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I’m constantly amazed at how Metaverse aficionados quote Snow Crash and and other 1990s works as cornerstones of cyberspace, when Gibson invented the term and N

I’m constantly amazed at how Metaverse aficionados quote Snow Crash and and other 1990s works as cornerstones of cyberspace, when Gibson invented the term and Neuromancer was written in 1984. Gibson is the original. The passage where Case connects to the matrix (also a Gibson term) again for the first time once his nervous system is repaired is heartbreakingly beautiful. I relate to it as a young phone phreak growing up in South Africa in the 80s and 90s when I would bluebox the home country direct phone trunks to connect to BBSs in the USA. When I could not get through, usually because they were filtering my seize tones, I felt the same deprivation. And when I finally connected I felt the same elation Case feels in this scene… “Please, he prayed, now— A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now— Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding— And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”

sneak 5y ago
To be honest, the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts of Neuromancer that hold up least well. The dirtbags, crime, sex, and drugs are all still perfect, and I imagine will remain so.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts of Neuromancer that hold up least well" I'd be interested in reading descriptions of cyberspace that are better than Neuromancer's. So far I haven't found any.
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    The commentary I've read (and agree with), is that the metaverse itself just didn't hold up. The internet did not become a new reality. Instead, our own reality is melding with the internet through always-on devices and miniaturized sensors and wide wireless networks. Instead of some kind of digital lovecraftian portals hidden away in parts of realspace that connect to this magical deadly realm, the modern vision of cyperbpunk should probably have included something more like an ethereal plane -- a perfect mirror of the real world that happens to ignore its physical constraints and provide ways to manipulate and bypass the realspace.
    - ant_li0n 5y ago
      I love Gibson but prefer the Bridge Trilogy over the Sprawl Trilogy. It's a lot closer to what you're describing, and the characters are way more interesting. Characters in the Sprawl seem so two-dimensional to me.
      - bpiche 5y ago
        The Bridge trilogy is fantastic but as a fun counterpoint I respectfully refer to you the two deuteragonists of the _first book_, Berry Rydell is a huge meathead and Chevette Washington has less depth than Snow Crash's Y.T., to me, which is saying something. The data analyst guy who ends up obsessing over the VR idol and ends up in a cardboard box in the Tokyo subway is super super interesting. Probably my favorite part of the whole trilogy. If I am not mistaken, Gibson actually took a lot of inspiration for that character from his own experiences with photography. The ability to intuitively line up the right F-stop, shutter speed, and film speed with a scene and natural light in a second is the inspiration for the way the analyst intuitively senses 'nodes' in a social network. And I personally think that it is this notion that led the author to write about causality in the Peripheral-Agency series.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      Wasn't it Gibson himself who wrote this, right in the beginning of Zero History if I'm not mistaken, when Cayce is meeting with some French artist in a warehouse in the outskirts of Oakland? The artist is making an augmented reality installation of a cyber whale that you can see in real life with mirrorshades. And then the artist says 'the internet is e-ver-ting'.
  - relaxing 5y ago
    Depends on your criteria, I guess. As a poetic fantasy, they are superb. But it's maddening how little sense they make as a way to navigate computer networks. (Why would you visualize servers and executing code in a 3D space that you have to physically navigate, when you could just... execute a command. Gibson's genius was recognizing that real computer hacking wasn't cinematic, and making up his own system.) I still love his vision.
    - narism 5y ago
