Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades
skmurphy.com
skmurphy.com
It was fascinating to realize just how much of our culture is indebted to Neuromancer. So many games and movies use scenes or characters taken wholesale from the pages.
Now if only somebody would do a TV adaptation of the original!
(As an aside: after finishing the book, I really enjoyed this artist's take on the characters. It was uncannily close to what I was already picturing in my head: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qo4Z8)
If you like this, you may enjoy Jeff Noon.
I sadly don't trust anyone including Gibson to do this in a way that doesn't ruin it for me, unfortunately. So much of it is about interiority. On the other hand it's ideal anime source material, where it could sit happily next to GITS.
The only approaches that might be viable would be to draw heavily on Mr Robot and Sherlock's overlay techniques. Let cyberspace bleed visibly into the real.
(The version I'd make would be the zero-budget BBC version, filmed deliberately on scratchy VHS with badly hand-matted effects, in the corner of a disused post-industrial warehouse with props from a bankrupt Maplins. It would be extremely punk and virtually unwatchable.)
Good, you'll know who to avoid in the future.
>In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would have made it feel rote and computery, whereas this cyberspace felt more like a collective fever dream.
It's because Gibson doesn't come from a technical background (he famously wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and had never even seen a personal computer at the time), but was a hippie deep into the drug subculture of the time.
I think being too into the technical side of things may actually be a hindrance when writing these kinds of books, and that Neuromancer resonated so widely precisely because it wasn't hung up on the details. It didn't need the right descriptions of technology, it needed to evoke the right kind of feeling and look at the right way of interacting with technology.
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
I've never seen a visual depiction in any cyberpunk-inspired that came even close to getting it right. They mostly all seem to want giant structures made out of neon blocks.
Incidentally a lot of cyberpunk feels off in 2018. Nobody seemed to forecast the rise of China.
China features prominently in The Diamond Age as a location, but not as a powerful, cohesive, oppressive, incredibly successful authoritarian government. It's sort of a laughing stock in Snow Crash, and barely present in Neuromancer.
Despite its reputation for being darkly cynical, I think we can look back now and see that cyberpunk as a genre was essentially optimistic about the power of computing technology--optimistic that it would indeed radically change power structures, society, and our relationship with governments.
Instead what we see today is not that different from this time 100 years ago: super rich oligarchs controlling much of the economy, rising racism and bigotry, authoritarians using new technologies to seize power and splinter their opposition.
It also nailed the gig economy.
> "The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate . . ."
> "Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."
> The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.
https://archive.org/stream/NeuromancerWilliamGibson/Neuroman...
And the Dixie Flatline! The idea of a personality captured as a software construct, to get all the little tics that make the personality so good at what they do. "Case. Joeboy. Quick study." You get that sense that this is a machine that sounds like a person, because it was a person. And toward the end, when the Dixie Flatline asks Case to erase him when it's over? Can a machine have existential horror to the point of longing for its own death? Loved that.
And Armitage! Technically, not a machine... just a hollowed-out shell of a man, filled with the sort of temporary personality Wintermute could craft, when Wintermute's ability to comprehend humans was limited, and Corto's madness lay trapped just below the surface, with Wintermute knowing it would crack at the worst possible time. Another truly great science fiction alien.
However after reading another discussion of it recently, things about it are still yet falling into place for me. Not just the viewpoint that cyber meaning "control systems" is also a theme; for each character, there is something or some means by which they are controlled. Retrospectively a lot of this looks like PTSD; Armitage most obviously, but it's a theme of all the characters and the world itself, including the AIs.
Looking too closely at the technology is a mistake. It's all about the mediation of experience and the aesthetic of it, rather than the details.
Is it just me?
For one, the creaky mechanics of the plot were much more transparent to me on re-eading it. The characters rush from location to location to find the next McGuffin, Case mostly being a passive spectator throughout. It feels like there's a checklist of items being ticked off one by one, and Gibson is never able to make it feel like an organic progression of events until near the end, where a very linear easter egg hunt turns into something less predictable. The characterizations are also weak; most of the characters, Case included, are just chess pieces that are shuffled around for the convenience of the plot. Gibson, in all his books, puts a certain cold distance between himself and his characters, and Case is perhaps the most distant of them all.
I suppose Gibson's novels (well, I skipped The Peripheral and never read The Difference Engine) have all disappointed me in some way. They're enjoyable, but I never feel like he's able to land them. I love the prose. I love his ability to conjure a certain kind of dirty, messy future. His action set pieces are often very rewarding and disturbing. Certain elements, like the guy living in the cardboard box in a subway in "All Tomorrow's Parties", I find rather haunting. But he's so often let down by lackluster character development and plotting. Pretty much every single novel follows the same architecture: Fabulously rich, unreliable mystery man of dubious moral integrity (possibly being a front for a near-omniscient A.I.) hires one or more people to find one or more McGuffins; Gibson is really into behind-the-scenes, large-scale manipulation by forces unknown, and it gets a little old. Perhaps it is that Gibson is so good at aesthetics, but not as good at the emotional dimension; I find Neuromancer's ending to be very aesthetically admirable, less so emotionally, because I truly don't care that much about his characters. And this is true about many of his novels. 70% of Count Zero is a masterpiece. It's just that the remaining 30% is an uninspired mess. (If you didn't like Neuromancer, there's a good chance you'd like Count Zero better, though. It's definitely a novel where he got a little more mature about character development and plotting.)
To this day, I find his most successful work to be his early collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", "New Rose Hotel", and "Burning Chrome" itself are all fantastic, in ways that I felt he's rarely been able to replicate in his novels.
Most novels have a plot. But the good ones don't let you in on it. As you say, the characters rush around for MacGuffins, and you characterized it as "creaky"--that's a good word for it. I have not always been the biggest Stephen King fan (as an author; growing up in Maine, I've always been a fan of King-the-person) but On Writing is an excellent book. I don't have my copy right here so I can't quote what he says about plotting (paraphrased: "try not to") but this quote from an interview with Goodreads resonates strongly with me:
"I start a book like Doctor Sleep [his most recent book] knowing just two things: the basic situation and that the story will create its own patterns naturally and organically if I follow it fairly...and by fairly I mean never forcing characters to do things they wouldn't do in real life...For me, the first draft is all about story. I trust that some other part of me—an undermind—will create certain patterns."
So long as your beginnings and ends are only modestly far apart, short stories (and I again agree that Burning Chrome is probably his best work) let you get away with a lot more of this. But novella and novel-length works can't hide the machinery of a plotted-out story as well unless you are inordinately good at it. (And I mean, this is a ding against authors like J.R.R. Tolkien as much as Gibson; it's not like he isn't in good company with this weakness.)
A great plot-driven writer who manages a superb synthesis of both is Iain M. Banks. One of his less well-known books, Feersum Endjinn, is a favourite of mine. Its journey is very linear, but it's a journey, a story that happens to a character. The skeleton of the plot is under a thick skin of emotional resonance. It's a good story.
You could say that Gibson is a writer who is uninterested in plots (to the extent that he's not able to come up with an original one) but who, paradoxically, still manages to write extremely plot-driven books.
Interesting. I've seen him twice at book signings and both times he said that he specifically does not plot beforehand. He starts with characters and "follows" them through the story. He did say he often ends up at a certain in the novel where he has to chart out what's going on so he can finish though. On the other hand, if I remember correctly he's said he's a fan of old-school pulp sci-fi which has a lot of plotting and he's perfectly fine with that even if it offends lit-crit types.
Burning Chrome is excellent, but the emotional weight is all dark.
This interview with Wired https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/ actually made Gibson click as a person for me. Especially some of the odder more obsessive thematic details in the novels.
I strongly agree that his best work was in Burning Chrome. Unfortunately, the only film adaptations of his work we have are two stories from that collection, and they were both awful in different ways. Johnny Mnemonic misses all but the barest outlines of the story - where's Molly? I can't believe they gave up the fight on the "Killing Floor" with Molly vs the vatgrown ninja in favor of blowing up a bridge. Sigh. New Rose Hotel, on the other hand, hewed very close to the original story - which was fine, except the story was only six pages long.
As an aside, I have a band called The Gernsback Continuum, after the short story.
I agree with the thread sentiment that the short stories are better than the novels and novellas, though I enjoyed them when I read them in the 1980's and again, maybe less so, recently. But Gernsback Continuum really resonated with me and I love the idea and metaphor that these zeigeist-driven unrealized futures exist and shimmer at the edge of reality. Visible to the tired, drugged, and crazy it's solidly in the same camp as Burroughs and Dick.
I'm also writing some songs that are actually science fiction short stories, set to music. It's an interesting challenge.
I see this as a nod to old detective pulp novels and film noir which often have these kind of plots: a mysterious backer (sometimes a rich man, sometimes a femme fatale) sends a detective on a mission to find something or someone. Over the course of following the leads, getting in fights, etc. it becomes apparent that the thing in question is either irrelevant to the larger plot that's revealed, or that things aren't what they seem about the mission, or both.
It's actually a surprise when they don't betray you. And if they follow through on the contract, you're only waiting for when they'll have lulled you into complacency and then turn on you.
Just checked the wiki and supposedly there are two other versions out there which I guess I'll have to find now.
Unfortunately, it's only an abridged version. On the positive side, it's a quick listen, and well worth it if you're a fan (or just want to get a taste).
I find it interesting how frequently “just ok” software is picked up and reaches a critical mass just because it is open. There are many good software projects that won’t grow because of licensing because they are more useful with network effects.
I have lots of colleagues who use R for data analysis. It wasn’t that great in the beginning but was widely used because of openness. 5 years ago, SAS and IBM would describe how superior they were, but it kind of missed the point.
For most of my software uses, I just need good enough.
UNIX itself is a great example of this. Look at the graveyard of excellent UNIX flavors that fell by the wayside when free, open Linux came around.
With more open licensing and a different business model, any of them (instead of Linux) might have been the dominant UNIX flavor today.
Assuming that in this alternate timeline, the Apple-NeXT merger still happens, the dominant Unix flavor would likely be macOS. As it is, it's still alive and kicking and enjoying a comfortable number two spot (number one if you're talking desktop installs).
Sun used to dominate there, and they might have continued to do so had they switched to open licensing, made the OS free, and maybe adopted a business model like RedHat's.
> three notes, high and pure. A true name.
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_03_13_archive...
Cyberpunk is a bit misnamed, I think, because as expressed by Gibson and his copycats, it's distinctly hipsterish. There's a fondness for the old, a desire to flash-freeze the zeitgeist (usually of the Beat era) so that it could live, in some sense, forever. In Max Headroom, every time we see a computer it has an old manual typewriter (much like the one Gibson used to write Neuromancer on, because to him computers were and still somewhat are alien invaders) for a keyboard.
Strangely, Johnny Mnemonic goes overboard with the technology in other ways: in 2015, let alone 2025, Johnny could have fenced 320 GiB of data at considerably less personal risk by swallowing a toy balloon with Micro SD cards in it.
For someone like Gibson, that period was their childhood. They can be forgiven for assuming it would continue to rapidly expand. In the early 1980s, we had the space shuttles going up like clockwork and MTV was using film clips of those big moon rockets as part of their station-identification clips. By and large, people still thought of space as present and future tense. People didn't really understand it as a demonstration of massive budget redirection and military-industrial might, and that nothing had really been done to solve the physics and make space travel a consumer possibility with low marginal cost.
To me, Gibson's later works try to correct that mistake. His focus shifts ever more towards the information flows, power brokers, and large-scale consumerism. He turns away from the military and space age set pieces. He treats weapons more as artifacts and surplus of a bygone era, just as this big nation-state technology must have seemed to him relics of his past.
Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer -- Brunner's Shockwave Rider form 1974 comes to mind (and is a pretty interesting and strangely timely read, given that it is almost 50 years old).
Cyberpunk wasn't coined as a term until right around the same time as Neuromancer came out and Neuromancer swept the big sci-fi awards, making it a fair thing to say that it 'helped to establish'.
Still a great read though.
- bookworm/assassin
He also wrote a fantastic, underrated novel that is definitely his most cyberpunk: The Computer Connection (1975), also published as Extro. It's great fun, and at times paints a future even more callous about human life than Gibson ever described (the main character is arguably a serial murderer, even if he has good intentions). The book was poorly reviewed at the time, and I wouldn't mind admitting that it's "flawed", but it's still one of my favourites.
But I haven't been able to find it again. Maybe I imagined it.
I think Shockwave Rider captured the sense of accelerating change and what Toffler called "future shock" (modeled on "culture shock" it's the discomfort from finding yourself embedded in the foreign culture of the future). Vinge anticipated privacy issues (and may other important considerations in his other works like "Rainbows End") and Dick is exploring the nature of what it means to be human.
Gibson's Neuromancer shows a world where extensive body modifications are commonplace, but it does not seem to affect anyone's self-image or concerns about identity. So at some level "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is more philosophically and psychologically profound.
Vernor Vinge, True Names
Thomas P Ryan, The Adolescence of P1
Algis Budrys, Michaelmas
Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One
Obviously, SF involving computers is pretty extensive, and there is a fuzzy line between "cyberpunk" and "this story involves computers at some level." My criteria are: Are computers major characters in the story, and secondarily, are they helping other characters break lots of rules? :-)
No, it doesn't. Proto-cyberpunk ideas existed, certainly (and more than 10 years before Neuromancer; you can trace the roots back to 60s New Wave SF), but the word itself only predates the book by a year. Neuromancer was very much a crystallization of ideas that had been floating around the zeitgeist.
