Neuromancer, William Gibson’s first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction: a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use. I recently re-read it and was struck by how things have turned out differently.
Gibson’s future just may not have happened yet. In the ‘50s our sci-fi showed rockets landing in the same manner (in reverse) that they launched, and it’s slowly becoming a thing now. Some things, like people living in space or AI, were always obvious and easy to predict. Some things were strangely overlooked (cellphones).
That's certainly possible. It's interesting that the developers of the Motorola Star Tac phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC said that they were inspired by the Star Trek communicators so science fiction had definitely predicted cell phones. There is an entire site devoted to tracing real inventions to their science fiction counterparts: http://www.technovelgy.com/
The space part of the book always seemed weirdly out of place to me given its near future run-down setting. It's unclear exactly when the novel was set, but probably within 50 years of its publication date of 1984. I can see how things like VR interfaces and even human-level AI could be early/mid 21st century things (particularly from the 1980s viewpoint), but things like cities in orbit seems more like a distant future several centuries out.
I recently watched a 1979 James Burke history show which was commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the moon landings. I was too young when this show was produced to really remember this time period clearly. This made me think about the timeline of the space age and just how short it was. That crowning moment was only about 15 years after the first satellite or 25 years after the end of WW2, when jet engines were barely known to the world.
For someone like Gibson, that period was their childhood. They can be forgiven for assuming it would continue to rapidly expand. In the early 1980s, we had the space shuttles going up like clockwork and MTV was using film clips of those big moon rockets as part of their station-identification clips. By and large, people still thought of space as present and future tense. People didn't really understand it as a demonstration of massive budget redirection and military-industrial might, and that nothing had really been done to solve the physics and make space travel a consumer possibility with low marginal cost.
To me, Gibson's later works try to correct that mistake. His focus shifts ever more towards the information flows, power brokers, and large-scale consumerism. He turns away from the military and space age set pieces. He treats weapons more as artifacts and surplus of a bygone era, just as this big nation-state technology must have seemed to him relics of his past.
> Neuromancer, William Gibson’s first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction
Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer -- Brunner's Shockwave Rider form 1974 comes to mind (and is a pretty interesting and strangely timely read, given that it is almost 50 years old).
Shockwave Rider is interesting because of how early it was and how unique at the time. That doesn't establish a subgenre though.
Cyberpunk wasn't coined as a term until right around the same time as Neuromancer came out and Neuromancer swept the big sci-fi awards, making it a fair thing to say that it 'helped to establish'.
"Stand on Zanzibar" is one of my favorite books of all times. That said, I think the Shockwave Rider actually holds up less well than Neuromancer, because it was more tuned into the reality of software of its day.
Don't forget Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man are interesting precursors to Gibson.
He also wrote a fantastic, underrated novel that is definitely his most cyberpunk: The Computer Connection (1975), also published as Extro. It's great fun, and at times paints a future even more callous about human life than Gibson ever described (the main character is arguably a serial murderer, even if he has good intentions). The book was poorly reviewed at the time, and I wouldn't mind admitting that it's "flawed", but it's still one of my favourites.
I keep thinking I read Gibson said something along the lines of "Delany's Nova was his attempt to reach the heights of The Stars My Destination, and Neuromancer was my attempt to reach Nova."
But I haven't been able to find it again. Maybe I imagined it.
One of the most significant pre-Gibson cyberpunk titles was True Names by Vernor Vinge -- a computer scientist who understood the nature of technology as it existed at the time of writing.
I agree that there were a number of earlier novels and stories that were cyberpunk in their sensibilities: John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" and "Stand on Zanzibar", Vinge's "True Names", Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" are some of the most obvious. I think Neuromancer helped establish cyberpunk because of it's popularity and it's vivid conceptualization of "cyberspace" as a separate parallel realm, similar to the Celtic Otherworlds, that is visited in more of a lucid dream state--to pass the final barrier Case has to flatline and cross over into what is essentially a land of the dead.
I think Shockwave Rider captured the sense of accelerating change and what Toffler called "future shock" (modeled on "culture shock" it's the discomfort from finding yourself embedded in the foreign culture of the future). Vinge anticipated privacy issues (and may other important considerations in his other works like "Rainbows End") and Dick is exploring the nature of what it means to be human.
Gibson's Neuromancer shows a world where extensive body modifications are commonplace, but it does not seem to affect anyone's self-image or concerns about identity. So at some level "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is more philosophically and psychologically profound.
Other early works that I associate with cyberpunk are:
Vernor Vinge, True Names
Thomas P Ryan, The Adolescence of P1
Algis Budrys, Michaelmas
Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One
Obviously, SF involving computers is pretty extensive, and there is a fuzzy line between "cyberpunk" and "this story involves computers at some level." My criteria are: Are computers major characters in the story, and secondarily, are they helping other characters break lots of rules? :-)
>Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer
No, it doesn't. Proto-cyberpunk ideas existed, certainly (and more than 10 years before Neuromancer; you can trace the roots back to 60s New Wave SF), but the word itself only predates the book by a year. Neuromancer was very much a crystallization of ideas that had been floating around the zeitgeist.
Or 3 years, depending on how you consider it. The word was coined by Bruce Bethke for his short story Cyberpunk, which was written in 1980 but not published until 1983. Gibson began writing Neuromancer in 1981, though it wasn't published until 1984.
>Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer (...)