      I think that’s mostly because he didn’t know anything about computers when he wrote it :) “I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful. “So I was listening to it as an English honours student. I would take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a world from those bricks. Consequently there are other things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson... His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently metaverse-like: The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine" – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson-beyond-cyberspace https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson...
    - vidarh 5y ago
      It makes no sense now, but there were endless experiments with physical metaphors for interacting with computers. At the time it was just not settled that this was not right around the corner and workable.
  - LegionMammal978 5y ago
    One depiction of cyberspace that's stuck with me is that of the datumplane in Dan Simmons' Hyperion (Chapter 5). It's only a few pages' worth of content, but it's by far the closest description conceptually to Gibson's cyberspace. Notably, the datumplane is envisioned as a highly organic realm at all scales, not restricted to cyberspace's cubes and hard edges. Both contain structures corresponding to the large-scale organization of their societies' data and programs.
- mmaunder 5y ago
  They're a 38 year old metaphor. Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we still don't have "professional road surfers", but that doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant: "Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball joint. As the wheel rolls, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it. If you surf over a pothole, the rubber prongs probe its asphalt depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds, smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right - you cannot be a professional road surfer without smartwheels."
  - paparush 5y ago
    You wanna talk about contact patches?
    - wiredfool 5y ago
      I am sooooo glad I read Snowcrash _after_ I stopped driving pizzas.
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    I just don't like snow crash. Does that make me an outlier? The whole thing was silly and far too jrpg for my taste. I mean, stealing the whole "skitchn" thing and slapping "Smooth move, ex lax" on a car when they try to shake you is just campy. "Poor impulse control" -- just slapstick comedy at that point.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      It is campy and frequently cheesy, and I think probably influenced somewhat by anime which was in the 80s and early 90s both very different from what it is now, and still in the US a very niche sort of taste in that you had to be somewhat "plugged in" even to have heard about it - it wouldn't hit more widely until the mid- to late-90s Web boom made awareness and access much more broadly available. That's part of the fun in my view, but it's equally fair just not to like it - de gustibus etc. Or maybe it's just a timing thing; I first read it when I was young and it was new, and maybe that has as much to do as anything with why I liked it so well and still regard it fondly.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Gibson has a cameo in Wild Palms. PAIGE: This is William Gibson, Harry. HARRY: Oh, yeah... Neuromancer, right? PAIGE: He invented the word "cyberspace." GIBSON: And they'll never let me forget it.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Wow. Wild Palms.... I don't hear that one mentioned often (or ever). Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's seen this weird, obscure, flawed gem of a series.
  - res0nat0r 5y ago
    This finally came out on Bluray not long ago. I remember seeing part of this in the early 90s and was trying to try and find it again forever but it was never available. https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wild-Palms-Blu-ray/245856/ https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wild-Palms-Blu-ray/245856/
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      And to go with it, The Wild Palms Reader, which has all kinds of little columns, clips, and so forth. I have the Blu-Ray and the Reader sitting in my "COVID Isolation Hotel Media Crate," waiting for the day I test positive.
  - user22 5y ago
    I remember watching this on Fox and being transfixed. I curious how my reaction to it would be today. Need to watch it again.
    - mulderc 5y ago
      It was on ABC which I find very amusing as it means Disney is ultimately responsible for that amazing incomprehensible strange mini-series.
      - 5y ago
pkdpic 5y ago
And didn't Gibson write the screenplay for the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic where they coined the term iPhone in that one random scene for two seconds? Or did I imagine that? Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:
