Hacker News Reader

Comment by antoinevg | Hacker News Reader

The world he created was all around you by the time you were born so you probably wouldn't understand.

That is such a great point.

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.

Neuromancer itself was written on a typewriter. That's how different the world was.

Exactly.

"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...

Great point.

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.

>Somewhat related, but I have hard time watching older shows/movies where the plot only works because people do not a have cell phones.

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.

Modern cell phones are a hellish technology for people trying to plot stories. Every single person's carrying a superior version of a 1960s spy's kit, and can magically send anything recorded on it to anyone else in seconds. It takes serious effort to make any event or information plausibly known only to a limited circle, should any of them wish it to be otherwise.

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.

Serial Experiments Lain is another SF work that makes little to no sense today, though the time between its release and obsolescence was much shorter (10 years later it already seemed quaint).

Lain, like Neuromancer, is best viewed in my mind as a sort of dark, surreal fantasy story.

Perhaps similarly to how someone today watching Pulp Fiction for the first time will see something cliched and derivative.

I watched a Peckinpah movie with a youth and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when they went there, but then I realized he was being generationally ironical.

I was born the year he wrote Neuromancer and I had already been familiar with his work before I was 10 (and playing Shadowrun since like '91). It's not an age thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com