“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.”
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.)
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.
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
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.
I read Neuromancer originally in 1984 and again a few years ago, and for me it still holds up. It's not the greatest book or anything, and I found Count Zero to be much better, but apart from those two books I've yet to read anything else cyberpunkish that comes even remotely close.
Before someone mentions Greg Egan or Vernor Vinge, as they have elsewhere in the thread, I read a lot by these authors and didn't like them either. Way too dry, boring, and unimaginative for me. I know some people love them, but they're just not for me.
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.
Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.
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)
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."
I'd be interested in reading descriptions of cyberspace that are better than Neuromancer's.
So far I haven't found any.
Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:
Matrix isn't Gibson's term. Doctor Who used the term Matrix back in the 70's referring to a supercomputer simulated reality environment.
“Hack the Gibson!”
Must have been a call-out :)
Specifically, he dislikes the focus on the aesthetic, neon lights, mirror shades, etc. I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then.
I think he means we need a different kind of critique now, not anchored to neon lights and vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics which look like what the 80s thought the future would be. And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it.
That said, I love that aesthetic myself, and have no problem being stuck in the past. But I see his point.
Charles Stross's early works came in at tail end of cyberpunk, lets call it the silver age, and to me they read like they're trying to find a way forward for the genre, and he ultimately decided that wasn't the way to go. So he branched out from there, including to near-future sci-fi. This was ultimately a dead end because he kept finding that, no matter how strange the plot, by the time a manuscript was really starting to take its final form he was already proven right by current events. And publishing schedules being what they are, his book wouldn't hit shelves until a year or more later at which point they'd read like derivative commentary on year++ old events. Essentially, his predictions were pretty good, but his expected timeline was far too generous: the future was coming too fast. All of his work is worth reading though, and I think his Laundry Files & Merchant series would appeal to different, somewhat overlapping sets of HN readers. For one of the most interesting mind fck time travel stories, check out his short work Palimpsest.
> Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world's first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk curled up and died).
More about that close future scifi dead end :
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-craz...
Including a... pandemic novel !
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/reality...
... I swear that I used the word "trump" above unintentionally, but my example for this is Trump rallies using music from bands like Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young and R.E.M. The music contains messages that explicitly speak against the type of political power being wielded, and! the artists themselves speak up about how much they despise the people using their music. The fact that the message is being misused couldn't be clearer. But the people using it are there for the aesthetic: the general sound and feeling of being rebels, ahead of the curve, etc.
And honestly I think that's a good thing. Creative reuse results in good and bad; jazz and Christian rock. Creators can't control their art once it's in the public, and the world would be a smaller place if they could.
Sorry I didn't reply to the part about Charles Stross, it looks like an interesting commentary but I'm not familiar enough with Stross in particular.
I'd argue that another game released in 2020 understood the "punk" part of cyberpunk much better than CP2077 -- Umurangi Generation. Instead of giving you a gun, the game gives you a camera, and tells you to go out and document how everyday people are reacting to the end of the world. The game was primarily inspired by the early 2020 brushfires in Australia, while its add-on DLC pack Macro was heavily influenced by the protests following the death of George Floyd, and both heavily criticize how the state misleads, reassures, and generally fails to respond to dire situations.
Errant Signal did an excellent deep-dive (and spoiler-filled) video essay on the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctkeq8IpdQA
The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner loves who they are and not what they look like).
And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a hot commodity.
The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, plastic and superficial culture.
The problem with playing the capitalist game is that it demands all of you, and never guarantees anything back.
The story is about megacorporations greedily controlling the supply of food via patents on GMO crops in a post-peak-oil society. There's no artificial general intelligence lurking in the electrons to save or doom us, just the consequences of our own choices.
I've no idea if Gibson has read Bacigalupi or what he thinks of his work, but I am definitely a fan!
Hell, cyberpsychosis, a pretty plot-minor series of encounters, delves into one of the more interesting considerations in the game. That a fair number of people are unable to handle the implant tech at all and lose their ability to function in a balanced way - each encounter has a harrowing series of notes about the person degrading into insanity and each is just sort of... ignored by most of the people around it and accepted as a cost of technological advancement.
