5 ms·
The protagonist is so addicted to the Internet that he's willing to do literally anything to be able to use it again. If that's not a relatable motivation, I do
by karpierz 5y ago
The protagonist is so addicted to the Internet that he's willing to do literally anything to be able to use it again. If that's not a relatable motivation, I don't know what is.
- ugl 5y agodon't forget the speed addiction!
- idontwantthis 5y agoI think he got addicted to speed so he wouldn’t have to dream about the internet as much
- nirav72 5y agoWe have adderall now. Speed with a PG rating
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI don't think that's a very kind thing to say about the medications for people for who ADHD medications like amphetamines and methylphenidates have meant a huge improvement in quality of life.
- InitialLastName 5y agoThat it has helped people doesn't make the comparison untrue. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that many drugs with reputations of illegitimate/illegal use are readily provided to patients (including children) in a pharmaceutical context, most notably amphetamines and opiates.
- nirav72 5y agoMy point was that plenty of people use adderall without being diagnosed with ADHD.
- samatman 5y agoAdderall is a euphemism for amphetamine the same way that speed is a dysphemism. Hence "speed with a PG rating". I don't think being unkind to molecules is something to worry about, they can't be offended.
- cstross 5y agoThe word "internet" doesn't appear in Neuromancer because in most respects it hadn't been invented yet. While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel manuscript into production back then: very often, it still does.) ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a while. But the publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence? That was all in his imagination.
- cubano 5y agoThe Source? Compuserve? AOL? Those three come quickly to mind that were certainly trying very hard to be the " publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence" you are speaking of.
- pmoriarty 5y agoAOL didn't exist when Neuromancer was written. While the others did, Gibson seemed not to have been aware of them, and he didn't even own a computer at the time. You can tell his vision of cyberspace came entirely from his imagination because it doesn't even remotely resemble any actual computer systems of the day.