16 ms·

Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

• amarcheschi 1y ago
  If you're interested in reading about cyberpunk and why today it feels "dated" - or at least to me, how it didn't manage to reinvent itself and remains crystallized in time -, there's a wonderful article here: https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-was-cyberpunk-in-memoriam-1980-2020/1721 https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-was-cyberpunk-in-memo... Be advised it's quite long
  • A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
    Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses the mark. Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot. That's the common thread; writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse. Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!" Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection: -The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.) -The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things. -The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly. Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that. What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
    • amarcheschi 1y ago
      It's not my article and I don't 100% agree with it. But I think it's interesting to read. I think the article spends some time making your points about the esthetic over the contents
    • AnonymousPlanet 1y ago
      I think you might be missing the mark. The "cyberpunks", the original authors who started the genre, raised eyebrows because in their stories technology wasn't described as something that invariably had a positive impact on people's lives, quite the contrary. That is was what set them apart from the techno optimistic utopianism that dominated science fiction at the time. The authors were called punks because they were going against the grain and, like punk, did a sort of reset of science fiction. Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology. The caper plots are just a coincidence. If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.
    • mnky9800n 1y ago
      Gibson isn’t the only person writing cyberpunk although he definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from words like >> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer Or >> There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process. ~ idoru I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer. I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.
  • keiferski 1y ago
    Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system. You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive. Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
    • bloqs 1y ago
      fascinating insight
    • throwpoaster 1y ago
      Another reading is that there is no more counterculture because it won and became the culture.
      • isoprophlex 1y ago
        I get where you are coming from but in my mind, when mutating into the dominant culture it loses vital, essential characteristics. Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within existing systems, is no longer a counterculture. My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or was it subsumed and perverted?
        • KineticLensman 1y ago
          "And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson
  • xvilka 1y ago
    An example of cyberpunk that is not dated - Hyperion Cantos[1]. It might not look like cyberpunk at the first sight but it definitely is. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
    • Apocryphon 1y ago
      I'd say parts of the universe and one and a half of the pilgrim's tales are cyberpunk, but a lot of it isn't tonally so.
    • duskwuff 1y ago
      I disagree. Hyperion has some of the surface elements of a cyberpunk work - primarily by way of "The Detective's Tale" (Lamia's story) - but it isn't cyberpunk overall, no more than it's a horror novel by way of Duré's story (for instance).
  • navane 1y ago
    It's because punk died, which is half of cyberpunk. All the cyber is corporate now. We live in cyber corp. We live in the part that Gibson found, rightfully, totally uninteresting to write about.
    • blogabegonija 1y ago
      [dead]
    • ahartmetz 1y ago
      I don't know about that. There are very powerful corporations in Neuromancer, more like governments than corporations. They (or powerful people inside / owning them) largely drive the action in Neuromancer.
  • cyberpunk 1y ago
    Hey, everyone gets older…
  • blincoln 1y ago
    Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia are the 21st-century evolution of cyberpunk, IMO.[1] It's really too bad he seems to have decided not to continue writing in that fictional world. [1] They're almost literally Bruce Sterling's corporations-would-turn-Frankenstein's-monster-into-a-product.
• elcapitan 1y ago
  Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions, ideas, concepts from Scifi stories, without all the plot and character stuff? Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.
  • Etheryte 1y ago
    This is akin to asking someone explain Tolkien's works, but without all the world-building. The set and setting matter, they're a part of the message, if not even the main message.
    • elcapitan 1y ago
      That's why I don't read Fantasy in the first place, but Scifi often has technological concepts and ideas that are interesting by itself. I don't give a damn about mountains, whether people have green or pink skin or the stupid songs they enjoy to sing though.
      • sethammons 1y ago
        > The difference between science fiction and fantasy…is simply this, science fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees. -- Orson Scott Card There is hard and soft types that muddy the quote, but it largely stands.
        • KineticLensman 1y ago
          Another definition that almost works is the distinction between Not-Yet-Possible and Never-Possible - although this may fail when things like Faster-Than-Light drives are considered.
  • AndrewDucker 1y ago
    These ideas are not supposed to be predictions about the future. They're cool changes to introduce to the fictional world to make the stories more fun. (Almost) nobody thinks that they are the actual future
• anupj 1y ago
  The most fascinating detail here is that every piece of tech in Neuromancer is Japanese or German. Hitachi computers, Sanyo suits, Braun drones. Gibson was extrapolating from 1984 when Japan dominated consumer electronics and Germany led manufacturing. Fast forward 40 years and we're having the exact same conversations about Chinese tech dominance. TikTok, DJI drones, BYD cars. Today's "future tech" assumptions mirror Gibson's perfectly. Makes you wonder what we're getting wrong about the next 40 years. Also wild that he nailed AI and VR but completely missed that everyone would carry a supercomputer in their pocket. The big paradigm shifts are always the ones nobody sees coming.
  • artofpongfu 1y ago
    Many things are obvious in retrospect. In this case, it seems few truly understood that all information will be made digital, and that print, audio, video etc are all just different kinds of information. Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI, but isn't.
  • Klonoar 1y ago
    The more time moves along, the more impressed I am by his call in “Pattern Recognition” than “Neuromancer”. The latter is still one of my favorite books of all time, though.
    • rubslopes 1y ago
      Pattern Recognition is the most accessible book of his that I have read, and it has such a great story. Neuromancer is incredible, but it's often hard to understand his prose.