I know the devs get a lot of hate, but I think that there is a whole lot of heart and soul poured into that game.
I'm reminded of that line in The Matrix when Neo breaks The Oracle's vase, "What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"
It's as lazy as it gets, and definitely not punk.
First, Blade Runner came BEFORE Neuromancer was released, so it cannot have been a derivative, and there weren't any good representations of the aesthetic on screen either; its visuals broke new ground in many senses. Gibson rightly feared that:
> "BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."
[source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.willia...]
Are there any other visual works of cyberpunk that came after Neuromancer and that Gibson praised? There must have been, but how common were they?
Second, I don't think Gibson's main objection was the aesthetic, but rather, that derivative works didn't do anything with it. They just copied, losing the punk spirit and rebelliousness.
For example here[1] is an interview in which Gibson waxes lyrical about pop culture, imagery, prose style and selective use of detail, and also says he didn't "have the patience" to flesh out details like the backstory of what was supposed to actually have happened to the US because they'd only detract from the reading enjoyment. He's saying that he was influenced by how cheesy Cold War era blockbusters could imply a lot happened with a few well chosen casual words, not claiming to make a case for a different politics or to channel Brave New World
And let's be brutally honest, the politics of Neuromancer isn't really more sophisticated than "counterculture is cool" and a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF. The writing is fantastic, but it's all about imagery and ideas. Even his polemical writing on Singapore and the Golden Age seem more concerned that paternalistic ideas of ideal societies are dull than anything else.
Even the most cynically commercial use of cyberpunk cliches embraces the idea that counterculture - or at least 1980s cyberpunk idea of counterculture - is cool
I've never seen Gibson describing Neuromancer as a critique of Reagonomics or having any particular political agenda. Interested to see it if so! I don't think of Gibson having nearly as much "political" agenda or grounding as some other early "cyberpunk" writer's like Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker.
(I don't think Gibson himself referred to his work "cyberpunk" or "punk" originally)
[1]: https://ew.com/article/1994/08/26/william-gibson-first-man-c...
In Pattern Recognition, the character Cayce is “allergic” to Tommy Hilfiger clothing because the style is so completely generic. Your comment makes me wonder if that was a commentary on the works derived from his initial vision in the Sprawl trilogy.
I remember this a bit differently? I thought she wore nondescript de-branded clothing specifically because she had a behavioral/neurological/information processing/sensory overload condition that caused her to have tics and flip out in the presence of excessive visual input. I remember her intentionally choosing this clothing, as it jumped out at me. And I thought she wore Levi’s, not that it matters, though they do have minimal brand motifs compared to some brands.
I didn’t finish the book, and it has been a while, so I could well be mistaken or outright wrong. I don’t remember TH being mentioned specifically.
But beyond mil spec, the whole Blue Ant series is just a beautiful tableau of different fashions and designed objects. Made me really want a Curta.
I’ve always loved the the affordable beauty line:
“In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”
He specifically said this about the game: "The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future, but hey, that's just me."
I suspect you could combine the "vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics" with a more modern political critique. To some extent, I feel like the original Deus Ex game is still relevant as it tangles with the corruption of power and how technology enables that process, which is more relevant than ever.
If you're one of those folks inexplicably bitter about prerelease trailers then maybe I can understand your stance. But dismissing the monumental amount of effort that it has taken to deliver what some of us perceive as one of the highest works of art in the genre, is ridiculous.
One dimension of Cyberpunk as envisioned by William Gibson genuinely was explicitly aesthetic, in the way in which it was meant to be understood and experienced. So derivatives focusing on that aren't necessarily missing the point.
However, it's still certainly possible to reproduce those aesthetics in bad ways, or to lean on them to the exclusion of any deep message or story of any kind, etc. And it's certainly fair to criticize any given derivative for shallowness of vision. So, as a criticism of Cyberpunk 2077 it's perfectly appropriate, but I don't think execution of aesthetics in and of itself misses the point.
In the former, I remember concepts being so much bigger and more concrete. E.g. the "War on Drugs" or "Reaganomics". These were things that existed because powerful people said they did. And there was debating, but ideas were still clearly defined.
So even though CP authors were imagining our future, it was a pretty fundamental shift to go from books-at-libraries to everything-anywhere-all-of-the-time.