Interestingly, the movie Blade Runner hit theaters before William Gibson had finished writing Neuromancer. When he saw the movie, he was afraid people would think that he ripped off the movie's aesthetic. [0,1] Most people would probably assume the movie was influenced by the book, but the movie almost killed the book.
> I recently re-read it and was struck by how things have turned out differently.
Oddly, I get the exact opposite feeling.
> a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use.
Are not computing and communications technologies dominant now? Are not the advances in AI (having recently beaten the GO world champion) and the influence of AI in our society (Cambridge Analytica, Google, ect) becoming more pronounced? Aren't we making staggering advaces in medicine (even if these medical advances can only be afforded by an elite few - another cyberpunk theme) ? Aren't the Chinese in the process of establishing a moon base with several "megacorps" planning the colonization of Mars in the near future? Isn't drug use extremely widespread (both illicit and "legally" prescribed drugs virtually ubiqituous)?
I would suggest that if you look at where society was in 1984, and look where we are today, we are well down the path towards a future that looks similar to Gibson's vision in many ways - we just aren't there yet.
To me, Ted Nelson's Zigzag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) - is a similiar view to Neuromancer's virtual reality. It's a shame it's not more popular. Gzz is an excellent version of it.
If only he hadn’t copyrighted/patented it, we might be using it.
I find it interesting how frequently “just ok” software is picked up and reaches a critical mass just because it is open. There are many good software projects that won’t grow because of licensing because they are more useful with network effects.
I have lots of colleagues who use R for data analysis. It wasn’t that great in the beginning but was widely used because of openness. 5 years ago, SAS and IBM would describe how superior they were, but it kind of missed the point.
For most of my software uses, I just need good enough.
"I find it interesting how frequently "just ok" software is picked up and reaches a critical mass just because it is open. There are many good software projects that won’t grow because of licensing because they are more useful with network effects."
UNIX itself is a great example of this. Look at the graveyard of excellent UNIX flavors that fell by the wayside when free, open Linux came around.
With more open licensing and a different business model, any of them (instead of Linux) might have been the dominant UNIX flavor today.
And they would have been a bit player in the OS marketplace compared to Windows NT.
Assuming that in this alternate timeline, the Apple-NeXT merger still happens, the dominant Unix flavor would likely be macOS. As it is, it's still alive and kicking and enjoying a comfortable number two spot (number one if you're talking desktop installs).
Sun used to dominate there, and they might have continued to do so had they switched to open licensing, made the OS free, and maybe adopted a business model like RedHat's.
Ted Nelson is the Nikola Tesla of computing. He came up with so much brilliant stuff that we will be kicking ourselves for not adopting wholeheartedly later on.
I find his discourse on fax machines interesting. I just rewatched Johnny Mnemonic, and a fax machine plays a significant plot role in that film. At the end, J-Bone says "Get your VCRs ready". This despite the writing being quite on the wall for both fax machines and VCRs even in 1995.
Cyberpunk is a bit misnamed, I think, because as expressed by Gibson and his copycats, it's distinctly hipsterish. There's a fondness for the old, a desire to flash-freeze the zeitgeist (usually of the Beat era) so that it could live, in some sense, forever. In Max Headroom, every time we see a computer it has an old manual typewriter (much like the one Gibson used to write Neuromancer on, because to him computers were and still somewhat are alien invaders) for a keyboard.
Strangely, Johnny Mnemonic goes overboard with the technology in other ways: in 2015, let alone 2025, Johnny could have fenced 320 GiB of data at considerably less personal risk by swallowing a toy balloon with Micro SD cards in it.
Gibson's language is so heavy, it was almost physically hard to read the book as a non-native speaker.
Also he was obviously not really into IT (at least when he wrote the book), which added to the negative perception even more, and left me with very mixed feelings afterwards.
The book was released in 1984. Could it be that his descriptions of tech were just true to the times? I imagine his stylistic embellishments were also important in the same way older movies about technology (e.g. Hackers[0]) stylize digital events.
The literary critiques & reviews were hugely positive about Neuromancer, but its a fairly common take down of the book how bad the technology pieces are.
Thanks for that interview link. Note that it was almost 30 years after publication.
I suppose a critique of "not sufficiently prescient" is supported by it, but "known at the time of publication that it got the IT wrong", which is what I think the GP was saying, isn't.
I was a huge computer geek when the novel came out in 1984. It completely blew my mind. I absolutely loved it.
Criticizing it for not being "true to IT" was the furthest thing from my mind.
Though I later found out it might not have been quite the first to go there, to me it seemed to herald a paradigm shift in scifi, towards a much grittier, darker future where one could inhabit (or, in a certain sense, commune) with computers. It was kind of like a darker version of Tron, which came out only a couple of years earlier.
Sure, it might not have been like using computers in real life, but it was not pretending to be about the current reality. It was scifi. It was about a possible future.
You're missing the point focusing on the inaccurate descriptions of tech. The point, and greatest strength, of the book is in how people interact with the tech, and how it shapes society. Gibson has always been very good at articulating how technology shapes society, and the human response to technology, especially how people always find their own, unexpected ways to utilize technology (as in the famous line from his short story "Burning Chrome", "the street finds its own uses for things").
Frankly, an "accurate" description of tech would almost certainly just badly date it (e.g., "an unbelievable 500MB of RAM!")