- porbelm 5y ago
  Nah, it's an EYE phone not an i-phone
officeplant 5y ago
It always confuses me when I hear much older people (I'm 34) mention Snow Crash and never Gibson's works. Younger people would be more understandable, but a handful of the tech podcasts I use for background noise at work are staffed by 50-70 year old tech folk that grew up with Gibson.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
Neuromancer isn't really my kind of scifi but Gibson's descriptions are so good and poetic I get the urge to re-read select chapters at least a few times every year.
- flir 5y ago
  The biological machine gun. Not gonna forget that one in a hurry.
nimithryn 5y ago
The writing is beautiful, but I think Neuromancer has failed to capture a modern audience due to some of the stylistic choices Gibson makes (I’m not necessarily arguing they are bad decisions - I personally enjoyed the style - although I think one could argue that). For instance, Gibson frequently skips exposition, and he delivers the narrative with a disconnected, stream-of-consciousness feel that is meant to evoke the sense of disconnection when “channel-hopping” or digging through large amounts of information on the internet. Combined with the frenetic pace of the story it can be confusing if the reader isn’t paying close attention. I’ll add that this was also Gibson’s first novel. Compare to Snow Crash, which has a pulpier writing style (it was original envisioned as a graphic novel) or even The Matrix, which has a tight narrative. Those are more accessible to a mainstream audience. Edit: formatting
- bpiche 5y ago
  I have to disagree, Snow Crash is interminably long, like most of Stephenson's books. Neuromancer's whole Ocean's 11 Straylight run job is a very clean story. edit: A lot of Gibson's stream of consciousness writing style can be attributed to the effect of beat writers like Burroughs on him. It's unique but it's also an intentional stylistic decision. Not really an attempt to capture the aesthetics of logging into the net. And as you may know, Snow Crash may seem pulpier but Gibson grew up on pulp like Edgar Rice Burroughs and it affected his work a bit.
  - nimithryn 5y ago
    To each his own, but I don’t think the length of the book has anything to do with the clarity of the narrative. And I’m definitely not arguing that Stephenson writes novels that are less confusing than Gibson in general (I liked Anathem! But cmon) I’m just arguing that the style in Snow Crash spells out what’s going on more literally than in Neuromancer.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      I'm not using this reply to agree or disagree, I just want to share this piece of internet archeology with you. If you're interested in comparing and contrasting great cyberpunk authors, the esteemed Rudy Rucker himself did this in an interview with punk-cyber legend R U Sirius (of R U A Cyberpunk? meme fame) on his blog back in the day https://www.acceler8or.com/2012/02/cyberpunk-sfmathematics-legend-rudy-ruckers-nested-scrolls-an-interview/ https://www.acceler8or.com/2012/02/cyberpunk-sfmathematics-l...
bpiche 5y ago
That last line must be the best one in the whole book. It has remained with me for years. Thank you for sharing this.
- EL_Loco 5y ago
  Neuromancer's opening line is probably one of the most remembered first sentences in american fiction. Every friend of mine who read the book, most of them in the 90's, seem to remember it verbatim. Now that I think of it, do younger people know what he's talking about? I mean, at some point dead channels changed from the noisy grayscale beehive-like granulates to a still blue screen.
  - ant_li0n 5y ago
    It's always been my understanding that a tv tuned to a dead channel was that solid grey color, like when the transmitter is powered on but there is no picture being sent. In other words, not the same thing as just setting the receiver to a frequency with no transmission (static)
    - EL_Loco 5y ago
      All the people I know who've read the novel agree with me that it was supposed to mean static. I wonder if anyone asked Gibson about this, since the advent of the blue screens.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
One of the famous lines from the movie Hackers (1995): “Hack the Gibson!” Must have been a call-out :)
majormajor 5y ago
By the time I read either book I'd been on the 90s internet for years, and I couldn't recognize it at all in Neuromancer, but I could see it turning into something like Snow Crash. Neuromancer aged faster because the technology evolved very differently (like the 3D real-world-but-never-popular interface in Jurassic Park, for that matter). So the metaverse people are pitching looks more like Snow Crash's "avatars interacting in a world that's otherwise immediately recognizable" than Neuromancer's "stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems" not just because Snow Crash is more prominent, but because it clicks more directly with people. The Snow Crash metaverse is infinitely more relatable to most people than the Neuromancer one. (And bonus points when it comes to being widespread, the novel is a lower-effort read. Which isn't a comment on quality... the genres are COMPLETELY different so I don't think that's really a reasonable comparison anyway.)
- tialaramex 5y ago
  A crucial difference is that Gibson hasn't the faintest idea about the actual technology - he wrote the early stuff on a typewriter - whereas Stephenson has a least a rudimentary understanding. For lots of readers this doesn't make any difference, but if you actually have some idea what's going on Gibson's approach interferes with the immersion more than Stephenson's. This has some impact on predictive power too. One reason people tried to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that - more or less, you actually could imagine building that. My friend's daughter talks to the AI, and is learning to read stuff on a glowing screen that knows her name. She doesn't have an abusive step-father, and so fortunately her glowing screen won't need to teach her martial arts for people who are smaller and less powerful than their opponent, and about the importance of running away when there's no way to win. And hopefully her mother will remain a loving physical presence in her life. But the general thrust of the idea in the Primer makes sense, even if we aren't close to "really" building the Primer, ideas from Gibson don't make so much sense.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    To me I think it's the opposite -- the fact that Neuromancer's technology isn't just a version of what we have makes is what makes it timeless. Kind of how Star Wars tech from 1977 seems less dated than in most SF movies because it wasn't based on real tech. Snow Crash is so obviously just 1992 technology with a coat of paint -- Stephenson obviously played MUDs and that's all his virtual world is -- a MUD. And so it hasn't aged well as MUDs weren't the future.
intrasight 5y ago
In 2013 at my 30 year HS reunion, I was talking to another student. He'd gone from being in the "jock" click to being a very cool artist in college. We got talking about literature and cyberpunk. He said that if I liked Gibson then I should read Stephenson - as he is the "continuation of the genre". The next year while visiting family in Portland, OR. I saw Snow Crash at a bookstore and bought it. My daughter read it while we were there and, as she thoroughly enjoyed it, I read it upon returning home. Then she and I, during a college trip, listened to the audio book. I've since read the book a second time and also listed to the audio book a second time. I have read at least 6 of his books since. I have thanked my HS friend since then for introducing me to the Neal Stephenson.
conical 5y ago
"Case connects to the matrix (also a Gibson term)" Matrix isn't Gibson's term. Doctor Who used the term Matrix back in the 70's referring to a supercomputer simulated reality environment.
Tr3nton 5y ago
I couldn't even finish Snow Crash. The fact the protagonist's name was "Hiro Protagonist" is a good example of the intellectual tone of the novel. Every character reminded me of Poochy from The Simpsons, an over-written "edgy" anti-hero, as compelling as an episode of Saved By The Bell. Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.
- Nursie 5y ago
  I enjoyed it, but it must be read with that in mind - every character is a caricature, and the dystopia they live in is that way too. If you don't take it as being serious in any way (other than in its satire of cyberpunk and its lambasting of a corporate-owned American future), I find it quite enjoyable. But it is a satire. I hope :) (Market Forces by Richard Morgan is another book I very much enjoyed, which is also very much this way)
- laichzeit0 5y ago
  Same, I actually tried reading Snow Crash on my kindle a month ago. I've read pretty much all of Gibson and found Snow Crash too... corny? I gave up at about the point where some autonomous dog thing died. Sci-fi is like vi / emacs preferences I guess.
  - d13 5y ago
    I gave up at exactly the same place. Absolutely baffled why it’s constantly cited, it’s totally insipid, unimaginative, and poorly written.
- barbecue_sauce 5y ago
  I've never read Snow Crash but that name strikes me as Pynchon-esque.

sneak 5y ago

To be honest, the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts of Neuromancer that hold up least well. The dirtbags, crime, sex, and drugs are all still perfect, and I imagine will remain so.

pmoriarty 5y ago
"the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts of Neuromancer that hold up least well" I'd be interested in reading descriptions of cyberspace that are better than Neuromancer's. So far I haven't found any.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  The commentary I've read (and agree with), is that the metaverse itself just didn't hold up. The internet did not become a new reality. Instead, our own reality is melding with the internet through always-on devices and miniaturized sensors and wide wireless networks. Instead of some kind of digital lovecraftian portals hidden away in parts of realspace that connect to this magical deadly realm, the modern vision of cyperbpunk should probably have included something more like an ethereal plane -- a perfect mirror of the real world that happens to ignore its physical constraints and provide ways to manipulate and bypass the realspace.
  - ant_li0n 5y ago
    I love Gibson but prefer the Bridge Trilogy over the Sprawl Trilogy. It's a lot closer to what you're describing, and the characters are way more interesting. Characters in the Sprawl seem so two-dimensional to me.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      The Bridge trilogy is fantastic but as a fun counterpoint I respectfully refer to you the two deuteragonists of the _first book_, Berry Rydell is a huge meathead and Chevette Washington has less depth than Snow Crash's Y.T., to me, which is saying something. The data analyst guy who ends up obsessing over the VR idol and ends up in a cardboard box in the Tokyo subway is super super interesting. Probably my favorite part of the whole trilogy. If I am not mistaken, Gibson actually took a lot of inspiration for that character from his own experiences with photography. The ability to intuitively line up the right F-stop, shutter speed, and film speed with a scene and natural light in a second is the inspiration for the way the analyst intuitively senses 'nodes' in a social network. And I personally think that it is this notion that led the author to write about causality in the Peripheral-Agency series.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    Wasn't it Gibson himself who wrote this, right in the beginning of Zero History if I'm not mistaken, when Cayce is meeting with some French artist in a warehouse in the outskirts of Oakland? The artist is making an augmented reality installation of a cyber whale that you can see in real life with mirrorshades. And then the artist says 'the internet is e-ver-ting'.
- relaxing 5y ago
  Depends on your criteria, I guess. As a poetic fantasy, they are superb. But it's maddening how little sense they make as a way to navigate computer networks. (Why would you visualize servers and executing code in a 3D space that you have to physically navigate, when you could just... execute a command. Gibson's genius was recognizing that real computer hacking wasn't cinematic, and making up his own system.) I still love his vision.
  - narism 5y ago
    I think that’s mostly because he didn’t know anything about computers when he wrote it :) “I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful. “So I was listening to it as an English honours student. I would take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a world from those bricks. Consequently there are other things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson... His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently metaverse-like: The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine" – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson-beyond-cyberspace https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson...
  - vidarh 5y ago
    It makes no sense now, but there were endless experiments with physical metaphors for interacting with computers. At the time it was just not settled that this was not right around the corner and workable.
- LegionMammal978 5y ago
  One depiction of cyberspace that's stuck with me is that of the datumplane in Dan Simmons' Hyperion (Chapter 5). It's only a few pages' worth of content, but it's by far the closest description conceptually to Gibson's cyberspace. Notably, the datumplane is envisioned as a highly organic realm at all scales, not restricted to cyberspace's cubes and hard edges. Both contain structures corresponding to the large-scale organization of their societies' data and programs.
mmaunder 5y ago
They're a 38 year old metaphor. Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we still don't have "professional road surfers", but that doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant: "Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball joint. As the wheel rolls, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it. If you surf over a pothole, the rubber prongs probe its asphalt depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds, smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right - you cannot be a professional road surfer without smartwheels."
- paparush 5y ago
  You wanna talk about contact patches?
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    I am sooooo glad I read Snowcrash _after_ I stopped driving pizzas.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  I just don't like snow crash. Does that make me an outlier? The whole thing was silly and far too jrpg for my taste. I mean, stealing the whole "skitchn" thing and slapping "Smooth move, ex lax" on a car when they try to shake you is just campy. "Poor impulse control" -- just slapstick comedy at that point.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    It is campy and frequently cheesy, and I think probably influenced somewhat by anime which was in the 80s and early 90s both very different from what it is now, and still in the US a very niche sort of taste in that you had to be somewhat "plugged in" even to have heard about it - it wouldn't hit more widely until the mid- to late-90s Web boom made awareness and access much more broadly available. That's part of the fun in my view, but it's equally fair just not to like it - de gustibus etc. Or maybe it's just a timing thing; I first read it when I was young and it was new, and maybe that has as much to do as anything with why I liked it so well and still regard it fondly.

at_a_remove 5y ago

Gibson has a cameo in Wild Palms. PAIGE: This is William Gibson, Harry. HARRY: Oh, yeah... Neuromancer, right? PAIGE: He invented the word "cyberspace." GIBSON: And they'll never let me forget it.

pmoriarty 5y ago
Wow. Wild Palms.... I don't hear that one mentioned often (or ever). Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's seen this weird, obscure, flawed gem of a series.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  This finally came out on Bluray not long ago. I remember seeing part of this in the early 90s and was trying to try and find it again forever but it was never available. https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wild-Palms-Blu-ray/245856/ https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wild-Palms-Blu-ray/245856/
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    And to go with it, The Wild Palms Reader, which has all kinds of little columns, clips, and so forth. I have the Blu-Ray and the Reader sitting in my "COVID Isolation Hotel Media Crate," waiting for the day I test positive.
- user22 5y ago
  I remember watching this on Fox and being transfixed. I curious how my reaction to it would be today. Need to watch it again.
  - mulderc 5y ago
    It was on ABC which I find very amusing as it means Disney is ultimately responsible for that amazing incomprehensible strange mini-series.
    - 5y ago