Now, every concept seems to have much fuzzier conceptual edges. Because there are a million opinions about it circulating publicly and loudly.
There's just as much scarcity of valuable information today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of garbage which is more accessible than ever before.
The (now-)standard Cyberpunk settings strikes me as, in part, asking "what would it really look like if David Friedman's ridiculous capitalism fan-fic happened?"
His The Machinery of Freedom was published in '73, and was a big part of the Reagan/80s zeitgeist.
Similarly now have the modern Korean alphabet bleed into the neon signs of Cyberpunky streets of more recent movie productions where in the past you had Japanese or Chinese writing systems. The shifting representation of Asia in Western exoticism/escapism content is fascinating to observe.
Edit: Photo of the cover: https://eikehein.com/stuff/neuromancer_seoul.jpg
- Export of majorly successful pop music (e.g. BTS, Blackpink - those hits are often penned by Western composers however, so a bit murky on what product is flowing there)
- Ditto TV (e.g. Squid Game setting TV records with a lot rooted in Korean schoolyard games)
- Ditto cinema (Parasite, a story about social mobility woes in Korean society, winning all the Oscars)
- Ditto gaming (PUBG, other MMOs)
- Ditto literature (bestellers including "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982", again on social issues in the country)
- Ditto cosmetics exports, beauty trends ("Korean Week" in malls, say), etc.
- Even some Western productions focussing specifically on Korean diaspora/ethnicity (e.g. most recently the expensive "Pachinko" on Apple TV+ (and the novel it's based on), or stuff like Kim's Convenience)
I think you can definitely make a case that Korea is the Asian-country-du-jour among the Western audience (and that's before you get into, say, Latin America, which is far deeper into Korean TV content, also bleeding over into Latin minorities in the USA).
Try flying through Minnesota, Wisconsin, the automaker capital states. Airports full of now-yellowed directions in Japanese for the consideration of what was frequent visitations by their competitors.
It was a no-brainer to bet on Japanese tech in next generation...even Gibson's dated "5MB of hot hitachi RAM" was far-sighted when he wrote it...just not far enough.
Tangentially, I find the generational aspect of that line fun. Depending on how old the person you're talking to is, this will mean (as originally meant) a gray/staticy color, or a searingly vivid blue, (or, I guess, something else like a graphical "no signal found" screen in the most modern interpretations).
As with much sci-fi, it's a story of "the future" that's thoroughly grounded in the present day it was written in.
It was an experience indeed. At many points, very high concept (which of course has been copied to death). At other points, naive. Surprisingly few things felt old fashioned.
The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character.
EDIT: To clarify, I liked the book very much.
And it bears remembering that Gibson was 34 when he wrote Neuromancer.
You can see a shift in his characterization by the time he gets to Mona Lisa Overdrive (a book and 4 years later). And certainly with the subsequent Bridge trilogy. IMHO, the Sprawl trilogy that starts with Neuromancer gets better with each book, even though the first is the most famous.
Also, plug for Void Star, which I recently finished after a recommendation here. It sits somewhere in Bridge-era Gibson tone, but with the quintessential "What the hell is going on?" Cyberpunk mystery that a lot of retro-CP authors drop. https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250...
Don't remember Mona Lisa Overdrive very well but the whole A plot with the girl being protected because she has a modem in her head was a bit hard to follow. Though once again great world building. The B plot with an older Molly Millions delivering The Count's cybersarcophagus in the desert was cool af though.
edit: that's not to say they're not fine books
While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel manuscript into production back then: very often, it still does.)
ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a while. But the publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence? That was all in his imagination.
I feel it's like this for two reasons:
1) Gibson himself says that he hasn't been a very good writer making Neuromancer, and that this is one of his weaker works,
2) but then again, we see the world from the POV of the protagonist and his brain filter. Case is not a very complicated man and this is how he sees the world. He chooses to focus on these things, and he treats people around him like NPCs. (Giving a convincing perspective of a character is what good writers do, so I think Gibson wasn't a shitty writer after all.)
> “So it’s entirely fair to say, and I’ve said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel “looks” was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in ‘Heavy Metal’. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’”, and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed ‘cyberpunk’. Those French guys, they got their end in early.”