He was inventing a lot of technology that didn't exist back then. I think not understanding computers was a strength of his, not a weakness. Someone more up on how they worked would never have come up with cyberspace, or with Wintermute. He made the usual "artificial intelligence tries to take over the world and exterminate humans" sound really trite.
I read an interview with Gibson way back in the 80s that was very telling. He had never touched a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. He wrote it on a mechanical typewriter, because word processors weren't even a thing then. With the money he made from the novel, he felt as a science fiction writer, he should own a computer. So he went and bought an Apple II, state of the art at the time. He took it home and turned it on, and it made whirring, grinding noises, which freaked him out. He had no idea computers should be anything but silent! He opened the case and looked at the disc drive... a Victorian clockwork mechanism of gears, belts, levers, and pulleys. That's like the most Gibson thing ever.
I just finished the audiobook of Neuromancer a week ago, and I didn't really enjoy it. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it. I love other what I think of as similar books like Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had high hopes for Neuromancer, which maybe that was part of it, but I just didn't enjoy it. It kind of turned into a slog and I nearly gave up at around 90%, but just pushed through because I was so close.
It's not just you, I read it about a year ago after all these years of hearing its praises. Clearly it was pioneering work that influenced many science fiction movies/books/games, but it was an atrocious read. There isn't many books where I've had to force myself to as you put it, slog my way to the end. I also thought Snowcrash was awful though, with that terrible third person narrative and amateur writing style.
Agreed - although visionary, Gibson's writing was not yet mature. I find his more recent Blue Ant series much more enjoyable, and while less technologically visionary, more insightful into human nature and interactions.
I think Neuromancer has suffered a lot from what TVTropes calls the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" problem: successive works have borrowed from it so completely that it's difficult to read the book now and get the same effect as when it was published, because it feels so full of cyberpunk cliches. But don't forget that pretty much all those cliches originated here and were totally new at the time.
In terms of milieu and ideas, definitely. But Gibson's plots clank along in pretty much every novel-length work of his I've read. It's a problem of mechanics and storytelling at that point, I think.
I read it twice, once in the mid-1990s, then a couple of years ago. I still love Gibson's language, and I love the ideas about AIs, but the flaws were much more apparent the second time around.
For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all.
I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.)
To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
I feel like the biggest criticism I can make of Gibson is that he plots.
Most novels have a plot. But the good ones don't let you in on it. As you say, the characters rush around for MacGuffins, and you characterized it as "creaky"--that's a good word for it. I have not always been the biggest Stephen King fan (as an author; growing up in Maine, I've always been a fan of King-the-person) but On Writing is an excellent book. I don't have my copy right here so I can't quote what he says about plotting (paraphrased: "try not to") but this quote from an interview with Goodreads resonates strongly with me:
"I start a book like Doctor Sleep [his most recent book] knowing just two things: the basic situation and that the story will create its own patterns naturally and organically if I follow it fairly...and by fairly I mean never forcing characters to do things they wouldn't do in real life...For me, the first draft is all about story. I trust that some other part of me—an undermind—will create certain patterns."
So long as your beginnings and ends are only modestly far apart, short stories (and I again agree that Burning Chrome is probably his best work) let you get away with a lot more of this. But novella and novel-length works can't hide the machinery of a plotted-out story as well unless you are inordinately good at it. (And I mean, this is a ding against authors like J.R.R. Tolkien as much as Gibson; it's not like he isn't in good company with this weakness.)
Good points. The crux of the problem is really in this distinction between plot and story.
A great plot-driven writer who manages a superb synthesis of both is Iain M. Banks. One of his less well-known books, Feersum Endjinn, is a favourite of mine. Its journey is very linear, but it's a journey, a story that happens to a character. The skeleton of the plot is under a thick skin of emotional resonance. It's a good story.
You could say that Gibson is a writer who is uninterested in plots (to the extent that he's not able to come up with an original one) but who, paradoxically, still manages to write extremely plot-driven books.
> I feel like the biggest criticism I can make of Gibson is that he plots.
Interesting. I've seen him twice at book signings and both times he said that he specifically does not plot beforehand. He starts with characters and "follows" them through the story. He did say he often ends up at a certain in the novel where he has to chart out what's going on so he can finish though. On the other hand, if I remember correctly he's said he's a fan of old-school pulp sci-fi which has a lot of plotting and he's perfectly fine with that even if it offends lit-crit types.
Characterisation is certainly the weak point of a lot of sci-fi. You could make the argument that distancing/alienation is part of the aesthetic, but I'm not expecting that to be very convincing.
Burning Chrome is excellent, but the emotional weight is all dark.
This interview with Wired https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/ actually made Gibson click as a person for me. Especially some of the odder more obsessive thematic details in the novels.
I agree with a lot of this. He's said himself that when he got the contract for a novel, he didn't know how to write one, and was kind of panicked about being boring. That's why the first 60 pages or so of the book (through the Sense/Net strike to get the Dixie Flatline's cartridge) is like a nonstop adrenaline rush. It's so exciting! I had no idea science fiction could be like that, the first time I read it.
I strongly agree that his best work was in Burning Chrome. Unfortunately, the only film adaptations of his work we have are two stories from that collection, and they were both awful in different ways. Johnny Mnemonic misses all but the barest outlines of the story - where's Molly? I can't believe they gave up the fight on the "Killing Floor" with Molly vs the vatgrown ninja in favor of blowing up a bridge. Sigh. New Rose Hotel, on the other hand, hewed very close to the original story - which was fine, except the story was only six pages long.