pkdpic 5y ago

And didn't Gibson write the screenplay for the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic where they coined the term iPhone in that one random scene for two seconds? Or did I imagine that? Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:

porbelm 5y ago
Nah, it's an EYE phone not an i-phone

officeplant 5y ago

It always confuses me when I hear much older people (I'm 34) mention Snow Crash and never Gibson's works. Younger people would be more understandable, but a handful of the tech podcasts I use for background noise at work are staffed by 50-70 year old tech folk that grew up with Gibson.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

Neuromancer isn't really my kind of scifi but Gibson's descriptions are so good and poetic I get the urge to re-read select chapters at least a few times every year.

flir 5y ago
The biological machine gun. Not gonna forget that one in a hurry.

nimithryn 5y ago

The writing is beautiful, but I think Neuromancer has failed to capture a modern audience due to some of the stylistic choices Gibson makes (I’m not necessarily arguing they are bad decisions - I personally enjoyed the style - although I think one could argue that). For instance, Gibson frequently skips exposition, and he delivers the narrative with a disconnected, stream-of-consciousness feel that is meant to evoke the sense of disconnection when “channel-hopping” or digging through large amounts of information on the internet. Combined with the frenetic pace of the story it can be confusing if the reader isn’t paying close attention. I’ll add that this was also Gibson’s first novel. Compare to Snow Crash, which has a pulpier writing style (it was original envisioned as a graphic novel) or even The Matrix, which has a tight narrative. Those are more accessible to a mainstream audience. Edit: formatting

bpiche 5y ago
I have to disagree, Snow Crash is interminably long, like most of Stephenson's books. Neuromancer's whole Ocean's 11 Straylight run job is a very clean story. edit: A lot of Gibson's stream of consciousness writing style can be attributed to the effect of beat writers like Burroughs on him. It's unique but it's also an intentional stylistic decision. Not really an attempt to capture the aesthetics of logging into the net. And as you may know, Snow Crash may seem pulpier but Gibson grew up on pulp like Edgar Rice Burroughs and it affected his work a bit.
- nimithryn 5y ago
  To each his own, but I don’t think the length of the book has anything to do with the clarity of the narrative. And I’m definitely not arguing that Stephenson writes novels that are less confusing than Gibson in general (I liked Anathem! But cmon) I’m just arguing that the style in Snow Crash spells out what’s going on more literally than in Neuromancer.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    I'm not using this reply to agree or disagree, I just want to share this piece of internet archeology with you. If you're interested in comparing and contrasting great cyberpunk authors, the esteemed Rudy Rucker himself did this in an interview with punk-cyber legend R U Sirius (of R U A Cyberpunk? meme fame) on his blog back in the day https://www.acceler8or.com/2012/02/cyberpunk-sfmathematics-legend-rudy-ruckers-nested-scrolls-an-interview/ https://www.acceler8or.com/2012/02/cyberpunk-sfmathematics-l...

bpiche 5y ago

That last line must be the best one in the whole book. It has remained with me for years. Thank you for sharing this.

EL_Loco 5y ago
Neuromancer's opening line is probably one of the most remembered first sentences in american fiction. Every friend of mine who read the book, most of them in the 90's, seem to remember it verbatim. Now that I think of it, do younger people know what he's talking about? I mean, at some point dead channels changed from the noisy grayscale beehive-like granulates to a still blue screen.
- ant_li0n 5y ago
  It's always been my understanding that a tv tuned to a dead channel was that solid grey color, like when the transmitter is powered on but there is no picture being sent. In other words, not the same thing as just setting the receiver to a frequency with no transmission (static)
  - EL_Loco 5y ago
    All the people I know who've read the novel agree with me that it was supposed to mean static. I wonder if anyone asked Gibson about this, since the advent of the blue screens.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

