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.
Great story! I also read Neuromancer for the first time in Greek translation (Αίολος), around 1995, knowing nothing about the book otherwise. It was a blind buy in a bookstore solely because I liked the cover and the short synopsis on the back. It was a book that changed my life. I remember being drenched in sweat when I finished it, and I immediately re-read it without a break. I was already at age 14 hopelessly hooked on computers, but Neuromancer completely rewired how I thought about technology (it was the first book I came across that put forth a non-anthropocentric point of view, with Technology being presented as both an addictive drug and a force in itself, bringing about its own teleology).
That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.
Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.
>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.
That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.
I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.
I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.
Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
> every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak,
I am like this with a lot of books. I'll remember a very high level overview ("The Historian is about a modern day hunt for Dracula, and it's really cool, and I liked how the story was told, but I can't remember why or any of what happened."), but can't remember much about plot details.
It makes re-reading things fun, but also is frustrating because I can't explain why something was good, and I also remember just enough that plot twists don't surprise me the second time. It also means that I completely forget about the "bad" parts of the book, or the parts that didn't resonate with me.
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.
Wow. What a great story. An in translation, no less. The Greek translator must have been very talented.
(Kind of curious now ... were the other translated editions in non-English languages as powerful? Do readers of science fiction in other languages seek out works by specific translators or publishers known to have great translations?)
Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to surpass the original. We Israelis also had one of our more famous poets (Alterman) translate some Shakespeare but I'm not aware of the translation being considered a masterpiece on its own (personally it felt too archaic to appreciate).
We have two translations of Lord of the Rings (Tolkien fans being one of the more picky bunches of book geeks here, I'll refer to it in depth.) The older one, by Lavnit, is considered more beautiful and poetic and flowing (my nick comes from it though I was never much of a Tolkien geek, just hung out with them - Elves were translated into the Sons of Lillith from Hebrew mythology, and my mother's name is Lillith...). It's also long out of print and goes for (lowish I believe) collector prices. The newer one by Dr Emanuel Lotem is more... I don't know, academic maybe would be the word? Anyway, the Tolkien community hates him so much that he's one of their main memes. He also translated Dragonlance, which I grew up with, so I had no ill will towards him myself, and at some point I realized he's the one who managed to translate the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is... quite a feat. I wouldn't expect it to be translatable. So now I hold a deep appreciation for him.
The local Harry Potter geeks treated the translator as a minor celeb.
Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any other translators that are held in special regard.
> Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to surpass the original.
Can't say about Shakespeare, there are many translations, and in my eyes all of them lack something that the original has, but Russian translations of such writers as O'Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald and Jack London have some irresistible charm and familiarity that is completely absent in original English texts.
I attribute it to censorship: many talented writers couldn't actually write because of it in soviet times, and to provide for themselves they took jobs as translators.
Translations are a very subjective matter because the emotional punch of a story is far greater when it is speaking to you in your mother tongue.
Shakespeare is perhaps impossible to translate properly to Spanish, just like Don Quijote to English, and yet we keep doing it because even the small glimpse afforded by the translation gives you an idea of the greatness behind it.
Funnily, I’ve always found the Spanish translation of the Lord of the Rings significantly more readable than the original, perhaps because Tolkien went out of his way to write in an old form of English that is a bit too distant for me. Or maybe it is because I read the story in my youth and re-reading it is a way to recapture some of the wonder that I felt then.
Translations can easily be just better than the 'original'. The translator is a better artist. Has better music inside him, knows better words (or: better words exist in the target language), maybe even shifts focus/tone, although that's the job of an editor. It is not very common to reedit books and call it a translation, but those happen too.
One of the challenges with Khamlet is that Klingon originally had no state of being verb - it was part of the word itself rather than a bare "I am {something}". Thus "to be or not to be" was never something that was translatable in the original Klingon language and it had to be updated.
Glancing at Amazon, there appears to be a release of Sunzi's Art of War from 2018.
The Bulgarian translation I read was a valiant effort by a guy who ran the Bulgarian "science fiction and fantasy BBS".
(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)
(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)
Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".
In French, I find that translations of Edgard Allan Poe by Baudelaire are really nice. I enjoy them as much as the original version.
Sci-fi translations of US science fiction classics (Orwell, Bradbury etc..) are usually excellent too. I find myself re-reading these books in French and/or English according to mood.
On the other hans, I find that French translators usually utterly fail to capture the dry kind humor from British authors. From Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, it reads so serious in French translations!!
He really tried IMO. Actually I wrote this story to him, the translator of the Greek edition when I happened to find him on Facebook. He told me he felt he didn't do justice to the original work and always felt a bit bad.
I think I read the same text in a 1996 reprint some years later, in 1999 - coincidentally also during my last year of highschool with impending doom^Wexams afoot.
Definitely mind-expanding, and helped shape my early cyberpunk tastes, though it didn't get me hitched :)
I do think the translation was excellent, he definitely must have put hard work and passion into it!
Generally I don't like translations. After the Internet became a thing and Amazon started shipping to Greece (probably after 2000) I never read Greek translations of English literature again.
I read it in 1996. and it was a t-file from a bbs. I had to sit in front of my 386sx everyday to read the text in dos edit. it took weeks. because it was in english and I was learning english at the same time. you gave me the urge to reread it now :)
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)
Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point.
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
The heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.
Katee Sackhoff did an interview with Ron Moore on her podcast, and one of the topics they discussed was how they would write the "technobabble" in Star Trek (and BSG). Moore said they would write the script and just say things like "they tech the tech with the tech until it techs" and then fill in the actual technobabble words later!
Hard sci-fi can definitely be popular, The Martian and The Three-Body Problem are two examples I can immediately think of. I think the Arrival and Contact movies would also count (not sure if the books were considered popular before their film adaptations came out). There is usually a way to avoid most of the "opaque wall of gibberish" so that there is just enough for a technical-minded reader to tell that the author has put some thought into it and the science makes sense, but still little enough that a non-technical reader can enjoy the story without having to care about the scientific worldbuilding.
I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.
A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point.
It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!
Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it to denigrate Gibson - his writing is beautiful, and I think he's one of the most perceptive Sci-fi writers going. The Blue Ant trilogy was one of the best encapsulations of the "new" world at the turn of the millenium, and reading The Peripheral has the terrifying quality of being given a prophecy of a future you don't want.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
I also think more accurate. The opening sentence of Neuromancer is one of the most beautifully perfect metaphors I've ever read - one that's also chock full of symbolism. It may be the single best line of writing I've ever read.