As an aside, I have a band called The Gernsback Continuum, after the short story.
I agree with the thread sentiment that the short stories are better than the novels and novellas, though I enjoyed them when I read them in the 1980's and again, maybe less so, recently. But Gernsback Continuum really resonated with me and I love the idea and metaphor that these zeigeist-driven unrealized futures exist and shimmer at the edge of reality. Visible to the tired, drugged, and crazy it's solidly in the same camp as Burroughs and Dick.
Yeah, I love it too. The band name followed on the musical inspiration for the band, which was to play "What the future used to sound like". I'm inspired by the grand history of science fiction themed music - early electronic soundtracks like Forbidden Planet, Afrofuturist sounds like Parliament-Funkadelic and 1970s Miles Davis, Ziggy-era Bowie, Blade Runner, huge swaths of prog-rock... And here we are, living in that future, and it doesn't sound a damn bit like what we were told it would sound like.
I'm also writing some songs that are actually science fiction short stories, set to music. It's an interesting challenge.
> Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins;
I see this as a nod to old detective pulp novels and film noir which often have these kind of plots: a mysterious backer (sometimes a rich man, sometimes a femme fatale) sends a detective on a mission to find something or someone. Over the course of following the leads, getting in fights, etc. it becomes apparent that the thing in question is either irrelevant to the larger plot that's revealed, or that things aren't what they seem about the mission, or both.
It's such a cyberpunk trope that in pretty much every RPG I've played in or heard of set in Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, everyone knows not to trust the client.
It's actually a surprise when they don't betray you. And if they follow through on the contract, you're only waiting for when they'll have lulled you into complacency and then turn on you.
Read the book for the first time last year. I heard from some people that it hadn't aged too well—that it should be viewed as more of a precursor to things like Snowcrash—but I really loved it. In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would have made it feel rote and computery, whereas this cyberspace felt more like a collective fever dream. And what brilliant world-building! Every page had something strange, intense, and new, from "the long pulse of Zion dub" to resuscitated memories of dead men to the beehive of the Tessier-Ashpool compound. Few works are able to create that all-encompassing sense of weirdness, where every strange thing builds on the previous one while somehow keeping the reader focused on the story. (Last book to successfully do that to me was the Saga series.)
It was fascinating to realize just how much of our culture is indebted to Neuromancer. So many games and movies use scenes or characters taken wholesale from the pages.
Now if only somebody would do a TV adaptation of the original!
(As an aside: after finishing the book, I really enjoyed this artist's take on the characters. It was uncannily close to what I was already picturing in my head: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qo4Z8)
Vurt? I loved that book so much when I read it a teen! (Reading it a second time didn't entice me quite so much a few years later, and I'm reluctant to read it again as an adult in fear that it'll be more like the second time and not the first.)
Yes - I also have Nymphomation, Pixel Juice, and Falling out Of Cars. Likewise I should give them a re-read. I've always thought of them as the 90s British rave scene version of cyberpunk.
> Now if only somebody would do a TV adaptation of the original!
I sadly don't trust anyone including Gibson to do this in a way that doesn't ruin it for me, unfortunately. So much of it is about interiority. On the other hand it's ideal anime source material, where it could sit happily next to GITS.
The only approaches that might be viable would be to draw heavily on Mr Robot and Sherlock's overlay techniques. Let cyberspace bleed visibly into the real.
(The version I'd make would be the zero-budget BBC version, filmed deliberately on scratchy VHS with badly hand-matted effects, in the corner of a disused post-industrial warehouse with props from a bankrupt Maplins. It would be extremely punk and virtually unwatchable.)
> I heard from some people that it hadn't aged too well
Good, you'll know who to avoid in the future.
>In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would have made it feel rote and computery, whereas this cyberspace felt more like a collective fever dream.
It's because Gibson doesn't come from a technical background (he famously wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and had never even seen a personal computer at the time), but was a hippie deep into the drug subculture of the time.
I think being too into the technical side of things may actually be a hindrance when writing these kinds of books, and that Neuromancer resonated so widely precisely because it wasn't hung up on the details. It didn't need the right descriptions of technology, it needed to evoke the right kind of feeling and look at the right way of interacting with technology.
I agree strongly. His description of what cyberspace looks like is absolutely perfect:
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
I've never seen a visual depiction in any cyberpunk-inspired that came even close to getting it right. They mostly all seem to want giant structures made out of neon blocks.
I think Neuromancer aged better than a lot of sci fi. Gibson didn't go into technical details, which is a blessing when you deal with early 80s computer tech.
Incidentally a lot of cyberpunk feels off in 2018. Nobody seemed to forecast the rise of China.
In general, a lot of well-known cyberpunk seems to have underestimated governments--their competence, power, longevity, and reach.
China features prominently in The Diamond Age as a location, but not as a powerful, cohesive, oppressive, incredibly successful authoritarian government. It's sort of a laughing stock in Snow Crash, and barely present in Neuromancer.
Despite its reputation for being darkly cynical, I think we can look back now and see that cyberpunk as a genre was essentially optimistic about the power of computing technology--optimistic that it would indeed radically change power structures, society, and our relationship with governments.
Instead what we see today is not that different from this time 100 years ago: super rich oligarchs controlling much of the economy, rising racism and bigotry, authoritarians using new technologies to seize power and splinter their opposition.
To be fair, Snow Crash has megacorps, oligarchs like L. Bob Rife and David, racism galore (New South Africa franchlettes anyone?) and the plot is literally all about using tech to seize power and splinter opposition. The whole system of FOQNE’s seems massively geared to cater to populist impulses, with the exception of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. It also neatly foresaw the role of self-sustaining media frenzy, increasingly stagnant economic prospects for most, and the resulting insularity and small-mindedness of much of society.
> "The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the
mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate . . ."
> "Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, "that is so much
bullshit."
> The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black
clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they
couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.
Gibson is a much better prose stylist than most of his SF-writing peers. Neuromancer shows his influences off pretty clearly (Robert Stone, William Burroughs, and a healthy dose of noir a la Hammett and Chandler), but cooks the resulting gumbo into something remarkable.
I find that while Neuromancer lays on the atmosphere heavy from the beginning, Count Zero is all about insinuations and implications. Kinda like Dune in that regard. This doesn't take anything away, but it means that it's not as in-your-face as Neuromancer. It's a more intuitive book.
The concepts and ideas are as iconoclastic as ever but one needs a keen eye and ideally personal experience in order to fully appreciate them. None of the sprawl trilogy novels are geared towards angry teenagers, they're layered with almost transcendental meaning that works on multiple levels.
An example: The Loa "riding" as the transmigration of traditional mystical experiences (possession/psychosis) into the digital domain. Anyone that's ever crossed the threshold will recognize innumerable similarities in Gibson's descriptions.
I often cite this as one of my favourite books, but it's also been a decade or so since I last read it and I should see how it holds up.
However after reading another discussion of it recently, things about it are still yet falling into place for me. Not just the viewpoint that cyber meaning "control systems" is also a theme; for each character, there is something or some means by which they are controlled. Retrospectively a lot of this looks like PTSD; Armitage most obviously, but it's a theme of all the characters and the world itself, including the AIs.
Looking too closely at the technology is a mistake. It's all about the mediation of experience and the aesthetic of it, rather than the details.
The BBC did a great adaptation of the book to a radio play, complete with professional voice acting, sound effects, even music: [1]
Unfortunately, it's only an abridged version. On the positive side, it's a quick listen, and well worth it if you're a fan (or just want to get a taste).
Much of the importance of Neuromancer at the time of publication wasn't that it was so technically correct or insightful, but rather that it connected science fiction to the cultural awareness of punk rock. That seems trite and obvious nowadays, but it was a revelation then. And although you sneer at the technology, his cultural insights were profound and remarkably predictive.
Gibson is very self-deprecating throughout. He attributes people’s favorite aspects of the Neuromancer to work-arounds he used to cover his inexperience as an author. Meanwhile, the film interleaves interviews with other sci-fi authors who has early access to the book. They all knew the book was something new and special immediately.
Something I think that is underrated in the criticisms of Neuromancer is how great the non-human characters are. I'm thinking here of Wintermute (of course), who is as cold and alien as a Lovecraftian horror. And the spider-like patience of Wintermute spending years working on manipulating 3Jane to madness and murder... it's terrifying and brilliant.
And the Dixie Flatline! The idea of a personality captured as a software construct, to get all the little tics that make the personality so good at what they do. "Case. Joeboy. Quick study." You get that sense that this is a machine that sounds like a person, because it was a person. And toward the end, when the Dixie Flatline asks Case to erase him when it's over? Can a machine have existential horror to the point of longing for its own death? Loved that.
And Armitage! Technically, not a machine... just a hollowed-out shell of a man, filled with the sort of temporary personality Wintermute could craft, when Wintermute's ability to comprehend humans was limited, and Corto's madness lay trapped just below the surface, with Wintermute knowing it would crack at the worst possible time. Another truly great science fiction alien.
The book "Void Star" by Zachary Mason was published last year. A high concept pitch for it is "Neuromancer, but all the 80s stuff is replaced with 2018 stuff". I hope the author wouldn't be offended by that -- the book is quite original but the influence is obvious. It's worth reading.
I would basically be okay with somebody doing this again in another 30 years.
Read it recently, had some ideas, but seemed to be either a conscious crib of Gibson's cyberpunk oeuvre or just so derivative of it that I kept comparing scenes/characters in it to similar ones in Neuromancer. And Gibson is the better writer.
> The Neuromancer AI made a copy of Case to keep its copy of dead Linda company:
A small detail - while it's left ambiguous, FWIW I always thought that was Dixie, not a copy of Case.
That's why Case hears Dixie's laughter at the very end; earlier Dixie disappears and Neuromancer says he got more than his wish; later, Case asks where Dixie is and Wintermute/Neuromancer says its kind of hard to explain.
Yeah; but I thought that was Dixie in Case's 'body', presumably so Linda thought it was Case. I.e. Dixie steals his identity in Neuromancer's virtual world. That wouldn't preclude the merge; if anything the merge precludes the construct being deleted.
I loved the audio book version read by Gibson. It's super hard to find, as it seems it was only released on casette, and then only for libraries. I got super lucky to score a copy, although I ended up digitizing it into speex. I need to find it again and do a better FLAC rip.
The quality is terrible as I wanted to make them as small as possible....
