I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek).
In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.
I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.
That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.
At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.
To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.
P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
Fascinating story :-).Neuromancer is a book I reread often - like Dune, it has a rich tapestry of background world building. There is nothing surprising about plot anymore, but it is like a place I like to return to.
>To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.
I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.
I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.
Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
I read it in 1996. and it was a t-file from a bbs. I had to sit in front of my 386sx everyday to read the text in dos edit. it took weeks. because it was in english and I was learning english at the same time. you gave me the urge to reread it now :)
One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)
Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point.
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people.
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
Just goes to show, if you want to write romantically about something, it’s best to have little or no idea what you’re talking about, so that your imagination can take over. Shouldn’t be too hard for some people on hackernews, they do it everyday!
Yes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge.
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.
Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.
Ghost in the Shell started publication
around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.
1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.
I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.
What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
Bruce Sterling "The Artificial Kid" (1980)
This is not a hacker novel, but eerily presages Instagram/Snapchat and viral stardom, the need for creators to create content, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid
Interesting article. As somebody who is an unapologetic, raging Neuromancer fan, it's always fun to read about someone experiencing the book for the first time.
The one nitpick I have about the article is just this:
But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981
OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.
If you're interested in reading about cyberpunk and why today it feels "dated" - or at least to me, how it didn't manage to reinvent itself and remains crystallized in time -, there's a wonderful article here: https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-was-cyberpunk-in-memo...
Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive.
Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
It's because punk died, which is half of cyberpunk. All the cyber is corporate now. We live in cyber corp. We live in the part that Gibson found, rightfully, totally uninteresting to write about.
Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia are the 21st-century evolution of cyberpunk, IMO.[1] It's really too bad he seems to have decided not to continue writing in that fictional world.
[1] They're almost literally Bruce Sterling's corporations-would-turn-Frankenstein's-monster-into-a-product.
Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses the mark. Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot. That's the common thread; writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse.
Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"
Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:
-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)
-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.
-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.
Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.
What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
Totally agree. "Stand on Zanzibar" has a modern-world feel to it although some parts have been visited by the Suck Fairy. "Shockwave Rider" is also interesting - IIRC characters use their landline phones to access large computer systems. Because Brunner never really goes into too many techy details - it's just phones and computers - it's less jarring to read now than books where technology-heavy authors such as Arthur C Clarke tried to describe in detail what future computing devices might look like.
There's also Vernor Vinge's "True Names" (1981), which arguably introduced the notion of cyberspace, while also being an early reference to things like the hacker ethos.
Zanzibar holds up as well or better than Neuromancer. I recently reread both and Molly having a clock in her eye inserts really dates that one bit in Neuromancer, the chyron like news updates in Zanzibar call to mind todays social media sound/video bites.
> But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980
My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the cable tuner was too primitive to maintain an active list or you miskeyed a number on a remote.
Glad I'm not the only one just getting around to reading Neuromancer in 2025! The shocking thing about the story is how very few screens there are in the world, and how ungrounded "cyberspace" is in physics. Cyberspace's mechanics are vague, and in fact are inconsistent with the other extent communication technologies. e.g. Case never seems to worry about getting a signal for his deck, and yet does worry about getting signals for, e.g. fax machines on space ships. It feels like the fabric of cyberspace must be ESP or telepathy (which is consistent with its description as a "shared hallucination". Gibson seems to be wrestling with new technology in a similar way to the authors of "Wierd Science" - where basically computers are magic. (And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL).
The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out.
If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.
Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bother to phrase things in a way that is digestible for people from the past.
I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best cyberpunk manga after Akira.
> I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences.
This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally.
Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.
“The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified.”
This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.
Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
I'm a big fan of the aspects of the Sprawl world that weren't personally copied as much - the fuller domes over NYC and (this is surprisingly prominent in the book and a significant plot point) all the personal hologram tech.
It's personally very boring to read about how the book and technology is dated blah blah. The vibes still feel incredibly fresh to me and that's much more important. A lot of modern books (especially written during covid) won't nearly hold up as well
I want to recommend Vernor Vinge's books to anyone looking for some new sci-fi... I've read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire upon the Deep. They were exemplary to the kind of logical structure of SciFi and made some relevant predictions which I won't spoil. The guy was a professor of computer science (RIP)
Of all the cyberpunk authors, Gibson, while one of the first, is probably the least interesting. Stephenson and Sterling are better writers and explore more complex ideas. Gibson has the occasional shadow of an idea that he explores with a few one dimensional characters. That said, I liked "Virtual Light".
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions, ideas, concepts from Scifi stories, without all the plot and character stuff?
Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.
These ideas are not supposed to be predictions about the future. They're cool changes to introduce to the fictional world to make the stories more fun. (Almost) nobody thinks that they are the actual future
This is akin to asking someone explain Tolkien's works, but without all the world-building. The set and setting matter, they're a part of the message, if not even the main message.
Ender's Game (1985) has a ton of spot on predictions of the future, if you haven't read that you might enjoy it (and the story and later universe are fascinating as well, with twists and turns, and the "two threads" storylines, where you can read the same events from two different characters in the plurilogies of books)
Some predictions in the first book:
- touch-screens in general and tablets in particular
- use of AI to adapt difficulty levels in games
- use of AI and virtual simulations for military training
- the Internet, and more specifically:
- the wide usage of forums, blogs, etc. (lots of references that kinda seem like social media, with propaganda spread, message control, etc.)