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
Really interesting, because his writing kinda gives you that wide-T sense, it's like the way Wu Tang rapped -- especially Raekwon, and to a lesser extend Ghostface -- where they avalanche you with all of these richly visualized and highly contrasted scenarios of this that and the other without ever go too deeply into any of them. Really does leave you awash in a lot of flavorful vibes and in 1991/1992 when I wasn't doing too much computering at all it gave me such a strong sense that sooner than later I'd be doing a lot of it
I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.
This is the best 'literary' comparison I have ever seen on this site. Since we're in hip-hop for a bit, I gotta point to the way less famous Camp Lo: They do this, but instead of kung-fu + hood drug dealing; they're more in the space of 70's Blaxploitation + Heist films with a dash of Neuromancer/Blade Runner.
For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense.
It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
Ballard is much, much more grounded in his stories, and I wouldn’t describe even his most outlandish ones as sci-fi. I actually think a lot of his writing is a bit dry and much prefer Gibson in that sense.
PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.
Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.
As I’m sure you know, Gibson himself briefly worked as a fashion model. Unlike most male authors and most sci-fi authors, and especially unlike most male sci-fi authors, he describes what people are wearing with great precision and creativity. For example, Molly’s first appearance in Johnny Mnemonic has her “wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.” I wanted to dig up a contrasting quote from Asimov, so I went to my Asimov shelf and although I had a great time looking, I had trouble finding a description of what any of the characters looked like, let alone what they were wearing.
Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.
I always felt that Asimov had good imagination and ideas, and could craft the plot well, but his actual writing skills were rather weak. He could get me curious, but I never felt any emotions when I read his books.
I think in Asimov, the real protagonist is always an idea, not a character. You can see this play out in the Foundation books; it’s especially clear in the Mule stories. The Foundation is one idea, the Mule is another, and they stand in opposition.
You know this makes a ton of sense and why his writing is so compelling. We experience the “vibe” of a world, not the technical details. And I am saying this as someone who came into Sci-Fi from Heinlein who to a fault focused on the technical. I think the moment you get into the mathematics of anything it starts feeling more mundane. But perceiving a different reality by how it feels is what we do as children and that’s why it’s such a magical feeling.
One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).
Totally disagree. He has the deepest understanding of all, of humans, aesthetic, culture, and art. Much more important than specifics about technology which is almost always completely irrelevant.
I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people.
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
I hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years.
The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.
Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
There's this quote I heard that said something along the lines of "Good sci-fi uses fictional technology to show us something about human beings that would be difficult to express otherwise".
I first read this as a foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness and it has completely changed how I read. It’s important to understand that there is an agenda behind every book, not as a bad thing, but as a way to understand and explore how the author thinks and how they have been shaped by the real world that they live in and build from to create.
I enjoyed the world of Tron a lot more when I understood that it was more about how people saw computers at the time than how they actually were, too. The result was something arguably more unique than a "realistic" view would have been, too.
Most of the culture novels are around a Special Circumstances situation. The minds and other science fiction elements are largely (albeit quite richly detailed) backdrop to a human protagonist’s actions.
Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.
Good points. His stories frequently (or always?) involve conflict. You can take it that he believes that when sentience is involved, conflict is unavoidable, regardless of how advanced that sentience becomes.
Socialism is the transition stage where collective ownership of the means of production, where the working class gains state power from the capitalist class.
Communism is a later stage of such abundance that money, classes and state power become redundant and are abolished.
The Culture is an imagining of the latter, where many means of production become people. They thus become workers that can labour for each other if they collectively decide to.
My reading of the Culture novels is that few people produce anything at all, or do any work or labour, and nearly every is produced by the ships, orbitals, and the Minds that control them. It’s not clear who exactly decides what gets produced, but decision making seems to be largely controlled by the Minds.
The Minds are people too. Production happens individually at the small scale and based on collective decisions at the large scale. The Minds sway public opinion, but ultimately the public at large makes large decisions like the Idiran war.
I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
Yes. Neuromancer is actually about drug addiction in the same way as PKD's work is, with the cyberspace being a psychedelic non physical drug. It is also about cybernetics as systems of control; you can trace the machinery of each character being driven by and struggling against external forces of control. Case, Molly, Armitage, and ultimately the AI.
To the best of my knowledge Gibson has never talked about Tron being an influence. He'd already described cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome before Tron came out.
He has sometimes talked about Blade Runner and worrying when it came out that people would think his stuff was derivative of it (it wasn't), and then said he eventually got to talk with Ridley Scott about it, and it turns out both of them had similar inspirations, namely Metal Hurlant.
You're right; also, apparently, Gibson said he hadn't seen Tron as late as March 1983, and he finished a draft of Neuromancer before that August https://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/free-article/neuromancer-t... . (Though this also confirms that he had seen Tron stills in mid-1982, though that's still well after both "Burning Chrome" and the Jacked In outline (both 1981)). OTOH the similarities to Blade Runner have never really been hard to explain: if you cross film noir and hard-boiled with New Hollywood and '70s malaise fiction then it's natural to end up with something a bit like Blade Runner and so also Neuromancer, while on the other hand there are of course huge differences between the two as well.
Similar situation with Abbott's Flatland fiction from the 1800's. No math/physics background, but a very interesting perspective on different dimensions from a humanistic point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts in ways that at the time many felt impossible.
Alas. I would love a story with utterly alien paradigm but nobody can actually write them and neither will the artificial minds anxiously crafted in the image of human mind be able to.
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
The trick is to invent future tech that feels organic, cohesive, and believable, and not just whatever happens to be needed for the story you’re trying to tell.
Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
It would honestly be nice if airports had 'phone booths' like I've seen in high tech companies. Think 1 person sized meeting rooms in larger spaces. One door on the pod opens, there's a seat and a small desk inside. Enough to make a mostly private phone call.
In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ.
I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.
Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows:
>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.
>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.
His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.
Just goes to show, if you want to write romantically about something, it’s best to have little or no idea what you’re talking about, so that your imagination can take over. Shouldn’t be too hard for some people on hackernews, they do it everyday!
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.
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.
Yes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge.
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
> 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.
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.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
I read an interview in the back of one of the volumes of Gundam: Origin where original series creators Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Yoshiyuki Tomino reflected on their history in the student protest movement of the 1960s. It was a fascinating read because I didn't know anything about the Japanese New Left, and all of a sudden it made Gundam click for me in a way that it hadn't before.
It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.
I would suggest you think about what you don't know.
The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US companies with US culture in them.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
So… your argument is that it’s not counterculture unless it’s mainstream culture? And that one should only credit derivative works once they become mainstream, rather than the original inspiring works because they were too obscure?
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.
I think it is actually pretty difficult to look at countries and say which ones have successful countercultures. I mean to some extent if a counterculture is successful it becomes not a counterculture, just part of the mainstream culture. On the other hand, a maximally out-of-mainstream counterculture is a totally unknown thing that we’ve never heard of as outsiders.
Counterculture is a culture that is counter to the mainstream culture. If a culture is happy on its own, it is more of just a subculture. Cyberpunk itself features counterculture not just subculture, but is also inspired by the counterculture at the time.
Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations, harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just like it could never be that influential in music.
Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (and some video games) have been influential and are frequently credited for that, but that is about it. Everything else including similar media before and at the same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0]. Just like in music.
Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in cyberpunk despite having had influence.
i dunno. some of the most influential d-beat/crust bands of all time are from japan (d-clone, disclose, gauze, gallhammer, gism, death side... that's barely scratching the surface of bands that are/were actively countercultural).
it may not always take the same form, but anywhere you find big cities, you'll find some form of countercultural punk movement because the economy is big enough to support people at the fringes (even if you just work as a bartender or whatever).
By the early 90s, “cyberpunk” had largely become self parody, meaning that the counter culture was already rejecting cyberpunk as too mainstream. Search around for the Usenet reactions to Billy Idol’s album of the same name.
Or take a look at the opening sequence of Snow Crash, where the deliverator is clearly making fun of ubiquitous cyberpunk tropes. At the time it was considered a tombstone for cyberpunk, rather than some sort of positive signal milestone.
These are only two data points to demonstrate that the “counterculture” era had already expired in the US by the early 90s, as members of that counterculture felt that it had already stopped being counter to any part of American culture.
The claim that there is “not much Japanese counterculture” is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around. The more traditional a society is, the more “counter” any underground culture is —- by definition.
American counterculture hasn’t really properly existed outside of capitalist smother and capture since the early 90s either by the way. Give No Logo a read for more on that.
> UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
> The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC
Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
"my country counterculture is so much better" could be ridiculously funny if it wasn't so sad to consider a presumably intelligent adult could utter it in complete sincerity.
Producing more in quantity, with far biggest allocated budget, and even better quality on everything that can be measured at surface level, all that is no guarantee to reach a work that is deeper in spirit.
Those who don't question what's wrong in themselves due specifically to the culture they were fed with are not on the path to elude its sway.
>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
> used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S
to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly maligned) sequels
Right: bascially, 1980s-vintage William Gibson is a post-New-Wave SF writer who's a fan of hard-boiled novels and of New Hollywood "outlaw" bohemianism, so his heroes are pimps, thieves and murderers. 1980s-vintage Shirow is a fan of military SF, so his heroes are paramilitary death squads. Now, that's a little jaded, but I think mostly simply accurate. I don't think that generalises well to a US/Japan distinction though. As others have said, Akira is surely more of an outsider story. (Beyond cyberpunk, have a look at the political backgrounds of senior Ghibli people like Isao Takahata, Kondo Yoshifumi and Hayao Miyazaki. I've read somewhere, but can't confirm, that people like that tended to end up in animation precisely because Communists were blackballed out from more respectable industries.) And the US is the land of Dirty Harry and Niven and Pournelle as much as Bonnie and Clyde and Blade Runner.
> Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
IIRC Switch was originally conceived as having one gender in the outside "real" world but another when incarnated in the Matrix (where your own self body image defines you). Hence their name - they switched.
This was all dropped at some point - the only surviving relic being the name of the character.
You're right about Switch but the other context is one of the Matrix directors said the original idea for The Matrix was a trans metaphor.
Somehow this became "the Matrix is a trans metaphor" to people with poor media literacy skills.
There was also an unfinished plot thread in The Matrix Online that a woman who emerged from a coma at the same time Neo died may or may not be a reincarnated Neo. This story setup was never concluded or followed up on.
"Fans were quick to note that "Sarah Edmontons" is an anagram for "Thomas Anderson," leading many players to believe Neo may have been reborn as Sarah after dying."
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
I really don't think Yakuza games are anything like GTA besides "being in a city". Yakuza has none of the sandbox elements like GTA, the city is more like an elaborate menu to go from mission to mission/side quest/activity.
Do you know how the Japanese think of and/or talk about "Japanese Cyberpunk"; e.g. Tetsuo: The Iron Man? It's interesting to me that there is "Japanese cyberpunk" and then there is regular cyberpunk made by Japanese artists (e.g. Ghost in the Shell). Do the Japanese consider these completely separate genres? Variants of the same genre? Are most fans even aware that Westerners make the distinction?
It's not actually framed as cyberpunk: Shinya Tsukamoto positionned it as "human size kaiju".
On the perception...I think its fans are mostly outside of Japan, and it was basically reversed imported. Tsukamoto sent it to foreign film festivals first, and only brought it to domestic theaters after it won at the Rome festival. Even now in interviews it's only brought back as it's directorial debut, and a stepping stone for getting money for bigger movies.
I have the feeling the whole notion of mixing human and technology just doesn't resonate as much in a country that is way more technology friendly and doesn't see robots as much as a threat than in the west.
PS: the "action hero" genre is basically humans transforming into machines, that speaks to the wide acceptance of the concept.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-memo...
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.
Perhaps publications like Mondo 2000 and WIRED (and Boing Boing) killed Cyberpunk the way The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis stuck a knife in the beatniks of the 1960's. Not that they made fun of Cyberpunk, but rather they so overly-embraced it that they kind of unintentionally made a mockery of it (so perhaps not so much like Dobie Gillis?). That was the way I saw it in the 90's anyway.
Good point. Over-enthusiasm is definitely a way to make a cool thing uncool. There are a few contemporary writers who seem to labels themselves as involved with cyberpunk, but whom really make it all a bit juvenile and silly.
In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in". I am of that age and I remember General Motors was a great place to work at that time. My friend "got in" after high school because his father was a union boss. For me, "getting in" to General Motors was literally impossible because I had no connections.
I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.
The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.
Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.
I don’t think that’s an accurate view of what the job market was like in the 70s and 80s.
My point was more that I think there was more of a feeling of security, in the sense that regular people felt a little more optimistic about the future and their personal finances. People started low on the totem pole but felt confident about moving upwards slowly. That feeling doesn’t really exist anymore.
Not at all. I see why you say that. My general thought of why things more interesting is not that they truly are, rather our time and attention spans have been taken up by more frivolous things while boredom leads to ideas and innovation.
I meant that boredom I experienced earlier in life was arguably a good thing.
