This weekend I finished True Names. The core of its cyberspace lies in the following act:
making data perceivable analogically
This line and its materialization is really insightful, one of the qualities that make the book not go stale after all that has changed in the real world of technology since then (1981).
Although explicit analogy based models have practical problems, they provide a good general framework for making sense of novel perceptions. In fact, most of the changes in the way we think about learning has involved a few ideas becoming implicit from explicit in our models. Analogy being one of them. Coincidentally, I am going through Society of Mind by Minsky from the same era (80s) which also focuses a lot on memory and analogies. It's a little too expository but looks nice in the main.