• makeitdouble 1y ago
  Overall an interesting read. To go straight to the nitpicks: > The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first. Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it. 1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time. I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial. What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • pieds 1y ago
    Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders. Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations. A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers. So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
• als0 1y ago
  Most interesting news: https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2024/02/apple-tv-announces-neuromancer-new-drama-based-on-the-multi-award-winning-science-fiction-novel-by-william-gibson/ https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2024/02/apple-tv-announces-...
  • emmelaich 1y ago
    I really hope they do it well. Some of the things that were new in Neuromancer are tropes these days. e.g. the payphone ringing, in the Matrix and more relevantly in Person of Interest. It's going to be very hard to navigate between faithfulness to the book and still have it feel fresh. That and inherent difficulty of taking Gibson's prose to the screen. Maybe it will be by voiceover.
    • int_19h 1y ago
      Voiceover worked surprisingly well for Murderbot, so I hope we'll see more of that.
• metalman 1y ago
  everything Gibson "Holly Fire" Sterling "Diamond Age" Stephenson both have dated passeges, but will then segue into lucid precience
  • gerikson 1y ago
    Sterling's Heavy Weather haunts me to this day.
• justanotherjoe 1y ago
  You can't say he was prescient and use the future as justifications... 'he's prescient because virtual reality in his novel is just like how it's going to be in the future'. Also I don't think these (cybernetics, virtual reality) are uncommon enough predictions to be credited to him.
• GCUMstlyHarmls 1y ago
  There's a podcast, "Shelved by Genre" that did a section on Gibson the year, reading Burning Chrome (short story collection, "world prequel" to Neuromancer) and the Neuromancer Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). During the reading the touch on origins and culture of Cyberpunk. The hosts are (I think) reasonably intelligent and well spoken and they tend to get a bit deeper into things around the books than other book podcasts I've listened too -- which seem to mostly just recount the plot. I had read Neuromancer as a kid but not the other books, I think if you're a Cyberpunk fan you should at least give Burning Chrome a read. It's quite short and digestible seeing as its all short stories. They also did the entire Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe and some Le Guin (the Earthsea series, not any science-fiction).
• cubefox 1y ago
  Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bother to phrase things in a way that is digestible for people from the past. I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    Exactly. I imagine something like “he glanced at his phone and saw he didn’t even have LTE”. The author wouldn’t be trying to make you think about the details of modern communication systems. They’d want you to infer that the subject of the sentence was barely on the edge of communications.
  • johngossman 1y ago
    Ada Palmer makes this point. She teaches Renaissance history and tries to write her sci-fi as if she was trying to describe today to someone from the 15th century. Stanislaw Lem was also brilliant in describing his future worlds in ways that were hard to understand, as alien as he guessed they would actually be.
    • cubefox 1y ago
      In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the Bathtub". In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when they are obvious for the characters. Similar to how books set in the present don't try to be science fiction for people in the past, even though they would be, and therefore don't avoid or explain modern terminology.
• ecocentrik 1y ago
  Of all the cyberpunk authors, Gibson, while one of the first, is probably the least interesting. Stephenson and Sterling are better writers and explore more complex ideas. Gibson has the occasional shadow of an idea that he explores with a few one dimensional characters. That said, I liked "Virtual Light". Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
  • gavinray 1y ago
    I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. I've not read any of the authors listed, but "downvote" on HN is not an "I don't like your opinion." button, it's a "What you've said contributes nothing, and/or is unsubstantiated or inflammatory."
    • booleandilemma 1y ago
      Give Stephenson a try. "Snow Crash" in particular.
    • layer8 1y ago
      Downvoting is for mere disagreement as well, and has always been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674260
  • jillesvangurp 1y ago
    What I always appreciated with Neal Stephenson is the level of nerdy detail in his books. It's what makes re-reading his books very enjoyable. Which is something I do every few years or so. Gibson's Neuromancer is often recommended as a thing to read next. But to me that's a very different type of book. Basically, Gibson uses a lot of word soup to create a futuristic vibe and mood but in the end it's just a stylistic thing rather than a coherent view of the future and at this point it's a bit dated. As a vision it was all a bit dystopian and cool at the time. But not very coherent. Stephenson's world building has a bit more depth to it. You can pick up the Diamond Age today and it still reads well and in a way a lot of stuff that is going on with LLMs make that a super relevant book right now. There are a lot of ideas and moral dilemmas that the book raises. What happens if you take the notion of a poor girl receiving a quality education from an AI and it starts subverting the child's mind with crazily addictive story telling, and adaptive behavior. What happens if you create an army of a quarter million girls with a copy of the same AI book. The reality of an ipad like device that might have some beefed up version of chat gpt on it that starts bonding with a toddler and executing an educational agenda over years is not that unimaginable any more. A lot of kids know how to unlock their mom's phone before they learn to walk/talk these days. Not the same thing of course but the whole morals and ethics around the topic are exactly what Stephenson explored in the early nineties with that book. A lot that is science fiction in that book still is; but some of it just became science fact. In the same way, Snow Crash is still pretty fresh. The whole Meta thing a few years ago was directly inspired by that book. And they made a mess of it. We still don't have proper VR. But the tech is definitely getting closer. Neuromancer never had that quality to me. It's alright as a book but ultimately a bit shallow.