I'm putting out a new track on spotify, as soon as i get the master back so I'm excited for that. I'll admit though, not a ton of interesting stuff going on. I mean, I make jewelry, am learning Japanese and do visual art too so I'm not lacking for good hobbies but idk where to meet people these days.
> 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.
Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.
Sadly, the minorities (in the Anglosphere at least) don't deliver at either "think" or "independently". Their counterculture is as countercultural as joining a church. Just another way to fit in. Be be slightly different and they'll chastise you - a high-profile example of this mechanism has just happened again https://archive.is/qeDfU. Unless that's what it's always been.
Hooligan-like countercultures are also excluded as far as "think" or "independently" goes for an obvious reason.
Thus, the only independent thinkers I've encountered are individuals who don't aim to have all the answers, who can accept disagreements, who attempt to know themselves - but those are individuals, not countercultures.
I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.
> I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.
This is my understanding. Was it really different in the 60s/70s?
Being unique, by definition, means you don’t fit in with a “culture”. There’s something inherent in human nature that causes people to form tribes (and copy others leading to cargo-culting, groupthink etc.); those who are too different to want to join the mainstream group still want to join some other group, they want to be accepted, which means they still have pressure to conform.
The main thing I see today is that most liberal “countercultures” don’t tolerate political differences. But they seem to tolerate other differences (at worst if nobody else has your difference it’ll be ignored which has always been the case), and perhaps 60s/70s counter-culture tolerated political differences more but had some other taboo.
Which is one reason I think novels like Neuromancer and count zero and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, feel so dated today, is that they are so decidedly not-queer in their sexual dynamics.
Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you can see the real thing effortlessly.
The other factor both of you are failing to see is that the majority of males are hetero normative and don't like watching sword fighting. This is not an outdated take but factual reality. There is nothing wrong with the alternative, but depicting only "hetero-normative" stuff is the statistical norm back then and even now.
It's absolutely the right thing to do to legitimize "non-hetero-normative" in the same way left-handedness is legitimate but saying any of it is "normal" and declaring anything not involving it as "dated" is absolutely out of touch with reality.
I didn’t even mean about sword fighting.. it’s just descriptions of women characters and the way the male characters talk about their lusty passions is soo boring.
I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk" appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea that all technology is socially transformative, just not in the ways we hope it will be.
Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.
I partially disagree, there are still some cyberpunk medias that feel fresh for today. But yes, they're definitely not as famous as the previous ones.
Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.
Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.
I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any
Well, I’m talking more about the culture environment of society at large, but even then – mirrors edge came out almost twenty years ago. While it might be considered “Post-cyberpunk,” (and I do enjoy that genre) it really doesn’t have much to do with the original genre in the countercultural sense. It’s more like an exploration into other aspects of a fictional cyberpunk-esque world.
Cloudpunk is the same thing as the recent Cyberpunk game: fun, but operating on stale tropes and aesthetics that haven’t changed in 40 years. This is a problem that pretty much every piece of cyberpunk media has.
Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…
Computers, the internet, it is all mainstream now, the opposite of a counterculture.
If you want a counterculture, look the other way. "digital detox", permaculture, degrowth, etc... In the tech world you have the "small web".
"Maker" movements, repair/reuse/recycling, etc... used to be countercultures but they have gone towards mainstream in the last few years (and I think it is a good thing).
Not all countercultures are "good". For instance what we now call "wokism" used to be a counterculture, it is now mostly mainstream. The opposite is now a counterculture, including incels, red pill, etc...
Countercultures change and go. Very few countercultures of the past still remain, they either integrate in mainstream culture, or become so niche that they effectively disappear.
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?
"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
arguably, no. counterculture ceases to exist when it becomes dominant culture, but it's not that "it won" - countercultural concepts are either adopted into mainstream culture through a widespread genuine desire for change (no longer countercultural, simply cultural), or they're vapidly recuperated (see chain stores like Hot Topic or Zumiez, if you're in the US) into commodity goods.
It was already a libertarian/neoliberal fantasy - one where everything is corrupt, everyone is competing with everyone else, and the point of the game is to grab as much as you can for yourself while selling your services to the highest bidder.
There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.
Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.
I’m confused. What I read you to be implying is that simply describing current reality is automatically an endorsement of that reality. Am I misreading you somehow?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot.
I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.
Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:
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.
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.
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
> And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL
No, he famously didn't own a computer when he wrote Neuromancer.
“I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, ‘This changes everything!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Automation—it automates the process of writing!’ I’ve never gone back.” [1]
> Cyberspace's mechanics are vague [...] basically computers are magic.
It was already so at the time - anyone working with real computers knew how thin the veil over the magic tech was. Gibson was doing a good Chandler iteration - "When in doubt, have a man come through shining a laser.”
It must be said that SF always had a lot of magic (ahem, "sufficiently advanced technology") going on,
and in the 1980s it translated to shiny zigzagging light paths such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron and implausible "lightsabers"
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.
Okay, I'll bite: what's so "terrifying" about developing a physical theory of consciousness?
I have to admit having similar reactions to other "profound" questions - for example, does free will exist? To that one I say: As long as weather exists, even deterministic intelligences will be as unpredictable as one with free will. A machine with chaotic inputs will itself be sufficiently chaotic.
Regarding consciousness, I think there is a category error born of (understandable) hubris. It is the conceit that you can carve out "consciousness" from the holistic physical phenomena of "humans" or, more generally, "life". It's kind of a package deal. Humans might (and probably will) make concious machines, but it will forever be an unanswerable philosophical question about whether they "really" are, just as it is with other humans. In the end it's best to "zoom out" and consider the subject in the context of the Fermi paradox - will such an invention help or harm humanity? (Does replacement imply harm? If we are replaced by our children, is that harm?)
In any event, it's all above my pay-grade, so to speak. For what it's worth, I tend to think that a) life is common in the universe, b) intelligent life very uncommon, and c) humanity got some really serious help from the cosmos/won a few lotteries. We got a moon the exact same angular size as the sun, allowing us to e.g. verify general relativity with ease. We got an atmosphere that let us see the stars clearly, and still breathe. We got a 3rd gen star and planet with a nice mix of light and heavy elements, and plenty of energy runway in the sun. We got abiogenesis (~common) and eukaryotic cells (~uncommon). We got some timely 99% extinctions (but not 100%) to clear the path for us, and which coincidentally left vast energy resources underground for us to bootstrap out of the middle ages. We got a celestial moat, almost impossible to cross (special relativity speed limits; thermodynamic limits) for all but the most advanced (and therefore presumably wisest) civilizations, keeping us safe from colonization. The latter is a bit of a golden cage, and I consider getting out of that cage the highest civilizational goal possible.
