The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: a History of Space from Dante to the Internet

Ever since the online world began, its inhabitants have puzzled over a fundamental question: What sort of space, exactly, is cyberspace? Is it just a metaphor, a vivid shorthand for the abstract complexity of computer networks? Or is it in some sense actually a space that parallels the one our bodies live in? Wertheim's impressively argued answer in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet is that it is both, and more. Cyberspace, she claims, at once exposes and fulfills a long-time cultural yearning for the type of immaterial space, the realm of the soul, that was written out of the West's cosmological picture when science displaced medieval theology