In particular, "The Long Tomorrow" by Moebius/Dan O'Bannon published in 1977 on Heavy Metal magazine was very influential to Gibson.
As a 16 year old kid back in 1990, this message meant everything to me. It inspired me and gave me hope. His new stuff has less neon but is just a great to read and feels the same to me today.
I like really well made books, so the edition I have is the Easton Press https://www.eastonpress.com/signed-editions/william-gibson-n..., from Ebay although mine is unsigned.
There is an a Suntup Editions version that is to drool over https://suntup.press/neuromancer, especially the Numbered Editions. Completely impossible to get except for thousands of dollars on Ebay. I have a Suntup Edition 451 Fahrenheit and it's amazing, so I can only imagine what this one looks like. And the circuit design has an Easter Egg, although I don't know what it is.
High quality rare books can be an expensive hobby...
Gibson latched onto that cultural wave and took it into a possible future, and it was exciting to me. Today it's interesting to see that technofuture both commoditized and idolized.
Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live.
It was a very interesting time in Japan's history, which I personally think has a lot of parallels to the current west-coast tech bubble.
Check out:
Fantasy - Meiko Nakahara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kt8HP1VEPU
真夜中のドア/Stay With Me - Miki Matsubara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEe_yIbW64w
I Can't Stop The Loneliness - ANRI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bALJxjL8jw
4:00 A.M. - Taeko Onuki
I'm just a little younger than you then, but I remember the 80's pretty much the same way. Japanese manufacturers (especially of cars and consumer electronics) were sort of "eating the world" and computers and high-tech were still seen as very mysterious and mesmerizing and had a real mystique about them.
Interestingly, for me, the mystique and mystery of high-tech largely persisted up until about 2010 or so. Maybe a little later, maybe 2015 even. It's only been in the last few years that it seems to be wearing off. Not sure if that's just a reflection of my becoming older and more cynical and harder to impress, or if its down to changes in society/culture at large, or what. But my recent re-reading of the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies was, in part, I think an attempt to recapture some of that. Not sure if it worked or not, but it was fun reading all that stuff.
Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live.
There are aspects of the "cyberpunk future" that still seem appealing in some regards, but it doesn't necessarily feel like the exact world I'd want to live in, that's for sure.
I just picked up a copy of Stand on Zanzibar, looking forward to getting into that soon.
I love science fiction. One thing you have to realize about science ficiton is that it is a product of the time it was written. It may share many of the aesthetics, themes, philosophies and politics of that time. Like it's hard not to look at the original Star Wars and not see the impact of 70s aesthetics.
Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. There was a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were "taking over". The depiction of a dystopian future dominated by megacorps mirrors fears of Japanese culture and influence.
40 years later this dystopian future still hasn't eventuated.
These days so much other media has been influenced by it that it doesn't look nearly as original.
But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies about:
- cyberspace inhabited by AIs
- neural interfaces
- corporate armies
- insanely rich people living in Earth orbit
- genetically engineered assassins with body augmentations
- slum-dwelling hackers who break in to corporate data stores
Neuromancer brought all this and more in to popular consciousness in a blinding flash.
After Neuromancer, Gibson came out with Count Zero (which I liked even more than Neuromancer itself) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which wasn't nearly as good as either of the books that preceded it). I stopped reading Gibson after that.
Neuromancer still sounds ground-breaking and I hope to read it one day.
As an aside - something interesting I just found was Gibson's thoughts on Blade Runner. He had seen the first 20 minutes of it and thought his book would be seen as a copy of the film. [1]
Edit: I uh finally read the article after spending ages in the comments and see that they mention this exact incident in there. Whoops.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.willia...
I found "The Peripheral" to be refreshingly good. I would recommend giving it a read.
A book written 125 years ago.
I was a sci-fi fan growing up, and Neuromancer wasn't the first cyberpunk novel along these lines (I would definitely recommend The Shockwave Rider for that) but it was one of the most striking spec-fi books I read that presented a realistic future that could be traced to our own world and critically: that wasn't better than it.
Ironically, reading Neuromancer in my older age, the main observation I have is how optimistic it is. The seas aren't rising and the climate seems to be doing just fine.