Within this picture, AI can fit in in many places, with positive and negative effects. I have to admit that I do not like the trend I see in humanity to become unmoored from the physical world, to venture out unarmed with critical thinking skills, like lambs to the slaughter in the barbaric free-for-all that is the modern info-sphere, who's ulimtate goals are the same as they ever were: money and power. The chance of a stupid self-own like nuclear war, autonomous AI weapons, bio-warfare, or catastrophic global climate change are still all too likely, and getting more likely as intelligent, balanced minds are selected against. We can't do anything about a caldera explosion or a nearby supernova, or even being stuck in-system while the sun burns out, but we can and should avoid shooting ourselves while playing with daddy's gun.
> 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.
I read it in the 90s and found the opposite experience: it's evocative. It doesn't describe things, instead it gives hints and lets your imagination build its own answers.
Exactly. If anything, Gibson's evocative style reminded me of the Strugatsky brothers; while the story is different, you get this sense of looming despair all through the book.
I struggled with Neuromancer and never finished it (as far as I recall), and I've later discovered I have aphantasia.
I haven't tried reading it again since but I can't help but feel it's related, as I really struggled to get into it, despite reading and enjoying a lot of various sci-fi.
It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.
It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992.
I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.
I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle into the mind and fade out.
(Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)
I recently read A Farewell to Arms, and disagree with you on the Hemingway comparison. Hemingway is perhaps the clearest, easiest to read author among the 'greats' so far for me. I felt his style is pretty much the exact opposite of Gibson's.
I like his books, but I have to read them at least twice to understand what's going on. Sometimes I'll read the plot summary on Wikipedia and realize I missed a lot. I think I've read everything he's written though because I enjoy the prose even when I'm not really following along.
I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...
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.
> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade
This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.
There are worlds of difference between analysing the syntax and semantics of languages in a structured and scientific way, and writing "good" prose (as subjective as that is).
English is not my first language, and Tolkien's prose is one of the easiest English language texts I've ever read. Even the occasional stylizations to old scaldic verse is very easy to comprehend.
Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly, some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists and (mostly) wrote very quickly.
tbh I don't think "researches language structure" has much at all of a correlation with "uses language in a pheasant manner".
it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.
Yeah, my thought reading Neuromancer too. I'm fine with Clockwork-Orange-esque jargon in prose, but even removing that, Gibson's text still didn't flow in a story-telling (conversational?) way for me. It was too stilted or something.
I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.
the exhaustion is the point. Gibson is great because he turned the essence of the genre, media oversaturation, into a prose style. Cyberpunk is all about everything being in your face. Things are flashing by, too fast, too dense, you're disoriented, etc.
You aren't supposed to understand or put every term under a microscope, you should feel as disoriented as the characters. One of the strongest aspects of the book is how successful he is at making you feel as if you're hooked into something running on 120% speed.
Not unlike Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New Sun, where Wolfe recombines words and invents language as the conceit is that the narrator is translating from a future work into contemporary English, having to make use of words that don't yet exist. You're not supposed to grab the dictionary and try to figure out what each term means, you're supposed to take it in as you go on.
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.
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.
“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).
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
(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
"True names and the opening of the cyberspace frontier" is a very nice edition with essays (Tim May's is very good) plus the novella of True Names, worth checking out!
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.
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.
comparing stephenson and gibson is interesting - gibson basically does no story-based exposition in a lot of his work, and stephenson can't help but dig into the nitty gritty details that support the world-building and story development to an almost obnoxious (but informative!) degree.
i used to really enjoy Stephenson (especially having not gone to college- i feel like i was exposed to some interesting ideas through his writing that i might not have otherwise).
now that i'm a bit older, i find him to be kind of a know-it-all blowhard, especially in light of his extremely-lucrative work with what are basically the precursors to the giant horrible corporations he wrote about so disparagingly.
i still enjoy snow crash, and i want to re-read cryptonomicon and anathem, but it's really hard to weigh the message he used to send against his more recent work in meatspace.
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."
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.
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
Ender's Game (1985) has a ton of spot on predictions of the future, if you haven't read that you might enjoy it (and the story and later universe are fascinating as well, with twists and turns, and the "two threads" storylines, where you can read the same events from two different characters in the plurilogies of books)
Some predictions in the first book:
- touch-screens in general and tablets in particular
- use of AI to adapt difficulty levels in games
- use of AI and virtual simulations for military training
- the Internet, and more specifically:
- the wide usage of forums, blogs, etc. (lots of references that kinda seem like social media, with propaganda spread, message control, etc.)
- the usage of sock-puppet accounts to influence elections and general political discourse (and the creation of "influencers" out of ... thin air)
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.
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.
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.
The US government used to consult sci-fi authors, especially when they were writing stories somewhat based on extrapolations of current advancements of technology or science. I'm not sure any of the notes from those meetings are available online, but I'd love to read them and compare.
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?
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.
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)
I was lucky enough to have it as part of my college literature course. I had a choice of Greek classics or SciFi and, though I'm missing a TON of Greek classic context these days I do not regret reading ANY of the scifi books! IMO it's a pity I couldn't take both!
There's a lot of content in the book that reads differently years later. It's extremely easy to criticize outside of the situations present in the book.
Fiction is a good a place to consider alternate worlds, situations outside of the norm, and people with circumstances you'll never (or hope to never) encounter yourself. That makes it a great place to refine morals and reach a deeper understanding of why things might be good or bad.
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.
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".
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.
I think Snow Crash is an interesting book but I can see how people could be turned off by it. It kind of straddles a weird line where parts of it almost read like parody or an attempt to troll the audience but at the same time it explores serious concepts.
It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is a fair analysis, but for me the pleasure of reading Gibson has basically always been the use of language and jargon. Yes, Virtual Light is a stupid caper story but both Chevette and Berry are great characters, hard-luck protagonists trying to make it in a crapsack world. Berry's background is especially deftly told in a few telling vignettes.
That's why the Bigend books are such disappointments to me. Instead of outsiders looking in, or trying to strike it big, we have bougie insiders getting VC money. And Agency is a travesty.
Agreed. I find the books enjoyable because of the language and world-building, and Gibson can write good action set pieces and decently fleshed-out characters.
However, in retrospect, I can't rate most of them very highly because they don't work well as stories. I struggle to remember anything from the Blue Ant books except the mildly irritating forays into location-based art, which seemed dated even then. (Gibson frequently injects art into his books. I think his use of Joseph Cornell boxes in Count Zero was fun, and it serves a real plot point, as the boxes are a trap meant to ensnare a particular art buyer. But the use of objects or people as bait or pawns is a ridiculously overused gimmick in his books, to the point where I wonder if it's lack of creativity or actually something pathological...)
