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.”

This chapter registers how questions of collectivity and radical change cannot be considered without questions of gender, race, class and power coming to the fore. In William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014), technology seems at first sight to distinguish the near from far future, but the foundational difference is between gendered bodies. In World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler (2008), the jump-starting of history leads to a pre-modern US from which race is excised, and a world that mirrors the role the South has played in the US regional imaginary in such a way that The Peripheral is revealed as a riff on the counterfactual civil war history. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014) sees the collaborative arts become a societal model in which women can assume prominent roles. However, the novel’s emphasis on timeless ‘beauty’ promotes the post-Fordist creative as human universal, while its patriarchal cult relies on a stereotyped figure of the white South, such that the novel’s utopian overlooking of race threatens to efface the history of slavery. Station Eleven ultimately splits between the return of a fatally compromised history, and a utopian break from it.

The figure of the spy is almost invariably tied to the concept of the nation and of the sovereign state – so much so that, as this chapter suggests, the removal of the state from the spy story would amount to what might be thought of as an ontological reconfiguration of the genre. William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy – Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) – effects just such a reconfiguration. The chapter traces the ways in which Gibson reimagines the figure of the spy in the age of the global and unearths the implications of this transformation. While the centrality of the nation-state has much to do with the conservativism that typically underpins spy fiction, the absence of the state in the Blue Ant trilogy’s global setting does not serve to transform a fundamentally conservative genre into a progressive one; rather, it points to something that is in fact more regressive: the emergence of a neo-feudal world.