8 ms·

Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

65 points by skmurphy 8y ago

skmurphy 8y ago
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.
- Cheyana 8y ago
  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).
  - skmurphy 8y ago
    That's certainly possible. It's interesting that the developers of the Motorola Star Tac phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC 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/ http://www.technovelgy.com/
    - bpiche 8y ago
      Sometimes these science fiction counterparts are called 'diagetic prototypes' or 'design fictions'. Has been a favorite topic of Mr Bruce Sterling's for a while now https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic-prototypes/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic-protot...
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson
- jhbadger 8y ago
  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.
  - saltcured 8y ago
    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.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  > 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).
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    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'.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      Brunner is amazing - far ahead of his time.
      - kasey_junk 8y ago
        "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. Still a great read though.
        sorokod 8y ago
        Now I need to go and reread the Stand on Zanzibar. - bookworm/assassin
  - atombender 8y ago
    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.
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  > 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.
jinie 8y ago
The Bridge trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy) has always struck me as being closer to reality than i care to think about.
mailxplorer 8y ago
To me, Ted Nelson's Zigzag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) 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.
- prepend 8y ago
  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.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "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.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      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).
      - 8y ago
wallflower 8y ago
In case anyone was perplexed about the end of Neuromancer, this is the answer about what was meant below from William Gibson. > three notes, high and pure. A true name. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive.asp http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive...
- bitwize 8y ago
  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.
0ld 8y ago
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.
- needz 8y ago
  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. [0]: https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69 https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    It was routinely criticized as not being true to IT when it came out.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jhayward 8y ago
      Not that I recall, and I read it within months of release. Can you point to some contemporaneous reviews or critiques that do so?
      - kasey_junk 8y ago
        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. Here is an interview with Gibson where he talks about it: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/ 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).
linsomniac 8y ago
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. Is it just me?
- overcast 8y ago
  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.
- snovv_crash 8y ago
  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.
- larrydag 8y ago
  I found it a very hard read and a very disjointed plot. The literary color in the book is really good as described already.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  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.
  - eropple 8y ago
archagon 8y ago
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 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qo4Z8)
- pjc50 8y ago
  > the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so colorful and enticing. If you like this, you may enjoy Jeff Noon.
  - archagon 8y ago
    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.)
    - pjc50 8y ago
      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.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Neuromancer started it all, but I've always found Count Zero to be by far the best book in the trilogy.
- armitron 8y ago
  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.
pjc50 8y ago
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.
pmoriarty 8y ago
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). [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Although listening to the introduction, they claim Case is living in the Sprawl (the US urban East Coast). No! He lives in Chiba City, in Japan!
beat 8y ago
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.
corysama 8y ago
I’ll plug the Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territorie... 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.
beat 8y ago
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.
currymj 8y ago
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.
- yborg 8y ago
  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.
feral 8y ago
> 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. This makes the ending a little darker.
- armitron 8y ago
  There is no ambiguity: "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.
  - feral 8y ago
    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. Maybe not.
scruffyherder 8y ago
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.... http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/low/neuromancer/neuromancer.html http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/low/neuromancer/neuro...

65 points by skmurphy 8y ago

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.

Cheyana 8y ago
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).
- skmurphy 8y ago
  That's certainly possible. It's interesting that the developers of the Motorola Star Tac phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC 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/ http://www.technovelgy.com/
  - bpiche 8y ago
    Sometimes these science fiction counterparts are called 'diagetic prototypes' or 'design fictions'. Has been a favorite topic of Mr Bruce Sterling's for a while now https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic-prototypes/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic-protot...
- mattkevan 8y ago
  “The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson
jhbadger 8y ago
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.
- saltcured 8y ago
  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.
electricslpnsld 8y ago
> 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).
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  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'.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Brunner is amazing - far ahead of his time.
    - kasey_junk 8y ago
      "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. Still a great read though.
      - sorokod 8y ago
        Now I need to go and reread the Stand on Zanzibar. - bookworm/assassin
- atombender 8y ago
  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.
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
> 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.

jinie 8y ago

The Bridge trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy) has always struck me as being closer to reality than i care to think about.

mailxplorer 8y ago

To me, Ted Nelson's Zigzag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) 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.

prepend 8y ago
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.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "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.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    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).
    - 8y ago

wallflower 8y ago

In case anyone was perplexed about the end of Neuromancer, this is the answer about what was meant below from William Gibson. > three notes, high and pure. A true name. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive.asp http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive...

bitwize 8y ago
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.

0ld 8y ago

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.

needz 8y ago
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. [0]: https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69 https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  It was routinely criticized as not being true to IT when it came out.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhayward 8y ago
    Not that I recall, and I read it within months of release. Can you point to some contemporaneous reviews or critiques that do so?
    - kasey_junk 8y ago
      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. Here is an interview with Gibson where he talks about it: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/ 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).

linsomniac 8y ago

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. Is it just me?

overcast 8y ago
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.
snovv_crash 8y ago
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.
larrydag 8y ago
I found it a very hard read and a very disjointed plot. The literary color in the book is really good as described already.
Analemma_ 8y ago
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.
- eropple 8y ago

archagon 8y ago

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 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qo4Z8)

pjc50 8y ago
> the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so colorful and enticing. If you like this, you may enjoy Jeff Noon.
- archagon 8y ago
  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.)
  - pjc50 8y ago
    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.

pmoriarty 8y ago

Neuromancer started it all, but I've always found Count Zero to be by far the best book in the trilogy.

armitron 8y ago
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.

pjc50 8y ago

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.

pmoriarty 8y ago

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). [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo

jhbadger 8y ago
Although listening to the introduction, they claim Case is living in the Sprawl (the US urban East Coast). No! He lives in Chiba City, in Japan!

beat 8y ago

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.

corysama 8y ago

I’ll plug the Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territorie... 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.

beat 8y ago

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.

currymj 8y ago

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.

yborg 8y ago
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.

feral 8y ago

> 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. This makes the ending a little darker.

armitron 8y ago
There is no ambiguity: "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.
- feral 8y ago
  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. Maybe not.

scruffyherder 8y ago

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.... http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/low/neuromancer/neuromancer.html http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/low/neuromancer/neuro...