• xg15 1y ago
  > People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50 years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next two. I like that we now also have "Amara's Law" [1] that makes the exact opposite point: > We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. So either that "futurist" was an idiot, or this shows that with respect to future developments, really no one has any idea what they are talking about. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
  • SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    I think there's a slight difference. Amara's law is about "a technology" - just one - and its initial impact vs second-order effects. e.g. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, and it had impact in that area. But the real impact on people of this kind of fast social media came about from it's longer term use in shaping public discourse, and how that role is weaponised. See also the saying "We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us" As for the other quote, I don't know if it's true that "we massively underestimate what will happen in the next two years" but it seems to be a statement about the volume of change, the number of new things, rather than the continued impact of one.
  • aaron695 1y ago
    [dead]
  • gcanyon 1y ago
    This jumped out at me as well. I think it's fair to say that if you aggregate all predictions, there will be those who vastly over- and under-estimate progress on any given time frame, so depending on who the authors were paying attention to, both could be correct. The interesting question is whether there is, in aggregate, a tendency to over- or under-estimate on a given time frame. My money is on Amara's Law for that.
• davedx 1y ago
  I first read Neuromancer in 1998 while I was at university, something like 6 months before I got my first mobile phone. My 2nd year group project was building a lounge/session discovery application for our University’s VR meeting software. (Using Java AWT!) So Neuromancer felt like it was on a pretty accurate trajectory to me. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• makaking 1y ago
  I got Neuromancer as a birthday gift earlier this year. I found it simultaneously very captivating but requiring a lot of effort to read through the dense terminology and try to accurately form a picture of what Gibson was trying to convey. Sadly I couldn't finish it since its the type of book that, if you stop reading for a week or longer, you'll have to start from the beginning. This post gave me more appreciation of Gibson's impact and a boost to pick it up somewhen later in the year.
• xvilka 1y ago
  Neuromancer makes more sense after reading remaining two books in the trilogy: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They are not as good as the first one, especially the last one, but make the story complete and more nuanced.
• russellbeattie 1y ago
  > Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how eerily prescient Gibson was in so many ways—but also by what he didn’t anticipate. It's the fate of all writers who create stories about the near future to eventually have time catch up with their imagination. It's sad, because many times their writing is often dismissed once their ideas don't seem so fantastic. Stories about upper class aristocrats in the 1800s still get movies made about them every year, but old science fiction novels lose their luster as time goes by. Like the article said, the ideas from futurist authors are either incredibly prescient, or miss the mark in ways that make their predictions quaint in retrospect. Jules Verne wrote about submarines and space travel. H.G. Wells wrote about lasers and military aircraft. Arthur C. Clarke predicted computer miniaturization and global telecommunications (including geosynchronous satellites). Douglas Adams predicted the smart phone and annoying Alexa responses. And on and on: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Huxley, Dick, Niven, and more. And everyone has predicted the coming age of AGI. I think it's pretty exciting that I might get to see who called it correctly within my lifetime.
• NetRunnerSu 1y ago
  While some focus on the missed predictions like pocket supercomputers, I find Gibson's true genius lies in anticipating the conceptual shifts – how our very sense of self, reality, and freedom would become inextricably linked to, and perhaps even defined by, digital networks. The real 'matrix' isn't just a virtual space we plug into; it's the increasingly complex, often invisible, interplay between our biological cognition and the predictive models that mediate our perception. We're already seeing early signs of 'cognitive debt' and the subtle erosion of our internal models as we offload more mental tasks to external systems. The challenge isn't just building smarter machines, but building anchors for consciousness in an increasingly fluid, data-driven existence. https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arrived/ https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...
• simpaticoder 1y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one just getting around to reading Neuromancer in 2025! The shocking thing about the story is how very few screens there are in the world, and how ungrounded "cyberspace" is in physics. Cyberspace's mechanics are vague, and in fact are inconsistent with the other extent communication technologies. e.g. Case never seems to worry about getting a signal for his deck, and yet does worry about getting signals for, e.g. fax machines on space ships. It feels like the fabric of cyberspace must be ESP or telepathy (which is consistent with its description as a "shared hallucination". Gibson seems to be wrestling with new technology in a similar way to the authors of "Wierd Science" - where basically computers are magic. (And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL). The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out. If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.
  • NetRunnerSu 1y ago
    You've perfectly articulated the central challenge that inspired my own work. The 'magical', ungrounded reality of early cyberpunk cyberspace is precisely the gap we're trying to bridge with formalized realism. Instead of telepathic magic, what if the 'deck' ran on a verifiable, computationally intensive process rooted in a concrete theory of consciousness? We've been archiving our attempt to build just that—the theory, the code, and the narrative simulation. Perhaps a less optimistic, but more grounded future. You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive https://github.com/dmf-archive
    • messe 1y ago
      > You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive https://github.com/dmf-archive It sounds like you're trying to build the Cyberpunk equivalent of the shared semi-hard-SF Orion's Arm universe / world building project? - https://www.orionsarm.com/ https://www.orionsarm.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm
• mindcrime 1y ago
  Interesting article. As somebody who is an unapologetic, raging Neuromancer fan, it's always fun to read about someone experiencing the book for the first time. The one nitpick I have about the article is just this: But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981 OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.
  • jghn 1y ago
    I'd take that a step further. I don't know how anyone who read it back at that timepoints would not have immediately pictured the static associated with not getting a signal.
  • layer8 1y ago
    The only thing to be confused about is that the sky never looks anything like TV static (other than maybe in a snow storm, but even then not really).