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadFor someone like Gibson, that period was their childhood. They can be forgiven for assuming it would continue to rapidly expand. In the early 1980s, we had the space shuttles going up like clockwork and MTV was using film clips of those big moon rockets as part of their station-identification clips. By and large, people still thought of space as present and future tense. People didn't really understand it as a demonstration of massive budget redirection and military-industrial might, and that nothing had really been done to solve the physics and make space travel a consumer possibility with low marginal cost.
To me, Gibson's later works try to correct that mistake. His focus shifts ever more towards the information flows, power brokers, and large-scale consumerism. He turns away from the military and space age set pieces. He treats weapons more as artifacts and surplus of a bygone era, just as this big nation-state technology must have seemed to him relics of his past.
Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer -- Brunner's Shockwave Rider form 1974 comes to mind (and is a pretty interesting and strangely timely read, given that it is almost 50 years old).
Cyberpunk wasn't coined as a term until right around the same time as Neuromancer came out and Neuromancer swept the big sci-fi awards, making it a fair thing to say that it 'helped to establish'.
Still a great read though.
- bookworm/assassin
He also wrote a fantastic, underrated novel that is definitely his most cyberpunk: The Computer Connection (1975), also published as Extro. It's great fun, and at times paints a future even more callous about human life than Gibson ever described (the main character is arguably a serial murderer, even if he has good intentions). The book was poorly reviewed at the time, and I wouldn't mind admitting that it's "flawed", but it's still one of my favourites.
But I haven't been able to find it again. Maybe I imagined it.
I think Shockwave Rider captured the sense of accelerating change and what Toffler called "future shock" (modeled on "culture shock" it's the discomfort from finding yourself embedded in the foreign culture of the future). Vinge anticipated privacy issues (and may other important considerations in his other works like "Rainbows End") and Dick is exploring the nature of what it means to be human.
Gibson's Neuromancer shows a world where extensive body modifications are commonplace, but it does not seem to affect anyone's self-image or concerns about identity. So at some level "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is more philosophically and psychologically profound.
Vernor Vinge, True Names
Thomas P Ryan, The Adolescence of P1
Algis Budrys, Michaelmas
Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One
Obviously, SF involving computers is pretty extensive, and there is a fuzzy line between "cyberpunk" and "this story involves computers at some level." My criteria are: Are computers major characters in the story, and secondarily, are they helping other characters break lots of rules? :-)
No, it doesn't. Proto-cyberpunk ideas existed, certainly (and more than 10 years before Neuromancer; you can trace the roots back to 60s New Wave SF), but the word itself only predates the book by a year. Neuromancer was very much a crystallization of ideas that had been floating around the zeitgeist.
Or 3 years, depending on how you consider it. The word was coined by Bruce Bethke for his short story Cyberpunk, which was written in 1980 but not published until 1983. Gibson began writing Neuromancer in 1981, though it wasn't published until 1984.
Interestingly, the movie Blade Runner hit theaters before William Gibson had finished writing Neuromancer. When he saw the movie, he was afraid people would think that he ripped off the movie's aesthetic. [0,1] Most people would probably assume the movie was influenced by the book, but the movie almost killed the book.
[0]https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-did-william-gibson-really-feel-a...
[1]http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_01_01_archive.as...
Oddly, I get the exact opposite feeling.
> a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use.
Are not computing and communications technologies dominant now? Are not the advances in AI (having recently beaten the GO world champion) and the influence of AI in our society (Cambridge Analytica, Google, ect) becoming more pronounced? Aren't we making staggering advaces in medicine (even if these medical advances can only be afforded by an elite few - another cyberpunk theme) ? Aren't the Chinese in the process of establishing a moon base with several "megacorps" planning the colonization of Mars in the near future? Isn't drug use extremely widespread (both illicit and "legally" prescribed drugs virtually ubiqituous)?
I would suggest that if you look at where society was in 1984, and look where we are today, we are well down the path towards a future that looks similar to Gibson's vision in many ways - we just aren't there yet.
I find it interesting how frequently “just ok” software is picked up and reaches a critical mass just because it is open. There are many good software projects that won’t grow because of licensing because they are more useful with network effects.
I have lots of colleagues who use R for data analysis. It wasn’t that great in the beginning but was widely used because of openness. 5 years ago, SAS and IBM would describe how superior they were, but it kind of missed the point.
For most of my software uses, I just need good enough.
UNIX itself is a great example of this. Look at the graveyard of excellent UNIX flavors that fell by the wayside when free, open Linux came around.
With more open licensing and a different business model, any of them (instead of Linux) might have been the dominant UNIX flavor today.
Assuming that in this alternate timeline, the Apple-NeXT merger still happens, the dominant Unix flavor would likely be macOS. As it is, it's still alive and kicking and enjoying a comfortable number two spot (number one if you're talking desktop installs).
Sun used to dominate there, and they might have continued to do so had they switched to open licensing, made the OS free, and maybe adopted a business model like RedHat's.
> three notes, high and pure. A true name.
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive...
Cyberpunk is a bit misnamed, I think, because as expressed by Gibson and his copycats, it's distinctly hipsterish. There's a fondness for the old, a desire to flash-freeze the zeitgeist (usually of the Beat era) so that it could live, in some sense, forever. In Max Headroom, every time we see a computer it has an old manual typewriter (much like the one Gibson used to write Neuromancer on, because to him computers were and still somewhat are alien invaders) for a keyboard.