Or 3 years, depending on how you consider it. The word was coined by Bruce Bethke for his short story Cyberpunk, which was written in 1980 but not published until 1983. Gibson began writing Neuromancer in 1981, though it wasn't published until 1984.
Interestingly, the movie Blade Runner hit theaters before William Gibson had finished writing Neuromancer. When he saw the movie, he was afraid people would think that he ripped off the movie's aesthetic. [0,1] Most people would probably assume the movie was influenced by the book, but the movie almost killed the book.
[0]https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-did-william-gibson-really-feel-a...
[1]http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_01_01_archive.as...
Oddly, I get the exact opposite feeling.
> a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use.
Are not computing and communications technologies dominant now? Are not the advances in AI (having recently beaten the GO world champion) and the influence of AI in our society (Cambridge Analytica, Google, ect) becoming more pronounced? Aren't we making staggering advaces in medicine (even if these medical advances can only be afforded by an elite few - another cyberpunk theme) ? Aren't the Chinese in the process of establishing a moon base with several "megacorps" planning the colonization of Mars in the near future? Isn't drug use extremely widespread (both illicit and "legally" prescribed drugs virtually ubiqituous)?
I would suggest that if you look at where society was in 1984, and look where we are today, we are well down the path towards a future that looks similar to Gibson's vision in many ways - we just aren't there yet.
Also he was obviously not really into IT (at least when he wrote the book), which added to the negative perception even more, and left me with very mixed feelings afterwards.
Here is an interview with Gibson where he talks about it: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/
(For the record he talks about it in agreement, he thinks he himself could write a good takedown of the technology).
I suppose a critique of "not sufficiently prescient" is supported by it, but "known at the time of publication that it got the IT wrong", which is what I think the GP was saying, isn't.
Criticizing it for not being "true to IT" was the furthest thing from my mind.
Though I later found out it might not have been quite the first to go there, to me it seemed to herald a paradigm shift in scifi, towards a much grittier, darker future where one could inhabit (or, in a certain sense, commune) with computers. It was kind of like a darker version of Tron, which came out only a couple of years earlier.
Sure, it might not have been like using computers in real life, but it was not pretending to be about the current reality. It was scifi. It was about a possible future.
Horses for courses, and all that.
Frankly, an "accurate" description of tech would almost certainly just badly date it (e.g., "an unbelievable 500MB of RAM!")
I read an interview with Gibson way back in the 80s that was very telling. He had never touched a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. He wrote it on a mechanical typewriter, because word processors weren't even a thing then. With the money he made from the novel, he felt as a science fiction writer, he should own a computer. So he went and bought an Apple II, state of the art at the time. He took it home and turned it on, and it made whirring, grinding noises, which freaked him out. He had no idea computers should be anything but silent! He opened the case and looked at the disc drive... a Victorian clockwork mechanism of gears, belts, levers, and pulleys. That's like the most Gibson thing ever.
Gibson is very self-deprecating throughout. He attributes people’s favorite aspects of the Neuromancer to work-arounds he used to cover his inexperience as an author. Meanwhile, the film interleaves interviews with other sci-fi authors who has early access to the book. They all knew the book was something new and special immediately.
The quality is terrible as I wanted to make them as small as possible....
http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/low/neuromancer/neuro...
A small detail - while it's left ambiguous, FWIW I always thought that was Dixie, not a copy of Case.
That's why Case hears Dixie's laughter at the very end; earlier Dixie disappears and Neuromancer says he got more than his wish; later, Case asks where Dixie is and Wintermute/Neuromancer says its kind of hard to explain.
This makes the ending a little darker.
"Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself."
It's hinted (in the next two books) that the construct merged with the AI and is part of the Loa phenomenon.
Maybe not.
I would basically be okay with somebody doing this again in another 30 years.
The concepts and ideas are as iconoclastic as ever but one needs a keen eye and ideally personal experience in order to fully appreciate them. None of the sprawl trilogy novels are geared towards angry teenagers, they're layered with almost transcendental meaning that works on multiple levels.
An example: The Loa "riding" as the transmigration of traditional mystical experiences (possession/psychosis) into the digital domain. Anyone that's ever crossed the threshold will recognize innumerable similarities in Gibson's descriptions.