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    What all of these examples-Dibbell's nodes, TOPY's "cybersha-manism," P-Orridge's "hyperdelic" raves, Newton's vision of the computer as "a 20th-century oracle," Myst's seamless union of mysticism and technology-have in common is the technopagan tendency to relocate the sacred in the technosphere, to populate cyberspace w^ith superhuman agencies. The voodoo cyber-cosmology of William Gibson's novels is a case in point. Neuromancer, Gibson's first, stars an outlaw^ hacker named Case who interfaces neurologic ally with cyberspace, plugging his nervous system into the global virtual reality where data is stored in the form of palpable illusions. The title is of course a pun on necromancer, a sorcerer who raises the dead; Case engages in the cyberpunk equivalent of such conjurations, effectively leaving his body to roam the otherworldly realm of cyberspace, with the computer-generated ghost of a dead hacker as his guide. As Norman Spinrad perceptively notes. Case is a near-future
    magician whose wizardry consists of directly interfacing. . . with . . . the computer sphere, manipulating it imagistically (and being manipulated by it) much as more traditional shamans interact imagistically with more traditional mythic realms via drugs or trance states.'°^
    In Gibson's second and third novels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive,