There's far better out there and I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.
Which is why The Matrix and its sequels were a huge box-office flop, why the most anticipated game of 2020 isn't cyberpunk (and definitely doesn't have 'cyberpunk' in the title), and why there haven't been half a dozen extremely successful adaptations of (mostly recent) cyberpunk works over the last few years. /sarcasm
Seriously though, cyberpunk never died, it just became the default for most sci-fi works due to the fact that we now live in that world.
Although interestingly, it's much shinier and prettier than we expected. And most of the grimy/slummy parts of the world still seem trapped in the past.
Is it? I'd say that's the view from the nice top floors. And are the "grimy" parts "trapped in the past" or next door to the "future"? I'd say cyberpunk hit the nail in the head:
https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness
https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2f...
https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/homeless-dea...
https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generat...
They don't actually intermingle much with the future as cyberpunk might have made us think though. Usually the nightmare cyberpunk scenario was that you find yourself in debt peonage to some corporate overlord. But that's a dramatic overestimation of our value to corporate overlords.
As a distinct genre, Cyberpunk lived for maybe 8 years. It's influences are huge, but all I'm saying is that his literary contributions are few. Also in that genre, Harlan Ellison probably deserves as much if not more credit.
He gets way too much smoke for not enough fire.
I strongly doubt even 10% of the anticipation about Cyberpunk 2077 is due to the title and subject matter. The creators redefined the first person rpg and then the open world rpg successfully with the fantasy Witcher series and there would be the exact same hype no matter what kind of world their next game would be set in.
As for Gibson’s Neuromancer aesthetic, it’s been strip-mined and recycled so thoroughly that it no longer has the shock of the new.
As a similar example, the bullet-time effects used in the Matrix (which itself owes a huge debt to Gibson) were so different, they went from jaw-dropping to cliche almost immediately through overuse.
Not really. Our AI is speciously intelligent, our computers are woodenly interactive, our governments are unimaginatively democratic, and our corporations are predictably mercantile. There is a general feeling of living in a pre-cyberpunk present but little of that world has materialized and I feel, like notions of a coming atomic age, it will continue to languish unfulfilled until replaced by another fashionable future.
Impact on the genre and on culture in general, however, is an more objective thing, and by that measure, Gibson is a giant.
> I never understood why Gibson has been written about so much when his output is so little.
As a huge science fiction nerd, I get impatient for new mind candy, too. But I far prefer a few stellar novels to a stream of forgettable pap, and by that measure, Gibson also over-performs.
From all other stuff I was reading and watching, I had that idea about a story. Not quite like "The Matrix" but something about people trapped in virtual world. I was also getting myself to finally read William Gibson, this year I got to read "Neuromancer". That was eye opening thing, I had to check twice when that book was released.
"At the time you coined “cyberspace,” you’d supposedly barely spent any time on a computer. That’s hard to believe.
Oh no, I had scarcely seen one. Personal computers were not common objects at all, and I had been writing short fiction on the kind of manual portable that hipsters are starting to pay really good money for now. And then a friend of mine called from Texas and said, “My dad just gave me this machine called an Apple IIc, and, like, it automates the writing of fiction — you’ve gotta get one.” So I went down to a department store, which was the only Apple dealership in town. I bought the IIc and the printer and the bits you needed to make it work and took it all home in a box, and never looked back. It was a godsend for me because I can’t type, and having this endlessly correctable, effortlessly correctable way to write was fantastic."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cyberspace...
Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones. I even grew up before cell phones, but they are such a part of our lives now it is hard to look past when they are missing.
One of the funniest moments in the Buffy spin-off Angel was when the title character was trapped somewhere, and after managing to escape he's asked by his friends why he just didn't use his cellphone to call for help - at which point he's at a genuine loss for words, because he did have one with him at the time.
It's become almost an in-joke how horror movies so often have to find a way to dispose of or disable cell phones early in the plot.
Do we WANT to live in a post government mega corporate future where everyone has mirror shades? The folks who got to thinking about that when Gibson was telling us about that future came up with some great ideas.
Gibson's modern work still feels good to me but it feels more like fiction than science fiction because we've crept into his future.
Now I read it many years after it came out so I suspect a lot of the fawning comes from nostalgia and those who happened to be the right age when it came out to be blown away by his ideas.
There GP had it right though. Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan and a lot less interesting once you realize it was a thinly veiled expression of xenophobia about the Japanese.
Some works are exceptional because their exceptional. Others are viewed as such because they're pioneering and while credit is due for Novell ideas often the only thing holding that up later is nostalgia over what's really a pedestrian work of fiction.
I disagree. Cyberpunk is now one of the principal, default sci-fi tropes.
So much of what you consider "normal tech" today seemed mind-blowing fantasy when predicted. In a world of 16,384-byte 4MHz computers communicating at 110 bits per second, high-res VR via multi-core multi-GHz computers networked at gigabit/s [0] was magic we didn't know how to comprehend. So much linguistic/cognitive representation was lacking that "futuristic" then sounds primitive/confused today. Once you grasp the context it was written it, you may see how insightful & innovative the works were.
[0] ...used to watch cat videos and argue with strangers.
Technologically augmented humans? Nope.
Pervasive VR? Hardly.
Dystopian future? Not realty.
Corporations supplanting governments? That's a stretch.
There was a book from the 1950s or 1960s (the names escapes me) that looe decline in sending bits, the natural conclusion of which was that in the coming decades you would be able to share your experience in real time to anyone else the planet. Off that's not VR I don't know what is.
Gibson may have popularized it in sci-fi (although I'm not entirely convinced of that) but nostalgia really seems to be trying to cast there present in Gibsob's future more than I think is justices.
while that is an unfortunate and awful aspect of one its central aesthetic tenants, i do not think that it is the core.
I also makes the point that it may well have been groundbreaking butt groundbreaking doesn't necessarily mean good fiction.
Interestingly Goodreads had it are 3.9/5 and a quick scan of the 5 star reviews all seem to mention how groundbreaking it was.
I can give credit for that but if you take that offer of the picture you're left with a completely forgettable work of fiction.
As for those who say how her predicted the future... Did he? Did he really? We don't live in a dystopia, VR is a gimmick, corporations haven't replaced governments and enhanced humans are still a fantasy.
As for the cell phone as a portable computer, the Pl prediction for that goes back to at least 1974 with The Mote in God's Eye.
This thread has done nothing but affirm my view that many people get completely enraptured with and are unable to separate themselves from nostalgia.
But the line continues back - William Gibson wrote a new foreword to Tiger, Tiger / The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. And Richard Morgan's series Altered Carbon continue forward in this vein of combining punk/pulp, dystopia and technology.
Personally I grown more and more fond of Gibson's vision of escaped AIs being worshipped as Vodou legbas.
That's a far cry from the output and impact of PKD specifically (favorite author, btw).
Gibson has also said John Brunner was also a big influence, and praised The Sheep Look Up (which is great).
I wonder if Gibson read Alfred Bester, whose The Stars My Destination certainly has something cyberpunk in it. His lesser-known novel The Computer Connection (also known as Extro) is also terrific.
Just because he hasn’t become the overly verbose waster of words that so many others have (ahem...) doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a solid body of work. I count 15 books on my shelf that bear his name. “So little”?
Burning Chrome
Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive
The Difference Engine (w/Bruce Sterling)
Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties
Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History
The Peripheral
That's 12?
Unless you're his publisher, the measure of a good writer is not how many books he's churned out. Look at Donna Tartt; she does one a decade.
He desperately needs an iron-fisted editor in his life. It's a tragedy that he doesn't.
I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.
I find the new books to be about things that are very low stakes, like an ad agency, or rich people from the future messing with people as a hobby. Because of that I'm less engaged.
But even with the low stakes the language is very high minded. I spend a lot of time with the lookup feature, which makes me glad I use an e-reader.