Much of the rest of it, though, isn't about Japanese culture, corporate or otherwise, but seems to me like taking AnCaps like Friedman seriously. Many elements are straight out of that kind of, ah, thought.
Gibson has gone on record multiple times in saying that he doesn't write about the future nor does he try to predict the future, but sees himself as always writing about the present.
From a SF aficionado point of view, Neuromancer world has:
-An economy that rely on ubiquitous computer networks.
-Colonization of low orbit.
-An AI rebelling and doing its own thing.
-Digital downloads of personalities.
In 1984.. I mean, OK, the concepts already existed, but it really break with most of the SF that was being done until then.
It's the beginning of a really dark SF, that I suppose was the point: "If we follow the current path, the future will look like corporate feudalism".
By the way, from a political point of view, the fear of the Japanese taking over is now the fear of the Chinese taking over. I will let the "dystopian future dominated by megacorps" comment as an exercise for the reader.
Why does mega-corporation mean Xenophobia against the Japanese? Bladerunner, which came out around the same time, has mega-corporations which aren't run by the Japanese. So does Robocop. The second Sprawl book and third Sprawl book both have wealthy villains who are not Japanese.
Same. No doubt it was an influential book. But I didn't find it well written or that interesting to be honest. I've read neuromancer once. I've read Dune maybe a dozen times. Also, other two books in the trilogy were even worse.
Maybe the hype was so great that nothing could live up to such expectations. I remember being so excited to finally read neuromancer only to be let down.
I strongly disagree. The core elements are transhumanism, post-liberal capitalism, high tech and low lives with a lot of pulp and noir: sex, drugs and violence at the street level. There are no heroes, no epics, just deeply broken people getting into a mess of intrigues as everyone just tries to fill their own egoistic needs, deal with their personal demons, or gets dragged along a path of least resistance. Claiming this is fear of xenos taking over is to close ones eyes for the very problems of our culture in favor of blaming someone else. The dystopian future has been there all along, you are just to sheltered in your uptown community to know about the perils of addicts and the girls that grew up in the house of blue lights.
I've heard young people argue that the Beatles weren't all that great, and then go on to name modern artists who would have never existed without them.
I'm late Gen-X and my wife is late millennial. We watched Pulp Fiction together and she didn't get it. I realized then how much of it was groundbreaking because of the time of its release. Someone watching it now just won't be blown away like I was when I first saw it. I imagine if we went back and watched Blade Runner it would be another forgettable movie to her and not the groundbreaking masterpiece it was when I saw it for the first dozen times.
Reminds me of the Steely Dan song 'Hey Nineteen'...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/01/sciencefiction...
I won't speculate on why this is the case, but some people claim its because the innovations are copied so quickly the original becomes just another copy of itself.
(My son has evolved somewhat in his view of Star Wars films. I'm just glad his older brother didn't regard The Barney Movie t00 highly.)
* Cyberpunk is a very humanist point of view. So often the tragedy in cyberpunk is that humanity is oppressed by a bureaucratic or technical system.
* All art is a product of its time.
I’m still enjoying the game, still riding through Night City, finding new details every day: in the roads, tunnels, on the walls. A random pedestrian might have some link to a book or a movie - you just need to check their clothes and phrases. So exciting.
REDEngine is great - of course, performance is awful, but the idea of ray-traced lights is great and it looks amazing. Also, the details level and the skin rendering - are truly amazing.
Of course, the game needs more, much more work - to make it more entertaining, deeper. But still, it's an interesting world, and I’m pretty sure the price was fair.
One of the most interesting and entertaining parts for me: Cyber Engine Tweaks. Some days I spend more times for hacking than playing:)
It feels like Gibson was riffing on the vibe created by John Foxx's "Metamatic" [1] in 1980 (never mind his "Ultravox!" [2] in the years before that). Maybe it was Foxx though that claimed he was channelling the mood of novels like Ballard's "Crash" [3] from 1973. Computerization, synthesized music, alienation were a part of the zeitgeist of the 70's, 80's.
[1] https://youtu.be/dgaLF2F5LWg
The reader view really highlights how short the article is, now that I'm looking at it.