  • jwrallie 1y ago
    Agreed, I was born in 1989 and remember it, so it was a thing even 10 years later. Dead channels only truly died after digital TV became the standard.
  • ab5tract 1y ago
    ISTR that whatever channel you had set up for your game console to operate needed to be a dead channel in order to work, anyway.
• surfingdino 1y ago
  One thing that Gibson nailed is the story of Operation Screaming Fist, which eerily reminds me of what's going on in Ukraine. From the Neuromancer wiki: "Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," which planned on infiltrating and disrupting Soviet computer systems from ultralight aircraft dropped over Russia. The Russian military had learned of the idea and installed defenses to render the attack impossible, but the military went ahead with Screaming Fist, with a new secret purpose of testing these Russian defenses. As the Operation team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their computers and flight systems, and Corto and his men were targeted by Soviet laser defenses."
• macleginn 1y ago
  One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)
  • qiine 1y ago
    fascinating
  • reactordev 1y ago
    Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss. Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all. Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
    • itomato 1y ago
      Māyā.
      • reactordev 1y ago
        Precisely
    • api 1y ago
      There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.
• cherryteastain 1y ago
  > I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences. This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally. Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.
  • magic_hamster 1y ago
    Comparing anyone to Tolkien is massively unfair. Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LotR for about a decade. It is going to be extremely hard to match these expectations for other authors.
    • fullstackchris 1y ago
      You're suggesting their arent any other authors who have taken over a decade to write a book? Prousts' In Search of Lost Time took 13 for example.
      • uaas 1y ago
        You are ignoring the part about being a linguist, though. Spending 10 years writing a book is also not quite rare.
        • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
          Sylvain Neuvel is also a linguist. But I’m sure this will also be disqualified because he’s in a different genre.
        • Groxx 1y ago
• kenoath69 1y ago
  I want to recommend Vernor Vinge's books to anyone looking for some new sci-fi... I've read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire upon the Deep. They were exemplary to the kind of logical structure of SciFi and made some relevant predictions which I won't spoil. The guy was a professor of computer science (RIP)
  • samsartor 1y ago
    Deepness in the Sky is one of my favorite books of all time! Fire Upon the Deep is a serious let-down by comparison, but the wolves are a cool concept. As I've gotten older I've realized that I have very little in common with Vinge philosophically. But he was a person who thought very deeply, and it shows.
    • kenoath69 1y ago
      (ok mild spoilers ahead) Really why! I enjoyed them both and I read Deepness in the Sky first. It was a bit of a shock about FTL for me but I kind of granted narrative license so he could explore the range of consequences there, like with FTLness being distributed over a field of sorts. But yeah the dogs were dope, their packs, the interaction of the technological bootstrapping with them. Yadda yadda. I can't say I am familiar with his philosophy either
    • throwaway328 1y ago
      Any essays or articles in particular you're thinking of in relation to his philosophy?
      • int_19h 1y ago
        Vinge is a full-on anarcho-capitalist. This is most evident in the Realtime series, particularly The Ungoverned which is pretty much entirely about the Bad Statists vs the Good Libertarians with Nukes. But it's also fairly obvious in Deepness, and to a lesser extent in Fire.
  • layer8 1y ago
    His Realtime series (The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime) is also pretty good, in terms of “what if”.
• robsws 1y ago
  Maybe I should read the book again making notes like the author did. I finished it understanding how novel this would have been when it was released and impressed with how much worldbuilding was fit into a relatively short book, but ultimately pretty disappointed by the plot itself. Without giving away too much, I feel that there were a few segments that fell pretty flat for me (to be specific, with minor spoilers: the new recruit around the middle of the book and the hacking subplot towards the end).
• plq 1y ago
  Man, I loved Neuromancer when I read it as a kid. Yes, it's a tough book to read, especially today where there are too many distractions as well as too many works of art built on the sci-fi ideas of that era. Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans. Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
  • BizarroLand 1y ago
    There are already dozens of AI Jesus influencers. Seems like it will get worse before it gets better
• user____name 1y ago
  When I talk about this book to other readers the first thing they bring up is the difficult prose. I think I only found a single other person like me who enjoys the writing style.
• hardlianotion 1y ago
  My first thought when I read the review: You are so lucky to have read the book for the first time in 2025.
• grimblee 1y ago
  Achually the first Cyberpunk work ever was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheeps by Philip K. Dick
• sim7c00 1y ago
  i love this trilogy. its so mind boggling. ppl slack off on the second 2 parts but the atmosphere totally captured me anyway.. I can also recommend his more recent book Agency. its amazing.
• anton-c 1y ago
  Necromancer was cool. Never managed to get through the other cyberpunk classic Snowcrash though. Did I get the right book? Pizza delivery?
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Just my opinion, but neither were .. revelatory for me. They were both just okay. I'm not really an avid reader though.
    • anton-c 1y ago
      I mean idk when you read it, but like the author said I've seen this language be absorbed so I can't take it in as fresh innovative stuff. I was born after the novel came out so obviously was decades old when I read it.
      • JKCalhoun 1y ago
        I did read both when they came out (in paperback anyway). But I know what you mean. Friends who had not read The Lord of the Rings but saw the films can be excused for thinking the story was "derivative".
        • anton-c 1y ago
          The old "Seinfeld isn't funny" one on tvtropes. I find it's easier to get in a time period with visuals compared to a book, but it is a forgivable thing for later generations to 'not get' either way. I certainly don't know all the musicians who influenced the musicians that influenced me.