Come to think of it, Gibson's career shares some similarities with that of J. G. Ballard. Started out with sci-fi, amazing prose stylist, gradually moved more mainstream, but struggled to escape a certain plot mold (many variations on the idea of wealthy people seeking outlets for their base instincts). I think that like Gibson, Ballard is always super readable, but his best stuff is his earlier works.
As a creative writer, "plot" and "story" have always eluded me. There's something mechanical—pushing, pulling—I just can't seem to construct, but I know when it's missing in books.
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.
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.....
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.
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.
Recently read and enjoyed Red Team Blues! It was very cool yes, readable and a good yarn too, straddled the line between "making points" and keeping the story going well I thought. Is there any you particularly liked or recommend?
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!
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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).
“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.
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.
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.
This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the language, which he imitated in his works.
Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.
I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.
i’m not a huge long form reader, but neuromancer was quick and terminology reused heavily. you will pick up the slang without too much difficulty. i wouldn’t let the sample paragraph color your view that heavily.
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.
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.
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.
That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.
Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.
Neu-romance-er :)
That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.
I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.
I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.
Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
I am like this with a lot of books. I'll remember a very high level overview ("The Historian is about a modern day hunt for Dracula, and it's really cool, and I liked how the story was told, but I can't remember why or any of what happened."), but can't remember much about plot details.
It makes re-reading things fun, but also is frustrating because I can't explain why something was good, and I also remember just enough that plot twists don't surprise me the second time. It also means that I completely forget about the "bad" parts of the book, or the parts that didn't resonate with me.
:)
>but eventually we divorced 29 years later.
:(
>Still friends.
:)
:(
>handed me Neuromancer
:)
(Kind of curious now ... were the other translated editions in non-English languages as powerful? Do readers of science fiction in other languages seek out works by specific translators or publishers known to have great translations?)
We have two translations of Lord of the Rings (Tolkien fans being one of the more picky bunches of book geeks here, I'll refer to it in depth.) The older one, by Lavnit, is considered more beautiful and poetic and flowing (my nick comes from it though I was never much of a Tolkien geek, just hung out with them - Elves were translated into the Sons of Lillith from Hebrew mythology, and my mother's name is Lillith...). It's also long out of print and goes for (lowish I believe) collector prices. The newer one by Dr Emanuel Lotem is more... I don't know, academic maybe would be the word? Anyway, the Tolkien community hates him so much that he's one of their main memes. He also translated Dragonlance, which I grew up with, so I had no ill will towards him myself, and at some point I realized he's the one who managed to translate the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is... quite a feat. I wouldn't expect it to be translatable. So now I hold a deep appreciation for him.
The local Harry Potter geeks treated the translator as a minor celeb.
Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any other translators that are held in special regard.
Can't say about Shakespeare, there are many translations, and in my eyes all of them lack something that the original has, but Russian translations of such writers as O'Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald and Jack London have some irresistible charm and familiarity that is completely absent in original English texts.
I attribute it to censorship: many talented writers couldn't actually write because of it in soviet times, and to provide for themselves they took jobs as translators.
Shakespeare is perhaps impossible to translate properly to Spanish, just like Don Quijote to English, and yet we keep doing it because even the small glimpse afforded by the translation gives you an idea of the greatness behind it.
Funnily, I’ve always found the Spanish translation of the Lord of the Rings significantly more readable than the original, perhaps because Tolkien went out of his way to write in an old form of English that is a bit too distant for me. Or maybe it is because I read the story in my youth and re-reading it is a way to recapture some of the wonder that I felt then.
One of the challenges with Khamlet is that Klingon originally had no state of being verb - it was part of the word itself rather than a bare "I am {something}". Thus "to be or not to be" was never something that was translatable in the original Klingon language and it had to be updated.
Glancing at Amazon, there appears to be a release of Sunzi's Art of War from 2018.
(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)
(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)
Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".
On the other hans, I find that French translators usually utterly fail to capture the dry kind humor from British authors. From Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, it reads so serious in French translations!!
I think I read the same text in a 1996 reprint some years later, in 1999 - coincidentally also during my last year of highschool with impending doom^Wexams afoot.
Definitely mind-expanding, and helped shape my early cyberpunk tastes, though it didn't get me hitched :)
I do think the translation was excellent, he definitely must have put hard work and passion into it!
"Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek)."
It seems unambiguous to me, they were referring to their own posted comment.
Edited to add: they also confirmed same in this thread.
Did you read the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy too? What do you think of the other books?
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.
It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.
It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.
Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.
Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!
Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.
https://www.gregegan.net/
For example, here's a page on his site explaining a concept in one of his books: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/02/02.html
https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
One of my favorite authors in all honesty.
I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.
One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...
EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.
Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
I love books that attempt to deal with time dilation/travel correctly.
Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.
Only some of the people in the series are space ships.
By a literal definition communism means the collective ownership of the means of production.
In the Culture the means of production own themselves, and they don’t seem to answer to anyone unless it suits them.
Communism is a later stage of such abundance that money, classes and state power become redundant and are abolished.
The Culture is an imagining of the latter, where many means of production become people. They thus become workers that can labour for each other if they collectively decide to.
I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
He has sometimes talked about Blade Runner and worrying when it came out that people would think his stuff was derivative of it (it wasn't), and then said he eventually got to talk with Ridley Scott about it, and it turns out both of them had similar inspirations, namely Metal Hurlant.
I think the article I got his take on Blade Runner from was the Paris Review [1] which is archived here [2]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
[2] https://archive.is/qmwKj
"Tron nostalgia: When I was writing Neuromancer, that was the bleeding-edge digital aesthetic. Those sparse green lines! Pong, meet Case."
Now you are being redundant :D
https://www.gregegan.net/
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ.
I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.
>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.
>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.
His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.
As I recall, his communication satellite depiction included humans living on it full time to keep it running. Also not quite how it turned out.
I have the utmost respect for him, but he was not immune to getting the future wrong like other science fiction authors.
Luckily tech improved a lot, so now many more things are possible for much less capitol.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.
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.
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.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.
I would suggest you think about what you don't know.
Those were made in Britain by British creators.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.
Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations, harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just like it could never be that influential in music.
Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (and some video games) have been influential and are frequently credited for that, but that is about it. Everything else including similar media before and at the same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0]. Just like in music.
Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyberpunk_works
tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in cyberpunk despite having had influence.
i dunno. some of the most influential d-beat/crust bands of all time are from japan (d-clone, disclose, gauze, gallhammer, gism, death side... that's barely scratching the surface of bands that are/were actively countercultural).
it may not always take the same form, but anywhere you find big cities, you'll find some form of countercultural punk movement because the economy is big enough to support people at the fringes (even if you just work as a bartender or whatever).
Or take a look at the opening sequence of Snow Crash, where the deliverator is clearly making fun of ubiquitous cyberpunk tropes. At the time it was considered a tombstone for cyberpunk, rather than some sort of positive signal milestone.
These are only two data points to demonstrate that the “counterculture” era had already expired in the US by the early 90s, as members of that counterculture felt that it had already stopped being counter to any part of American culture.
The claim that there is “not much Japanese counterculture” is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around. The more traditional a society is, the more “counter” any underground culture is —- by definition.
American counterculture hasn’t really properly existed outside of capitalist smother and capture since the early 90s either by the way. Give No Logo a read for more on that.
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
Producing more in quantity, with far biggest allocated budget, and even better quality on everything that can be measured at surface level, all that is no guarantee to reach a work that is deeper in spirit.
Those who don't question what's wrong in themselves due specifically to the culture they were fed with are not on the path to elude its sway.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell
to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly maligned) sequels
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
This was all dropped at some point - the only surviving relic being the name of the character.
Somehow this became "the Matrix is a trans metaphor" to people with poor media literacy skills.
There was also an unfinished plot thread in The Matrix Online that a woman who emerged from a coma at the same time Neo died may or may not be a reincarnated Neo. This story setup was never concluded or followed up on.
"Fans were quick to note that "Sarah Edmontons" is an anagram for "Thomas Anderson," leading many players to believe Neo may have been reborn as Sarah after dying."
https://www.cbr.com/the-matrix-resurrections-online-female-n...
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
GTA "equivalent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)
It's not actually framed as cyberpunk: Shinya Tsukamoto positionned it as "human size kaiju".
On the perception...I think its fans are mostly outside of Japan, and it was basically reversed imported. Tsukamoto sent it to foreign film festivals first, and only brought it to domestic theaters after it won at the Rome festival. Even now in interviews it's only brought back as it's directorial debut, and a stepping stone for getting money for bigger movies.
I have the feeling the whole notion of mixing human and technology just doesn't resonate as much in a country that is way more technology friendly and doesn't see robots as much as a threat than in the west.
PS: the "action hero" genre is basically humans transforming into machines, that speaks to the wide acceptance of the concept.
George Alec Effinger "When Gravity Fails" (1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails
Walter John Williams "Aristoi" (1992) 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_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
Void Star by Zachery Mason is also good.
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.
Be advised it's quite long
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.
I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.
The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.
Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.
My point was more that I think there was more of a feeling of security, in the sense that regular people felt a little more optimistic about the future and their personal finances. People started low on the totem pole but felt confident about moving upwards slowly. That feeling doesn’t really exist anymore.
Perhaps this may have been true for those who didn't have a university degree. Otherwise, this experience doesn't line up with anyone in my family.
(UK here). My first job in 1987 was in computing for an engineering company and my father had exactly zero influence on me getting that job.
I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s.
I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content.
I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of boredom, I don't think I'm an isolated incident.
I meant that boredom I experienced earlier in life was arguably a good thing.
Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.
Hooligan-like countercultures are also excluded as far as "think" or "independently" goes for an obvious reason.
Thus, the only independent thinkers I've encountered are individuals who don't aim to have all the answers, who can accept disagreements, who attempt to know themselves - but those are individuals, not countercultures.
I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.
This is my understanding. Was it really different in the 60s/70s?
Being unique, by definition, means you don’t fit in with a “culture”. There’s something inherent in human nature that causes people to form tribes (and copy others leading to cargo-culting, groupthink etc.); those who are too different to want to join the mainstream group still want to join some other group, they want to be accepted, which means they still have pressure to conform.
The main thing I see today is that most liberal “countercultures” don’t tolerate political differences. But they seem to tolerate other differences (at worst if nobody else has your difference it’ll be ignored which has always been the case), and perhaps 60s/70s counter-culture tolerated political differences more but had some other taboo.
It's absolutely the right thing to do to legitimize "non-hetero-normative" in the same way left-handedness is legitimate but saying any of it is "normal" and declaring anything not involving it as "dated" is absolutely out of touch with reality.
Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.
Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.
Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.
I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any
Cloudpunk is the same thing as the recent Cyberpunk game: fun, but operating on stale tropes and aesthetics that haven’t changed in 40 years. This is a problem that pretty much every piece of cyberpunk media has.
Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…
If you want a counterculture, look the other way. "digital detox", permaculture, degrowth, etc... In the tech world you have the "small web".
"Maker" movements, repair/reuse/recycling, etc... used to be countercultures but they have gone towards mainstream in the last few years (and I think it is a good thing).
Not all countercultures are "good". For instance what we now call "wokism" used to be a counterculture, it is now mostly mainstream. The opposite is now a counterculture, including incels, red pill, etc...
Countercultures change and go. Very few countercultures of the past still remain, they either integrate in mainstream culture, or become so niche that they effectively disappear.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.
Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
[1] They're almost literally Bruce Sterling's corporations-would-turn-Frankenstein's-monster-into-a-product.
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.
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.
>> 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.
I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.
Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades
I don't remember exactly, but I think most of these short stories aren't crime fiction. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" definitely isn't.
Well that’s a new one on me.
https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Suck_Fairy
And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these "curtains for Zoosha" moments:
https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/114819416384262242
https://infosec.exchange/@cjust/114820379745453988
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.
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.
No, he famously didn't own a computer when he wrote Neuromancer.
“I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, ‘This changes everything!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Automation—it automates the process of writing!’ I’ve never gone back.” [1]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
Maybe they're using the Ansible
It was already so at the time - anyone working with real computers knew how thin the veil over the magic tech was. Gibson was doing a good Chandler iteration - "When in doubt, have a man come through shining a laser.”
It must be said that SF always had a lot of magic (ahem, "sufficiently advanced technology") going on, and in the 1980s it translated to shiny zigzagging light paths such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron and implausible "lightsabers"
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
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm
https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15676304
https://github.com/dmf-archive/Tiny-ONN
Let's make sci-fi into reality.
I have to admit having similar reactions to other "profound" questions - for example, does free will exist? To that one I say: As long as weather exists, even deterministic intelligences will be as unpredictable as one with free will. A machine with chaotic inputs will itself be sufficiently chaotic.