One of the famous lines from the movie Hackers (1995): “Hack the Gibson!” Must have been a call-out :)

majormajor 5y ago

By the time I read either book I'd been on the 90s internet for years, and I couldn't recognize it at all in Neuromancer, but I could see it turning into something like Snow Crash. Neuromancer aged faster because the technology evolved very differently (like the 3D real-world-but-never-popular interface in Jurassic Park, for that matter). So the metaverse people are pitching looks more like Snow Crash's "avatars interacting in a world that's otherwise immediately recognizable" than Neuromancer's "stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems" not just because Snow Crash is more prominent, but because it clicks more directly with people. The Snow Crash metaverse is infinitely more relatable to most people than the Neuromancer one. (And bonus points when it comes to being widespread, the novel is a lower-effort read. Which isn't a comment on quality... the genres are COMPLETELY different so I don't think that's really a reasonable comparison anyway.)

tialaramex 5y ago
A crucial difference is that Gibson hasn't the faintest idea about the actual technology - he wrote the early stuff on a typewriter - whereas Stephenson has a least a rudimentary understanding. For lots of readers this doesn't make any difference, but if you actually have some idea what's going on Gibson's approach interferes with the immersion more than Stephenson's. This has some impact on predictive power too. One reason people tried to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that - more or less, you actually could imagine building that. My friend's daughter talks to the AI, and is learning to read stuff on a glowing screen that knows her name. She doesn't have an abusive step-father, and so fortunately her glowing screen won't need to teach her martial arts for people who are smaller and less powerful than their opponent, and about the importance of running away when there's no way to win. And hopefully her mother will remain a loving physical presence in her life. But the general thrust of the idea in the Primer makes sense, even if we aren't close to "really" building the Primer, ideas from Gibson don't make so much sense.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  To me I think it's the opposite -- the fact that Neuromancer's technology isn't just a version of what we have makes is what makes it timeless. Kind of how Star Wars tech from 1977 seems less dated than in most SF movies because it wasn't based on real tech. Snow Crash is so obviously just 1992 technology with a coat of paint -- Stephenson obviously played MUDs and that's all his virtual world is -- a MUD. And so it hasn't aged well as MUDs weren't the future.

intrasight 5y ago

In 2013 at my 30 year HS reunion, I was talking to another student. He'd gone from being in the "jock" click to being a very cool artist in college. We got talking about literature and cyberpunk. He said that if I liked Gibson then I should read Stephenson - as he is the "continuation of the genre". The next year while visiting family in Portland, OR. I saw Snow Crash at a bookstore and bought it. My daughter read it while we were there and, as she thoroughly enjoyed it, I read it upon returning home. Then she and I, during a college trip, listened to the audio book. I've since read the book a second time and also listed to the audio book a second time. I have read at least 6 of his books since. I have thanked my HS friend since then for introducing me to the Neal Stephenson.

conical 5y ago

"Case connects to the matrix (also a Gibson term)" Matrix isn't Gibson's term. Doctor Who used the term Matrix back in the 70's referring to a supercomputer simulated reality environment.

Tr3nton 5y ago

I couldn't even finish Snow Crash. The fact the protagonist's name was "Hiro Protagonist" is a good example of the intellectual tone of the novel. Every character reminded me of Poochy from The Simpsons, an over-written "edgy" anti-hero, as compelling as an episode of Saved By The Bell. Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.

Nursie 5y ago
I enjoyed it, but it must be read with that in mind - every character is a caricature, and the dystopia they live in is that way too. If you don't take it as being serious in any way (other than in its satire of cyberpunk and its lambasting of a corporate-owned American future), I find it quite enjoyable. But it is a satire. I hope :) (Market Forces by Richard Morgan is another book I very much enjoyed, which is also very much this way)
laichzeit0 5y ago
Same, I actually tried reading Snow Crash on my kindle a month ago. I've read pretty much all of Gibson and found Snow Crash too... corny? I gave up at about the point where some autonomous dog thing died. Sci-fi is like vi / emacs preferences I guess.
- d13 5y ago
  I gave up at exactly the same place. Absolutely baffled why it’s constantly cited, it’s totally insipid, unimaginative, and poorly written.
barbecue_sauce 5y ago
I've never read Snow Crash but that name strikes me as Pynchon-esque.