    • Espressosaurus 1y ago
      If you read Snow Crash before the age of 25 it's revelatory. If you read it after 25 it's laughably on-the-nose. In highschool it was the greatest book I ever read. Some books require the reader to be in a particular place in their lives.
• gcanyon 1y ago
  It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should really read it now!" I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.
  • brianjlogan 1y ago
    Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never read it and went "This is garbage." In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.
    • gcanyon 1y ago
      I didn't say it doesn't have meaning. I'm saying that I prefer simple language around complex topics, rather than the other way around. As one example, the discussion of "quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the language isn't difficult or opaque, but that's a concept that has stuck with me since I first read it in the '80s.
  • mingus88 1y ago
    The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a single line of dialogue. With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction. If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.
    • 1y ago
• atombender 1y ago
  An interesting aspect of Neuromancer again was how obviously perfunctory and mechanical the plot appears when you're not as absorbed by the mystery of what will happen next. It's easy to see that Case is almost entirely a passive observer, only stepping in with his hacker skills for a brief mission in cyberspace, then not doing anything except follow the gang as they travel to a new location to pick up another McGuffin that the mysterious man with unlimited financial resources needs. It's creaky, but works despite its McGuffin-chasing adventure caper aspect because it's so well written and Case becomes a proxy for the reader, allowing us to observe the plot from a relative outsider's POV, and enjoy all the fantastic sci-fi world building. But then if you read more Gibson, you will come to realize every single Gibson plot is like that. It's always a mysterious man (always a man!) with apparently unlimited resources who needs to hire someone, usually a ragtag group of specialists, to obtain a McGuffin, usually under false pretenses. Sometimes the group is on the run, but the protagonists invariably end up passive observers in an Easter egg hunt (with the possible exception of Turner in Count Zero) and are generally being manipulated into doing what they do. I think the most egregious example of this is The Peripheral, where the heroine does absolutely nothing; it's a classic witness protection plot where the main character is just a pawn, moved around for safety or as bait, while observing as things happen to her. The sequel, Agency, has an ironic title given that the heroine does even less and appears to have no agency at all. Once you realize the basic skeleton of a Gibson plot, you come to appreciate how well the world building hides it, but it's clear he ran out of ideas quickly after his first book. The two Neuromancer sequels had a bunch of action but were once again about McGuffins and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Bridge novels is another McGuffin hunt with lower stakes. The Blue Ant books even more so. With The Peripheral he seemed to be trying at something completely new, but ended up stuck in the same mold, parallel universes being used to uncover the identity of someone pulling McGuffins from behind the scenes once again. A not-terrible but old-fashioned sci-fi idea well executed, but little more than a potboiler. Agency was awful. Maybe I'm being cynical, but I've come to the conclusion that Neuromancer was Gibson's one good idea, and while his execution — world building and prose and so on — has been top notch throughout, every book has been weaker than the last. I had to look up his post-Bridge books on Wikipedia to even remember what they were really about. There are occasional glimmers (the Burning Chrome collection is fantastic), and none of his books are not enjoyable on some level. But when I look at the wonderful works of contemporaneous authors like Iain Banks, Gibson doesn't measure up. Banks is an apt comparison, I think, because like Gibson his books are also immensely plot-driven and McGuffin-based, and often lean on similar themes, but with very different results. I do love Gibson's dense, beautiful prose, and will read anything he writes just for the pleasure of it, so there's still that.
• ecocentrik 1y ago
  I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best cyberpunk manga after Akira.
  • prettyblocks 1y ago
    It's a masterpiece. Surprised it hasn't been adapted as a film or series.
    • xoxxala 1y ago
      I’ve reread Transmetropolian more times than Neuromancer and Snow Crash. And I love Neuromancer and Snow Crash. It rewards rereads like few graphic novels. Highly recommended.
• daremon 1y ago
  I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek). In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it. I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again. That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times. At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment. To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot. P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming. P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
  • NikolaNovak 1y ago
    Fascinating story :-).Neuromancer is a book I reread often - like Dune, it has a rich tapestry of background world building. There is nothing surprising about plot anymore, but it is like a place I like to return to.
    • charlesrobertd 1y ago
      [dead]
    • more_corn 1y ago
      Dosadi Experiment is better than Dune. Just sayin.
      • NikolaNovak 1y ago
        I will check it out ; in which manner is it superior?
• nocoiner 1y ago
  “The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified.” This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so. Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
• johngossman 1y ago
  Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
  • stevenwoo 1y ago
    Zanzibar holds up as well or better than Neuromancer. I recently reread both and Molly having a clock in her eye inserts really dates that one bit in Neuromancer, the chyron like news updates in Zanzibar call to mind todays social media sound/video bites.
    • johngossman 1y ago
      Agree. Same experience. Zanzibar (1968) is almost eerie sometimes.
    • wpietri 1y ago
      It has been a million years since I read Stand on Zanzibar, but that technique of giving a set of cultural snippets to paint a picture really stuck with me. These days I'll be reading news headlines or Reddit's front page and be struck by how easily I could compose one of those that would be perfect for a novel imagining our era. And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these "curtains for Zoosha" moments: https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/114819416384262242 https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/114819416384262242 https://infosec.exchange/@cjust/114820379745453988 https://infosec.exchange/@cjust/114820379745453988
  • KineticLensman 1y ago
    Totally agree. "Stand on Zanzibar" has a modern-world feel to it although some parts have been visited by the Suck Fairy. "Shockwave Rider" is also interesting - IIRC characters use their landline phones to access large computer systems. Because Brunner never really goes into too many techy details - it's just phones and computers - it's less jarring to read now than books where technology-heavy authors such as Arthur C Clarke tried to describe in detail what future computing devices might look like.