I think tracking is letter spacing right? It is pretty rough. I think you can enforce fonts and at least in Firefox and Safari you can add custom CSS to help with that sort of thing. I don't think Chrome offers the same feature without an extension.
One thing that really stuck out for me was that _everyone_ had memory foam mattresses. The slums, the really slick holiday homes, everyone.
Interesting; I guess it could be explained in-universe by economies of scale, that is, (memory) foam mattresses being faster and cheaper to produce than other types of mattresses. I'm thinking of spring mattresses, which actually have parts and different materials, whereas foam can be just a single block I think? And when you think about logistics, memory foam can be compacted and vacuum sealed for transport.
Btw, compared to hard scifi like Stephenson (relevant comparison due to Snow Crash), Neuromacer isn't really there; its strengths are outstanding creativity, world-building, character development (including top-notch implied backstories), personal interactions, and artful descriptions.
I really can't think of an author who can stand with Stephenson. Vernor Vinge comes close, but not there on style. Then there are authors with a single good idea that are worth reading, but nowhere near Stephenson's level (e.g. the author of The Forever War).
P.S. Obviously I am not so subtly fishing for people to argue with me and give me book recommendations. Just not the Tri-body Problem please - it falls in with The Forever War - cool concept, cool (very long) intro, not much else.
As for recommendations about post-cyberpunk: our own cstross has written plenty of great books (Accelerando in primis); I've liked anything that Peter Watts as written so far (Blindsight is the most famous, but the rifters saga is also good and the Sunflower cycles is excellent). Alastair Reynolds writing is very uneven, but world building is excellent and so are many of his stories (even outside of the Revelation Space universe).
More generally, Egan (hard sci-fi), Banks (space opera) are some of my favorites. Vance, Wolfe for something more on the fantasy side.
T.R.Napper is also worth looking out for. "Neon Leviathan" is not what i would call a masterpiece, but the author seems promising.
It's such an amazing series, it so good I find myself trying to pace myself while reading it so I can gestate more of the world and think about it for a while.
I rarely find a book or series that captivates me to this level so I'm basically in love with the sprawl trilogy right now. After I'm done ill probably read Gibsons other stuff because he is really good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy
> The trilogy derives its name from the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, which was abandoned in an earthquake and has become a massive shantytown and a site of improvised shelter.
Seems sadly two heartbeats into the future for today’s Bay Area
I'd read everything at least once before, except Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, so this was a chance to kinda do it all at the same time, finish the stuff I had not read, and kinda have all this William Gibson in my head at more or less the same time.
Having done all that, I'll add this; if you've only read Neuromancer, or even only read just the Sprawl Trilogy, definitely consider giving the Bridge Trilogy a shot. It's markedly different in many ways, but still very Gibsonesque and definitely worth reading. The big differences, IMO, are that the Bridge Trilogy books are less "futuristic" and have less focus on tech technology qua technology, and focus more on the people and their interactions and choices, etc.
I once asked Gibson whether he was influenced by Philip K Dick, and he said that he didn't read Dick when he was young, and was more influenced by Pynchon instead. Still, despite his denial, he seems to be retreading a lot of ground first covered by Dick himself.
I'm rereading Snow Crash now and you cant go 10 pages without reading about The Metaverse. and so much of its VR world reminds me of Ready Player One
everything old thats good seems to get endlessly reinvented, riffed on, or just blatantly ripped off? lol
Given how time goes, I'd say it was the other way around with the references.
go read Neuromancer. then come back here. I'll wait :-)
Thing is, who could even do such a book justice as a film?
As one of them (I'll be 49 in a couple of months), I expect there is a pretty diverse range of opinions among us.
Me? Relative to cyberpunk fiction specifically? I think the old adage "the future is here, its just unevenly distributed" rings very true. Clearly in certain sense we are living in "the cyberpunk future". But by the same token there are obviously regards in which we are not (so far as we know).
