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Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future. Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing thei
by lobster_johnson 10y ago
Conversely, in William Gibson's Neuromancer, there are no cell phones, despite being set decades into the future.
Gibson knows a thing or two about seeing their scifi becoming dated, of course. The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so (although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input).
There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot.
- ronilan 10y ago> although for a number of years, many digital TVs would display blue for missing input I'm sure you are aware that "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is not blue - right? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZAMjpjYfQ
- lobster_johnson 10y agoOf course. My point was that for a brief period of time, you could give Gibson the benefit of an accidental retcon; "ah, so the sky was a dark shade of blue, that works". As opposed to "uh, NO INPUT?".
- RandomOpinion 10y agoGiven that he spent the entire paragraph talking about how younger people wouldn't know what that passage refers to, presumably yes, he does.
- xor1 10y ago>There's also some fun stuff about people physically carrying information (this also happens in short story "Johnny Mnemonic"). For a world where there's a highly connected, super fast worldwide computer network available, people sure travel around a lot. Sneakernet isn't an irrelevant concept in any sort of context where data transferred through a computer network can be intercepted.
- vidarh 10y agoBut carrying a concealed micro-sd card with encrypted data would be a lot more convenient. Heck, you could fit many times as much data as in Johnny Mnemonic (40GB, I think?) inside your head too by shoving a micro-sd card up your nose or into your ear.
- walrus01 10y agoNose, ear, really? On a more realistic note, what is the maximum microsdxc card capacity of a human rectum?
- labster 10y agoA metric buttload.
- pravda 10y agoBelieve it or not, that's a thing, and it's called 'keistering'! Apparently, pro's can get a cellphone 'keistered'. But I think the flip-phone style, not an iPhone. As far as microsd cards -- I think you'd be able to 'keister' many many terabytes. They are so tiny and so thin, I'd guess hundreds would fit.
- throwanem 10y agoThere's a difference between "fit" and "fit without making it impossible to walk normally". And really, you'd want some sort of carrier for the cards, because otherwise they're likely to be lost or damaged. So it becomes a fairly complex question of the optimal balance among total carrier volume, gait effects, and maximizing internal volume of the carrier without thinning the walls so much they're likely to crumple. (Metal walls might serve, but then we're back to gait effects. Not comfortable.) And once the carrier design is in hand, there arises the question of how to maximize its bandwidth, which is itself a rather nontrivial packing problem.
- twic 10y agoGreat, yet ANOTHER USB-C adaptor I'm going to have to pay Apple for.
- duskwuff 10y ago"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel." -- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. (In an intentional homage to Neuromancer.) On another tangent: Gibson wrote, in an afterword in an early-1990s digital edition of Neuromancer, that he had never owned, nor even used, a computer until some years after he wrote the book. He noted that: > Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago> "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" no longer resonates with anyone born the last 20 years or so when reading that my mind conjures a gray sky, but then again when I was young TVs displayed static if you turned them to a dead channel, not solid blue...
- doomtop 10y agoI believe gray sky is the intended image.
- c22 10y agoI own a 60" television with no TV tuner attached to a smattering of devices that play and stream digital content. I suspect when my 1 year old is an adult she won't even have a solid conception of a "channel" let alone be able to imagine the color of a "dead" one.
- stephancoral 10y agoThe grey of a dead OTA channel and the grey of a missing / removed YouTube video aren't too dissimilar
- icebraining 10y agoThat's because YouTube mimics the TV static in their player.
- cwp 10y agoProbably the worst (best) bit of future-past in Neuromancer is that it starts with the main character trying to fence "three megabytes of hot RAM". That seemed like a ludicrously large amount when it was written.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoI think we can give Gibson the benefit of the doubt here and say the point was not the size, but the fact that it was hot RAM -- the contents was valuable. The price of 3MB, even as early as in 1984, was not so high as to make it that impressive even by the standards of the day.
- mortenjorck 10y agoHa, I never considered that. It would fit with the data-smuggling theme of Johnny Mnemonic (the short story, at least), which is set in the same universe.
- SamReidHughes 10y agoHey, 3 megs of RAM is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-SRAM-card-/252456869804 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP48-2MB-RAM-memory-card-for-HP48GX-...
- Lio 10y agoI always thought it was a prototype of some very, very fast cache RAM. I think I like your idea of hot RAM containing data better now.
- bboreham 10y ago> fun stuff about people physically carrying information This is a thing, though. https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ Or if you have 100PB: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
- Lio 10y agoI wonder what these people who don't know what a TV tuned to a dead channel looks like make of the HBO intro.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoEspecially after it's been encoded poorly, as static is a worst case scenario for video codecs.
- unimpressive 10y agoI was born in the last twenty years and understood the sentence just fine when I read it. Interestingly enough, youtube does static when your connection times out. (Though I grew up with CRT televison as a kid and definitely remember TV static. I also played a lot of classic video game consoles because my dad was a thrift store hound.)
- usrusr 10y agoJust like we do have an idea about how steam engines look and feel, but the mental image painted by words referring to one will be very different for those who only know steam engines from the Hogwarts Express, compared to those who actually stood close to one fully heated up and regulating pressure by bleed valve, turning half the station into a sauna. Firmly establishing in those opening lines not only the future setting of Neuromancer but also the era of analog electronics it was written in will be of great benefit to future readers.