• KaiserPro 1y ago
  Neuromancer was a much easier read to me than "A scanner darkly" I had the same trouble physically reading it as I did with a picture of dorian gray. (top tip, audiobooks totally made them easy and enjoyable to "read") I'm not a natural scifi-cyberpunk literature person. I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story. One thing that did stand out was this: Everywhere had memory foam mattresses. Some horrid bedsit: Memoryfoam matress Uber fancy sky hotel: memoryfoam.
  • jszymborski 1y ago
    I'm by no means a quick reader and I devoured Neuromancer. I really had zero problem parsing the introduced words. Easier even than A Clockwork Orange. My experience reading A Scanner Darkly was super painful. Switched to audiobook and quit quickly even then. > I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story. Agreed, but the prose are also so beautiful. This is not some garden variety pulp (not that there is anything wrong with pulp)
    • allthedatas 1y ago
      The prose immediately made me think of a clockwork orange when I read it way back. Two of my favorites and that is a big reason. Not easy to pull off.
• angry_octet 1y ago
  My favourite lesser known post-Neuromancer works: George Alec Effinger "When Gravity Fails" (1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails Walter John Williams "Aristoi" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel) And just pre-Gibson: Michael Berlyn "The Integrated Man" (1980) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144056.The_Integrated_Man https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144056.The_Integrated_M... Bruce Sterling "The Artificial Kid" (1980) This is not a hacker novel, but eerily presages Instagram/Snapchat and viral stardom, the need for creators to create content, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid
  • ondravn 1y ago
    I'll add Pat Cadigan's Synners to the list.
    • mbravorus 1y ago
      Synners is a very much an underappreciated jewel
  • selfmodruntime 1y ago
    Thank you so much! Neuromancer had such a profound impact on my career and my life. I've been searching for similar works for years and by this point, I've read all the obvious ones twice over.
    • MrVandemar 1y ago
      Dreams of Flesh and Sand by William T. Quick reads like a rip-off of Neuromancer ... and it should be bad ... but I really like the writing style and the characterisation -- Berg, Toshi and Calley seem pretty cool and real, and so it may be a rip-off, but it feels like a fun and interesting rip-off. Worth a look. Void Star by Zachery Mason is also good.
  • silenced_trope 1y ago
    nice, anyone who provides links with their recs is top-notch!
• ltbarcly3 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • selfmodruntime 1y ago
    It may be weird to you, but this was indeed cool at a point.
    • ltbarcly3 1y ago
      I wrote the same review over 20 years ago on amazon.com. It was never cool. That kid you went to school with that only wore black jeans was not one of the cool ones.
      • Krasnol 1y ago
        It says more about your own perspective then about the actual coolness of those guys.
        • ltbarcly3 1y ago
          I think you have substituted a cope definition for the word 'cool' that removes the social aspect of it, which is pretty convoluted. I think those guys are great, my friends are those guys, I'm one of those guys, but nobody thinks they are cool.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
• damontal 1y ago
  The sequels got really strange and focused on voodoo god personas sort of running things. I probably read Neuromancer once a year just to revisit the place and always try to give the sequels another go but they just don’t grab me like the original did.
• endorphine 1y ago
  Any suggestions for sci-fi books everyone should read in 2025?
  • mbravorus 1y ago
    Read all you can grab. The more you do, the richer you will be (as a person, not monetarily :)) it is an endless list,or perhaps I should say a river. Anyone can fish out something, but there's nothing everyone will be guaranteed to enjoy
• greatgib 1y ago
  I don't understand the success of "a scanner darkly", I had hard time to finish it so boring it was. There is almost not a story in it. Maybe the initial setup in interesting, but then it is like a boring action less long blabla about it.
• kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  > But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980 My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the cable tuner was too primitive to maintain an active list or you miskeyed a number on a remote.
  • nebalee 1y ago
    And game consoles, home computers or VCRs provided ample opportunities to experience this during setup when using the RF connector. Also, the successful 1982 Poltergeist movie had some very prominent scenes involving TV static.
  • werdnapk 1y ago
    I had static on my TV well into the 90's.
• solaire_oa 1y ago
  > The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. > static-filled “dead channels.” I don't think Gibson was referring to static (which is bland grey and not cyberpunk at all). I think he was referring to SMPTE on a "dead channel", which is a colorful skyline reminiscent of Blade Runner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars I agree with the author of this article that Neuromancer is a precursor for modern sci-fi, and it serves as inspiration for so much popular culture. But it's a terrible book IMO. The characters are shallow and uninteresting (Cage), the plot is boring (Wintermute), expository dialogue is rattled off without any setup or motivation (the female character explaining her backstory), it's chock full of nonsequiters (shark-head, something about horses being extinct), and new concepts are introduced not because they're engaging but because they're "just so sci-fi bro" (Turning police).
  • ordinaryradical 1y ago
    “I actually composed that first image with 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 revels a particular grace shared by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future where we all must go.” You misunderstood from the first sentence. The rest of your read is similarly flawed if not worse.
• throwaway328 1y ago
  I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay, watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting. I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.