- the usage of sock-puppet accounts to influence elections and general political discourse (and the creation of "influencers" out of ... thin air)
The US government used to consult sci-fi authors, especially when they were writing stories somewhat based on extrapolations of current advancements of technology or science. I'm not sure any of the notes from those meetings are available online, but I'd love to read them and compare.
Man, I loved Neuromancer when I read it as a kid. Yes, it's a tough book to read, especially today where there are too many distractions as well as too many works of art built on the sci-fi ideas of that era.
Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans.
Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
Neuromancer was a much easier read to me than "A scanner darkly" I had the same trouble physically reading it as I did with a picture of dorian gray. (top tip, audiobooks totally made them easy and enjoyable to "read")
I'm not a natural scifi-cyberpunk literature person. I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
One thing that did stand out was this: Everywhere had memory foam mattresses.
I'm by no means a quick reader and I devoured Neuromancer. I really had zero problem parsing the introduced words. Easier even than A Clockwork Orange.
My experience reading A Scanner Darkly was super painful. Switched to audiobook and quit quickly even then.
> I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
Agreed, but the prose are also so beautiful. This is not some garden variety pulp (not that there is anything wrong with pulp)
[+] [-] daremon|8 months ago|reply
In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.
I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.
That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.
At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.
To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.
P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
[+] [-] Bluestein|8 months ago|reply
Neu-romance-er :)
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Kon5ole|8 months ago|reply
That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.
I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.
I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.
Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
[+] [-] slim|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] macleginn|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] roughly|8 months ago|reply
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
[+] [-] jfengel|8 months ago|reply
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
[+] [-] corysama|8 months ago|reply
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
[+] [-] dfxm12|8 months ago|reply
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
[+] [-] deadbabe|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] beefnugs|8 months ago|reply
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
[+] [-] reactordev|8 months ago|reply
Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.
Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
[+] [-] qiine|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|8 months ago|reply
To go straight to the nitpicks:
> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.
Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.
1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.
I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.
What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
[+] [-] angry_octet|8 months ago|reply
George Alec Effinger "When Gravity Fails" (1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails
Walter John Williams "Aristoi" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)
And just pre-Gibson: Michael Berlyn "The Integrated Man" (1980) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144056.The_Integrated_M...
Bruce Sterling "The Artificial Kid" (1980) This is not a hacker novel, but eerily presages Instagram/Snapchat and viral stardom, the need for creators to create content, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid
[+] [-] mindcrime|8 months ago|reply
The one nitpick I have about the article is just this:
But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981
OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.
[+] [-] amarcheschi|8 months ago|reply
Be advised it's quite long
[+] [-] keiferski|8 months ago|reply
You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive.
Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
[+] [-] navane|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|8 months ago|reply
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
[+] [-] blincoln|8 months ago|reply
[1] They're almost literally Bruce Sterling's corporations-would-turn-Frankenstein's-monster-into-a-product.
[+] [-] cyberpunk|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] A_D_E_P_T|8 months ago|reply
Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"
Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:
-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)
-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.
-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.
Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.
What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
[+] [-] johngossman|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] KineticLensman|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] int_19h|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwoo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ltbarcly3|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|8 months ago|reply
My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the cable tuner was too primitive to maintain an active list or you miskeyed a number on a remote.
[+] [-] simpaticoder|8 months ago|reply
The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out.
If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.
[+] [-] cubefox|8 months ago|reply
I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
[+] [-] ecocentrik|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cherryteastain|8 months ago|reply
This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally.
Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.
[+] [-] nocoiner|8 months ago|reply
This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.
Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
[+] [-] xyzsparetimexyz|8 months ago|reply
It's personally very boring to read about how the book and technology is dated blah blah. The vibes still feel incredibly fresh to me and that's much more important. A lot of modern books (especially written during covid) won't nearly hold up as well
[+] [-] kenoath69|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ecocentrik|8 months ago|reply
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
[+] [-] GMoromisato|8 months ago|reply
Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle)
William Gibson (Neuromancer)
Neil Stephenson (Diamond Age)
Vernor Vinge (Across Realtime)
Greg Egan (Permutation City)
Robert Reed (Sister Alice)
John Varley (Eight Worlds series)
I'm sure every generation has its pantheon--I wonder what it is for Millennials and Gen Z.
[+] [-] elcapitan|8 months ago|reply
Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Etheryte|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NitpickLawyer|8 months ago|reply
Some predictions in the first book:
- touch-screens in general and tablets in particular
- use of AI to adapt difficulty levels in games
- use of AI and virtual simulations for military training
- the Internet, and more specifically:
- the wide usage of forums, blogs, etc. (lots of references that kinda seem like social media, with propaganda spread, message control, etc.)
- the usage of sock-puppet accounts to influence elections and general political discourse (and the creation of "influencers" out of ... thin air)
Later in the series we also get:
- Cryptocurrencies
- AIs in control of financial systems
[+] [-] surfingdino|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cubefox|8 months ago|reply
For concepts yes:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistalpha.asp
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] plq|8 months ago|reply
Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans.
Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
[+] [-] BizarroLand|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] KaiserPro|8 months ago|reply
I'm not a natural scifi-cyberpunk literature person. I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
One thing that did stand out was this: Everywhere had memory foam mattresses.
Some horrid bedsit: Memoryfoam matress
Uber fancy sky hotel: memoryfoam.
[+] [-] jszymborski|8 months ago|reply
My experience reading A Scanner Darkly was super painful. Switched to audiobook and quit quickly even then.
> I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
Agreed, but the prose are also so beautiful. This is not some garden variety pulp (not that there is anything wrong with pulp)