Strangely, Johnny Mnemonic goes overboard with the technology in other ways: in 2015, let alone 2025, Johnny could have fenced 320 GiB of data at considerably less personal risk by swallowing a toy balloon with Micro SD cards in it.
Also he was obviously not really into IT (at least when he wrote the book), which added to the negative perception even more, and left me with very mixed feelings afterwards.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69
Here is an interview with Gibson where he talks about it: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/
(For the record he talks about it in agreement, he thinks he himself could write a good takedown of the technology).
I suppose a critique of "not sufficiently prescient" is supported by it, but "known at the time of publication that it got the IT wrong", which is what I think the GP was saying, isn't.
Criticizing it for not being "true to IT" was the furthest thing from my mind.
Though I later found out it might not have been quite the first to go there, to me it seemed to herald a paradigm shift in scifi, towards a much grittier, darker future where one could inhabit (or, in a certain sense, commune) with computers. It was kind of like a darker version of Tron, which came out only a couple of years earlier.
Sure, it might not have been like using computers in real life, but it was not pretending to be about the current reality. It was scifi. It was about a possible future.
Horses for courses, and all that.
Frankly, an "accurate" description of tech would almost certainly just badly date it (e.g., "an unbelievable 500MB of RAM!")
I read an interview with Gibson way back in the 80s that was very telling. He had never touched a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. He wrote it on a mechanical typewriter, because word processors weren't even a thing then. With the money he made from the novel, he felt as a science fiction writer, he should own a computer. So he went and bought an Apple II, state of the art at the time. He took it home and turned it on, and it made whirring, grinding noises, which freaked him out. He had no idea computers should be anything but silent! He opened the case and looked at the disc drive... a Victorian clockwork mechanism of gears, belts, levers, and pulleys. That's like the most Gibson thing ever.
Is it just me?
For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all.
I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.)
To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
Most novels have a plot. But the good ones don't let you in on it. As you say, the characters rush around for MacGuffins, and you characterized it as "creaky"--that's a good word for it. I have not always been the biggest Stephen King fan (as an author; growing up in Maine, I've always been a fan of King-the-person) but On Writing is an excellent book. I don't have my copy right here so I can't quote what he says about plotting (paraphrased: "try not to") but this quote from an interview with Goodreads resonates strongly with me:
"I start a book like Doctor Sleep [his most recent book] knowing just two things: the basic situation and that the story will create its own patterns naturally and organically if I follow it fairly...and by fairly I mean never forcing characters to do things they wouldn't do in real life...For me, the first draft is all about story. I trust that some other part of me—an undermind—will create certain patterns."
So long as your beginnings and ends are only modestly far apart, short stories (and I again agree that Burning Chrome is probably his best work) let you get away with a lot more of this. But novella and novel-length works can't hide the machinery of a plotted-out story as well unless you are inordinately good at it. (And I mean, this is a ding against authors like J.R.R. Tolkien as much as Gibson; it's not like he isn't in good company with this weakness.)
A great plot-driven writer who manages a superb synthesis of both is Iain M. Banks. One of his less well-known books, Feersum Endjinn, is a favourite of mine. Its journey is very linear, but it's a journey, a story that happens to a character. The skeleton of the plot is under a thick skin of emotional resonance. It's a good story.
You could say that Gibson is a writer who is uninterested in plots (to the extent that he's not able to come up with an original one) but who, paradoxically, still manages to write extremely plot-driven books.
Interesting. I've seen him twice at book signings and both times he said that he specifically does not plot beforehand. He starts with characters and "follows" them through the story. He did say he often ends up at a certain in the novel where he has to chart out what's going on so he can finish though. On the other hand, if I remember correctly he's said he's a fan of old-school pulp sci-fi which has a lot of plotting and he's perfectly fine with that even if it offends lit-crit types.
Burning Chrome is excellent, but the emotional weight is all dark.
This interview with Wired https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/ actually made Gibson click as a person for me. Especially some of the odder more obsessive thematic details in the novels.
I strongly agree that his best work was in Burning Chrome. Unfortunately, the only film adaptations of his work we have are two stories from that collection, and they were both awful in different ways. Johnny Mnemonic misses all but the barest outlines of the story - where's Molly? I can't believe they gave up the fight on the "Killing Floor" with Molly vs the vatgrown ninja in favor of blowing up a bridge. Sigh. New Rose Hotel, on the other hand, hewed very close to the original story - which was fine, except the story was only six pages long.
As an aside, I have a band called The Gernsback Continuum, after the short story.
I agree with the thread sentiment that the short stories are better than the novels and novellas, though I enjoyed them when I read them in the 1980's and again, maybe less so, recently. But Gernsback Continuum really resonated with me and I love the idea and metaphor that these zeigeist-driven unrealized futures exist and shimmer at the edge of reality. Visible to the tired, drugged, and crazy it's solidly in the same camp as Burroughs and Dick.
I'm also writing some songs that are actually science fiction short stories, set to music. It's an interesting challenge.
I see this as a nod to old detective pulp novels and film noir which often have these kind of plots: a mysterious backer (sometimes a rich man, sometimes a femme fatale) sends a detective on a mission to find something or someone. Over the course of following the leads, getting in fights, etc. it becomes apparent that the thing in question is either irrelevant to the larger plot that's revealed, or that things aren't what they seem about the mission, or both.