  • johngossman 1y ago
    Alan Moore identifies as an anarchist (and is friends with Moorcock iirc). Warren Ellis also comes to mind. Yes, both work primarily in comics, but of the highest order.
    • throwaway328 1y ago
      I've read one or two of Moore's things. Only very recently saw Transmetropolitan described somewhere as the best depiction of neoliberalism anywhere. Will definitely try something from Ellis soon then, thanks!
  • archermarks 1y ago
    Ursula K Leguin, 100%. The Dispossessed is about an anarchist society. Might also check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Kameron Hurley.
    • throwaway328 1y ago
      The Dispossessed was great! I wanted to read something by Ursula K. Le Guin for ages, and then happened to be staying in a friend's house where that book happened to be on a bookshelf. So I'd the happy experience of just giving it a go, knowing nothing. And it was very good. Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though - thank you for sharing!
• jmyeet 1y ago
  I was very much alive in the 1980s but for no particular reason I never read Neuromancer at the time. No specific reason I guess other than I never fetishized Japanese culture. I read it back in the 2010s and was... underwhelmed. I see this pattern a lot: a given work is seminal but it doesn't tend to age well. Much of the accolades are based on nostalgia. Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently both xenophobic and Orientalist [1]. In the context of the 1980s (before 1987 when Japan's bubble popped), this makes perfect sense. There was a genuine fear of the Japanese taking over. Japanese tech companies were at their relative peak. So people both feared and fetishized Japanese culture and products. Interestingly, I did read Snow Crash when it was published (1992 and that did have a big impact on me. I also think that book is solely responsible for a whole generation of people thinking VR was ever going to be a mainstream thing when in fact the metaverse is fundamentally flawed because of network latency. To me, cyberpunk was pretty inaccurate. Technology for the longest time was rebellious and hopeful. It's only really in the last decade that tech has turned dystopic. I can actually see a techno-feudalistic future now but it's not at the hands of the Japanese (or, now, the Chinse). What I guess is interesting is how white supremacy is so pervasive. It certainly underpins cyberpunk. [1]: https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-genre-xenophobia-orientalism https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-ge...
  • archermarks 1y ago
    While I don't think you're wrong about the orientalist elements in Western cyberpunk, consider that Japan also produced two of the seminal and genre-defining works of cyberpunk (Akira and Ghost in the Shell).
    • bitwize 1y ago
      Japanese artists in the nineties stanned so hard for Blade Runner. The influence on their media aesthetics is pretty pervasive.
• MortyWaves 1y ago
  Never heard of it
  • JohnKemeny 1y ago
    Turn in your geek card on your way out.
    • MortyWaves 1y ago
      I figured this type of basement dweller response would happen
• xyzsparetimexyz 1y ago
  I'm a big fan of the aspects of the Sprawl world that weren't personally copied as much - the fuller domes over NYC and (this is surprisingly prominent in the book and a significant plot point) all the personal hologram tech. It's personally very boring to read about how the book and technology is dated blah blah. The vibes still feel incredibly fresh to me and that's much more important. A lot of modern books (especially written during covid) won't nearly hold up as well
  • keiferski 1y ago
    Agreed, I re-read the book probably once a year and almost inevitably stop after the first hundred pages or so. The vibes of the future Chiba / Sprawl are what really appeal to me, not so much the VR world or the space station sci-fi stuff.
    • xyzsparetimexyz 1y ago
      Chiba feels a little cliche now in some regards but the Sprawl section rules and is probably my favorite but. But the space station is also pretty neat and and I'm a big fan of the matrix/VR stuff AS LONG AS you recognize that it's basically a tech induced-hallucination/drug trip where you enter some shared alternative reality that only has a very tentative relationship with 1s and 0s, NOT some sort of VR headset thing.
• tim333 1y ago
  I still haven't read Neuromancer but just watched a video interview with Gibson on writing it. Entertaining if you haven't seen it https://youtu.be/x6QH5ixsEEU https://youtu.be/x6QH5ixsEEU
• wrp 1y ago
  Cyberpunk got the future exactly wrong. In the 1980s, being into computer technology meant being into hardware. You could scrounge it and tinker with it, and had to be clever and highly motivated to do that. Cyberpunk took the computer geek themes of cleverness, effort, and hardware and added heavy antiestablishmentism. I've been in education all through the rise of digital culture and am now dealing with the first ChatGPT generation. What I see is the inverse of cyberpunk culture. Computers are ubiquitous and dead simple to use. Kids spend their time doomscrolling and let ChatGPT do their thinking for them.
  • wslh 1y ago
    In the 1980s, many kids had new computers, but most were just playing games rather than programming, despite having to type a few commands to load and run them. Today, the cybersecurity scene feels more comparable in terms of power it can provide. The "classic hacker" archetype seems less central now, overshadowed by state sponsored actors and the rise of cryptocurrency related crimes.
  • margalabargala 1y ago
    On the other hand, I could see this causing a resurgence of exactly that same aesthetic. Software will be eaten by LLMs and computers will remain ubiquitous, but hardware for now remains where it was. Specialized, niche, and able to be combined into something cool only by someone knowledgeable. Having to solder or breadboard something together is approximately the same experience it was in the 80s. And the sorts of results you can expect are similarly rare and exotic. An at home automated solution for soldering is not coming any time soon.