I continue to see Cyberpunk as stimulating and fascinating in terms of thinking about the potential of technological developments, while continuing to be a warning about the dangers of certain paths that we might go down (and in some cases, are arguably already headed down). While I'm not as anti-advertising in the general sense as many HN'ers, I will say I dislike the way so much of what we call "tech" has become all about finding ways to serve more ads to more people, more efficiently - as opposed to working on finding better ways to purify water, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, etc. And I believe that there are company executives out there who would actually authorize the deployment of Max Headroom style "blipverts" even if they were exactly as flawed as described in Max Headroom. Not all would, of course, but I expect they exist.
My relationship with cyberpunk is a bit weird though, because I also don't share the broadly anti-capitalist sentiments often associated with "punk" ideology. In fact, I'm very much an an-cap[1]. So while I enjoy this fiction, I don't always interpret the political bits the way some others might. And as much as I see mega-corporations as an affront to human values, human decency, freedom, etc., I see governments as equally so (or more so). Both are just ways to concentrate power and oppress people in my book. shrug
Anyway, speaking more generally, I think the world we livein today is amazing in many ways, and kinda sucks in quite a few ways. I see Khan Academy, Youtube, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, inexpensive but crazy powerful computers, ubiquitous bandwidth, hand-held computers (smart phones) that are basically straight out of science fiction, etc. as adding so much to our world and enabling so many things. But at the same time, you can't ignore climate change, pollution, poverty, rising sea levels, the recent surge in something resembling what you might call "right wing populist fascism", etc. and not be a bit bothered.
We can put men on the moon, but we have people living in cardboard boxes. It's frustrating because I'm convinced we can do better. sigh Sorry for the long rant.
I guess the comparison isn’t perfect but I get what it means. Snow crash made more technical sense but reads like a disaster. Neuromancer reads like a dopamine drip but misses the mark on some of the tech.
Also I wish the sense of humor of Snow Crash was better understood. It really is a laugh-out-loud read and otherwise reads like a comic book (in a good way). I think some of the Americanisms irk British and Euro readers. I'm not usually one for audio books but I have heard the Snow Crash audio book carries the tone perfectly.
Did anyone find a convincing way out?
But there's no convincing way out. In reality the system wins and eats everything, and your only choice is the end in ice or fire.
However, what fiction, art and comics were to us in a time before we could see pictures on the internet of literally everything, travel everywhere, and read the thoughts of random strangers on every conciavable topic, is what cyberpunk signifies now.
Gibson seemed to escape the category of genre and get treated "seriously," as "literary," fiction that is usually character driven, (vs plot driven and didactic fantasy sci-fi) but in Neuromancer's case the technology was so alive it became a character, or so the conversation at the time was about the book.
Literary fiction was a way to extend your experience by developing an empathy for complex characters and exercise it in a way that could be applied to relationships with real people. You could tell when someone had read Catcher and the Rye because it was like they had adopted the mannerisms of another friend you hadn't met. The idea and aesthetic of being or becoming cyberpunk - an anti-hero with super power competence at manipulating the tech substrate of your environment and system you both existed in and were against - was what a generation of young hackers adopted from Neromancer the way boomers read 'Catcher'.
At the time, Neuromancer's Case, Artimage, and Molly replaced the Holden Caulfields, Sebastian Flytes, and Larry Darell (characters from different famous literary novels) as character archetypes a lot of young readers oriented their aspirations and identities around, where relationships with these characters often set them on a real life trajectory. If you read Neuromancer and became a hacker, it's a lot like reading Brideshead Revisited and accepting your sexuality, or reading Razor's Edge and dropping out and living in an ashram.
Fiction before the internet did that, where it was personal experience of a relationship with characters and it had downstream effects on the culture. Post-internet on instagram or a blog someone follows, the characters are literally more real because these are people sharing their lives, but also less complex because the text and images are still representations created by people who aren't deeply thoughtful and practiced writers, and by being real, they don't provide ideals or open aesthetics. Internet people/characters don't provoke and leverage imagination that lets the reader create new and beautiful things, rather, they create concrete symbols to imitate and compare with directly.
When I read the article I was nostalgic, but thought it's not so much cyberpunk that is the artifact of the past, it's that the aesthetics and experience of fiction as a perfect, distant, and open ended ideal that draws out the readers imagination to create something new themselves that feels gone. As in I don't miss cyberpunk so much as I miss fiction being meaningfully upstream of culture the way it seemed to be before the internet. Anyway, piqued.