Regarding consciousness, I think there is a category error born of (understandable) hubris. It is the conceit that you can carve out "consciousness" from the holistic physical phenomena of "humans" or, more generally, "life". It's kind of a package deal. Humans might (and probably will) make concious machines, but it will forever be an unanswerable philosophical question about whether they "really" are, just as it is with other humans. In the end it's best to "zoom out" and consider the subject in the context of the Fermi paradox - will such an invention help or harm humanity? (Does replacement imply harm? If we are replaced by our children, is that harm?)
In any event, it's all above my pay-grade, so to speak. For what it's worth, I tend to think that a) life is common in the universe, b) intelligent life very uncommon, and c) humanity got some really serious help from the cosmos/won a few lotteries. We got a moon the exact same angular size as the sun, allowing us to e.g. verify general relativity with ease. We got an atmosphere that let us see the stars clearly, and still breathe. We got a 3rd gen star and planet with a nice mix of light and heavy elements, and plenty of energy runway in the sun. We got abiogenesis (~common) and eukaryotic cells (~uncommon). We got some timely 99% extinctions (but not 100%) to clear the path for us, and which coincidentally left vast energy resources underground for us to bootstrap out of the middle ages. We got a celestial moat, almost impossible to cross (special relativity speed limits; thermodynamic limits) for all but the most advanced (and therefore presumably wisest) civilizations, keeping us safe from colonization. The latter is a bit of a golden cage, and I consider getting out of that cage the highest civilizational goal possible.
Within this picture, AI can fit in in many places, with positive and negative effects. I have to admit that I do not like the trend I see in humanity to become unmoored from the physical world, to venture out unarmed with critical thinking skills, like lambs to the slaughter in the barbaric free-for-all that is the modern info-sphere, who's ulimtate goals are the same as they ever were: money and power. The chance of a stupid self-own like nuclear war, autonomous AI weapons, bio-warfare, or catastrophic global climate change are still all too likely, and getting more likely as intelligent, balanced minds are selected against. We can't do anything about a caldera explosion or a nearby supernova, or even being stuck in-system while the sun burns out, but we can and should avoid shooting ourselves while playing with daddy's gun.
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.
I haven't tried reading it again since but I can't help but feel it's related, as I really struggled to get into it, despite reading and enjoying a lot of various sci-fi.
"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."
I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.
I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle into the mind and fade out.
(Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)
I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...
This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.
I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?
In which case, have you read https://archive.is/20241231024916/https://www.newyorker.com/... in which Michael Moorcock calls Tokein's work:
"...a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".
Which I'm not saying should change your opinion on anything, I just find it's always a good exercise to find the juiciest criticism of one's darlings.
it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.
I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.
the exhaustion is the point. Gibson is great because he turned the essence of the genre, media oversaturation, into a prose style. Cyberpunk is all about everything being in your face. Things are flashing by, too fast, too dense, you're disoriented, etc.
You aren't supposed to understand or put every term under a microscope, you should feel as disoriented as the characters. One of the strongest aspects of the book is how successful he is at making you feel as if you're hooked into something running on 120% speed.
Not unlike Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New Sun, where Wolfe recombines words and invents language as the conceit is that the narrator is translating from a future work into contemporary English, having to make use of words that don't yet exist. You're not supposed to grab the dictionary and try to figure out what each term means, you're supposed to take it in as you go on.
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).
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.
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
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.
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
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.
i used to really enjoy Stephenson (especially having not gone to college- i feel like i was exposed to some interesting ideas through his writing that i might not have otherwise).
now that i'm a bit older, i find him to be kind of a know-it-all blowhard, especially in light of his extremely-lucrative work with what are basically the precursors to the giant horrible corporations he wrote about so disparagingly.
i still enjoy snow crash, and i want to re-read cryptonomicon and anathem, but it's really hard to weigh the message he used to send against his more recent work in meatspace.
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."
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.
Some predictions in the first book:
- touch-screens in general and tablets in particular
- use of AI to adapt difficulty levels in games
- use of AI and virtual simulations for military training
- the Internet, and more specifically:
- the wide usage of forums, blogs, etc. (lots of references that kinda seem like social media, with propaganda spread, message control, etc.)
- the usage of sock-puppet accounts to influence elections and general political discourse (and the creation of "influencers" out of ... thin air)
Later in the series we also get:
- Cryptocurrencies
- AIs in control of financial systems
-- Orson Scott Card
There is hard and soft types that muddy the quote, but it largely stands.
For concepts yes:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistalpha.asp
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?
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.
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)
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.
There's a lot of content in the book that reads differently years later. It's extremely easy to criticize outside of the situations present in the book.
Fiction is a good a place to consider alternate worlds, situations outside of the norm, and people with circumstances you'll never (or hope to never) encounter yourself. That makes it a great place to refine morals and reach a deeper understanding of why things might be good or bad.
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.
It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.
Snow Crash would be a hollow joke without Gibson etc.
It is now just a joke with some encyclopedia mixed in.
Terrible ending. As always with the author btw.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
This post gave me more appreciation of Gibson's impact and a boost to pick it up somewhen later in the year.
So Neuromancer felt like it was on a pretty accurate trajectory to me. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
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.
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.
You are so lucky to have read the book for the first time in 2025.
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.
That's why the Bigend books are such disappointments to me. Instead of outsiders looking in, or trying to strike it big, we have bougie insiders getting VC money. And Agency is a travesty.
However, in retrospect, I can't rate most of them very highly because they don't work well as stories. I struggle to remember anything from the Blue Ant books except the mildly irritating forays into location-based art, which seemed dated even then. (Gibson frequently injects art into his books. I think his use of Joseph Cornell boxes in Count Zero was fun, and it serves a real plot point, as the boxes are a trap meant to ensnare a particular art buyer. But the use of objects or people as bait or pawns is a ridiculously overused gimmick in his books, to the point where I wonder if it's lack of creativity or actually something pathological...)
Come to think of it, Gibson's career shares some similarities with that of J. G. Ballard. Started out with sci-fi, amazing prose stylist, gradually moved more mainstream, but struggled to escape a certain plot mold (many variations on the idea of wealthy people seeking outlets for their base instincts). I think that like Gibson, Ballard is always super readable, but his best stuff is his earlier works.
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
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.
Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though - thank you for sharing!
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.
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.
Wonderful writing, I love Neuromancer & Count Zero is superb as well, like many others of his books.
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.
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-ge...
"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."
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.
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.
The latter is still one of my favorite books of all time, though.
Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI, but isn't.
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-arri...
I think those guys are great, my friends are those guys, I'm one of those guys, but nobody thinks they are cool.
> 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
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).
You misunderstood from the first sentence. The rest of your read is similarly flawed if not worse.
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.
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.
I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.
I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over writing style.
In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.