• inglor_cz 1y ago
  Interesting how many people mention that Gibson's prose is stilted. I never read Neuromancer in English. I only read it in Czech, and I wonder if the translator changed the vibe/flow a bit. It was a bit staccato, but the language flowed quite naturally.
• Duanemclemore 1y ago
  Great read - it's nice to see something I take for granted with fresh eyes (I think I've read all the Gibson). The fact that it's someone steeped in the genre humble enough to go back to a foundational text is a great device for explaining it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the Apple adaptation. I think they did as good a job as The Peripheral deserved (although it did end on a really dumb note). Although Gibson's writing has gotten less strong as he's aged, his world-building is still top-notch and some good writers of narrative taking a pass at it was I think mostly successful. The Sprawl Trilogy is great front to back, each book has its charms. And of course the world is so rich, beyond Neuromancer. So if they do it right they could set themselves up for a compelling multi-season series. The question with Neuromancer that took until now to start realizing was - how do you do it and not look like a fool by mangling a classic? I think that its world has advanced sufficiently (as the author of this piece highlights) that a lot of the kinks have been worked out by reality. Now, a central conceit of an ultra technological society without cell phones is going to be interesting in and of itself! I'll stop now, but excited to see this continue.
• OrvalWintermute 1y ago
  William Gibson seems so prescient at times. Wonderful writing, I love Neuromancer & Count Zero is superb as well, like many others of his books.
• newsclues 1y ago
  “In an age of affordable beauty…” is the quote that keeps popping in my mind
• gpete 1y ago
  not a lot of memories of Neuromancer it seemed to me to be created as "Japanese" style of life culture story set in the future...in my mind it segues into The Matrix and Terminator.....
• gpete 1y ago
  matrix, terminator merge with my thoughts of Neuromancer.....
• jlundberg 1y ago
  People who like Neuromancer would probably enjoy reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
• viccis 1y ago
  It's funny to read it after playing Cyberpunk 2077 (or the tabletop game setting) and realize that almost everything is just lifted from Neuromancer, often not even bothering to come up with new jargon.
• LightBug1 1y ago
  Obligatory reminder to listen to the audiobook read by Gibson himself. I think they did a great job with that production. He's not a natural but his southern drawl really adds flavour, along with the soundtrack and effects. Love it.
  • troseph 1y ago
    I couldn't find this anywhere, I tried the version on audible but it can barely stay awake. The narration is soooooo bland.
    • LightBug1 1y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYn090EvNBcinpVcrKNmYAHojxP7pnYC1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYn090EvNBcinpVcrKNmY... You're welcome. Just listened to the first chapter and the youtube version feels a tad slower than I remember. Perhaps that's just Gibson stoned. Audio versions are on the t0rr3nt sites also
• nycdotnet 1y ago
  If you want to experience the Neuromancer vibe (but not story line), in 2025, from a contemporaneous source, I can’t recommend the Commodore 64 adaptation enough.
• sevensor 1y ago
  As I say every time Gibson comes up, cyber is just a setting. Punk is the whole point. While you can certainly read Neuromancer in isolation, it’s worth reading the bridge trilogy and even Zero History to see how this plays out in different settings.
• theodric 1y ago
  Well, time to burn some karma: my wife and I listened to it in unabridged audiobook form on a drive back from Norway to the Netherlands about 10 years ago, and at the end we both agreed we weren't really sure what had happened. It seemed to meander quite a lot and got lost in its own sauce. I understand that it's a seminal work for the cyberpunk genre, and there are certainly cool vibes scattered around it, but I don't really see a cohesive whole. Blade Runner similarly was a beautiful screensaver during which I failed to observe any significance plot. Now Snow Crash, that's another matter entirely. Great book. Compelling characters.
• GMoromisato 1y ago
  For me, reading sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, my pantheon was (in no particular order): Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle) William Gibson (Neuromancer) Neil Stephenson (Diamond Age) Vernor Vinge (Across Realtime) Greg Egan (Permutation City) Robert Reed (Sister Alice) John Varley (Eight Worlds series) I'm sure every generation has its pantheon--I wonder what it is for Millennials and Gen Z.
• gm678 1y ago
  It's rather besides the point of the essay, but the comment about "ask[ing] a deliberately stupid question, one that might annoy [the subject] just enough to elicit an interesting response" made me realize I had never considered that difficulty of interviewing when reading transcripts, and reminds me to be a bit more charitable to interviewers.
• folkrav 1y ago
  I should try and give that book another chance… I couldn’t get past the first couple of chapters, as I found the French (France) translation I had borrowed to be extremely annoying to read as a Quebec French speaker. I’d describe myself as fully bilingual, but I’m apparently still not good enough to really appreciate the nuances in writing style.
• timonofathens 1y ago
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• terrakok 1y ago
  I really liked the idea of a template text generator based on Gibson's words, so I made it: https://terrakok.github.io/loremgibson/ https://terrakok.github.io/loremgibson/
• themadturk 1y ago
  Neuromancer changed my life (sounds like many others responding here). But more than that, it was the first step in William Gibson becoming my favorite author. I can't tell you the number of times I've read Neuromancer; right now I'm almost finished with my umpteenth re-read of the Blue Ant trilogy; I fear another reread of the rest of his books is not far behind.
• PontingClarke 1y ago
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• norswap 1y ago
  I read it and was disappointed, it's okay but probably my expectations were too high for this classic. I would recommend Snow Crash instead, another Sci-Fi classic from the same era which I found to be a much more enjoyable read & more commensurate to the hype.