Abstract
This chapter focuses on images and appropriations of computer networks in contemporary literature. Continuing the narrative of earlier chapters on compasses, steam engines, wires, and waves, this chapter explores the manner in which writers used images of networked machines to reimagine community, individuality, and the body. Ciccoricco reads fiction by William Gibson and Porpentine Charity Heartscape as serving to train its readers in the ambivalent business of navigating their own networked realities. "Just as metaphor itself relies on distance between source and target," Ciccoricco argues, "figurations of networks are vital to the project of maintaining a critical distance from the social and political networks that we propagate and that in turn interpenetrate our experience."