Over at DigitalScienceFiction.com, my review of Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson is live. This is my first blog post written for Digital Science Fiction; and, hopefully, the first of many. Here’s an excerpt:

Take the trope of the cyborg, for instance. A symbol, a science-fictional image as well as reality, Gibson argues that in today’s world we fail to see the forest for the trees, so to speak — that our “literalist” sensibilities blind us to the truth of our existence: that the Net, or cyberspace, is itself a very real, very vital, and utterly enormous cybernetic organism.

Questions about the merit of ideas like the so-called Technological Singularity, or transhumanism, posthumanism, et cetera, are rendered moot in Gibson’s view, in light of the reality that we already exist — in a fully physical sense, whether we’re readily aware of it or not — as organic units within a larger cyborg (he employs the metaphor of the capital-B “Borg,” from the fictional Star Trek universe). That we are, quite literally, participants in a global, liminal state of being — transhumanist, if you prefer — that points to the inevitability of science-fictional concepts like human drones with a shared consciousness, or hive mind, and “a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine.”