It's actually a surprise when they don't betray you. And if they follow through on the contract, you're only waiting for when they'll have lulled you into complacency and then turn on you.
Just checked the wiki and supposedly there are two other versions out there which I guess I'll have to find now.
It was fascinating to realize just how much of our culture is indebted to Neuromancer. So many games and movies use scenes or characters taken wholesale from the pages.
Now if only somebody would do a TV adaptation of the original!
(As an aside: after finishing the book, I really enjoyed this artist's take on the characters. It was uncannily close to what I was already picturing in my head: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qo4Z8)
If you like this, you may enjoy Jeff Noon.
I sadly don't trust anyone including Gibson to do this in a way that doesn't ruin it for me, unfortunately. So much of it is about interiority. On the other hand it's ideal anime source material, where it could sit happily next to GITS.
The only approaches that might be viable would be to draw heavily on Mr Robot and Sherlock's overlay techniques. Let cyberspace bleed visibly into the real.
(The version I'd make would be the zero-budget BBC version, filmed deliberately on scratchy VHS with badly hand-matted effects, in the corner of a disused post-industrial warehouse with props from a bankrupt Maplins. It would be extremely punk and virtually unwatchable.)
Good, you'll know who to avoid in the future.
>In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would have made it feel rote and computery, whereas this cyberspace felt more like a collective fever dream.
It's because Gibson doesn't come from a technical background (he famously wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and had never even seen a personal computer at the time), but was a hippie deep into the drug subculture of the time.
I think being too into the technical side of things may actually be a hindrance when writing these kinds of books, and that Neuromancer resonated so widely precisely because it wasn't hung up on the details. It didn't need the right descriptions of technology, it needed to evoke the right kind of feeling and look at the right way of interacting with technology.
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
I've never seen a visual depiction in any cyberpunk-inspired that came even close to getting it right. They mostly all seem to want giant structures made out of neon blocks.
Incidentally a lot of cyberpunk feels off in 2018. Nobody seemed to forecast the rise of China.
China features prominently in The Diamond Age as a location, but not as a powerful, cohesive, oppressive, incredibly successful authoritarian government. It's sort of a laughing stock in Snow Crash, and barely present in Neuromancer.
Despite its reputation for being darkly cynical, I think we can look back now and see that cyberpunk as a genre was essentially optimistic about the power of computing technology--optimistic that it would indeed radically change power structures, society, and our relationship with governments.
Instead what we see today is not that different from this time 100 years ago: super rich oligarchs controlling much of the economy, rising racism and bigotry, authoritarians using new technologies to seize power and splinter their opposition.
It also nailed the gig economy.
> "The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate . . ."
> "Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."
> The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.
https://archive.org/stream/NeuromancerWilliamGibson/Neuroman...
The concepts and ideas are as iconoclastic as ever but one needs a keen eye and ideally personal experience in order to fully appreciate them. None of the sprawl trilogy novels are geared towards angry teenagers, they're layered with almost transcendental meaning that works on multiple levels.
An example: The Loa "riding" as the transmigration of traditional mystical experiences (possession/psychosis) into the digital domain. Anyone that's ever crossed the threshold will recognize innumerable similarities in Gibson's descriptions.
However after reading another discussion of it recently, things about it are still yet falling into place for me. Not just the viewpoint that cyber meaning "control systems" is also a theme; for each character, there is something or some means by which they are controlled. Retrospectively a lot of this looks like PTSD; Armitage most obviously, but it's a theme of all the characters and the world itself, including the AIs.
Looking too closely at the technology is a mistake. It's all about the mediation of experience and the aesthetic of it, rather than the details.
Unfortunately, it's only an abridged version. On the positive side, it's a quick listen, and well worth it if you're a fan (or just want to get a taste).
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo
Gibson is very self-deprecating throughout. He attributes people’s favorite aspects of the Neuromancer to work-arounds he used to cover his inexperience as an author. Meanwhile, the film interleaves interviews with other sci-fi authors who has early access to the book. They all knew the book was something new and special immediately.
And the Dixie Flatline! The idea of a personality captured as a software construct, to get all the little tics that make the personality so good at what they do. "Case. Joeboy. Quick study." You get that sense that this is a machine that sounds like a person, because it was a person. And toward the end, when the Dixie Flatline asks Case to erase him when it's over? Can a machine have existential horror to the point of longing for its own death? Loved that.
And Armitage! Technically, not a machine... just a hollowed-out shell of a man, filled with the sort of temporary personality Wintermute could craft, when Wintermute's ability to comprehend humans was limited, and Corto's madness lay trapped just below the surface, with Wintermute knowing it would crack at the worst possible time. Another truly great science fiction alien.
I would basically be okay with somebody doing this again in another 30 years.
A small detail - while it's left ambiguous, FWIW I always thought that was Dixie, not a copy of Case.
That's why Case hears Dixie's laughter at the very end; earlier Dixie disappears and Neuromancer says he got more than his wish; later, Case asks where Dixie is and Wintermute/Neuromancer says its kind of hard to explain.
This makes the ending a little darker.
"Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself."
It's hinted (in the next two books) that the construct merged with the AI and is part of the Loa phenomenon.
Maybe not.
The quality is terrible as I wanted to make them as small as possible....
http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/low/neuromancer/neuro...