4 ms·

What, a uniform blue color? I remember a discussion about that particular line with Gibson, in an interview, but can't find it at the moment.

tcoff91 5y ago
Given the time that the novel was written, televisions at the time would just display grey static on a dead channel.
Veen 5y ago
This comment makes me feel old. I immediately knew he was talking about static, but I suppose if you didn't grow up with pre-digital terrestrial TV, you wouldn't be familiar with that.
e12e 5y ago
as remarked on in homage by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: > The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
Vancouver grey
atombender 5y ago
Gibson discusses the opening in the foreword to the latest edition of Neuromancer [1]: "It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism, right at the very start of my career in the imaginary future. But an invisible one, interestingly; one that reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel”." [1] https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101146460 https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101146460

tcoff91 5y ago

Given the time that the novel was written, televisions at the time would just display grey static on a dead channel.

Veen 5y ago

This comment makes me feel old. I immediately knew he was talking about static, but I suppose if you didn't grow up with pre-digital terrestrial TV, you wouldn't be familiar with that.

e12e 5y ago

as remarked on in homage by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere: > The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

Vancouver grey

atombender 5y ago

Gibson discusses the opening in the foreword to the latest edition of Neuromancer [1]: "It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism, right at the very start of my career in the imaginary future. But an invisible one, interestingly; one that reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel”." [1] https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101146460 https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101146460