"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Writing doesn't get any better than this. From this line onwards I was and always will be a Gibson fan.
His latter works are less impressive though, I think.
Writing doesn't get any better than this. From this line onwards I was and always will be a Gibson fan.
His latter works are less impressive though, I think.
And yet... there's no mistaking the visual evoked by these opening lines. Even if you didn't grow up with over-the-air broadcast TV on a cathode-ray tube, the words "dead channel" are equally of their era and ground the book in its analog-and-early-digital milieu. The real timelessness comes in the juxtaposition of old, malfunctioning electronics and the natural environment: a pitch-perfect image to introduce the world of the Sprawl.
> Gibson imagined an ancient TV ... that grey/green haze as the tube warmed to a channel that was 'active', but sending no programming. A 'dead' channel.
> Most kids in the 90's imagined the static of a TV of THEIR childhood, when not tuned to any channel, just projecting a grey/white static. Gibson has often corrected people that this was NOT the 'Dead Channel' he was referring to.
> Now, of course, a new generation is imagining a sickly bright blue ... probably the last generation to really know what a 'TV' is, when it connected to something called a 'channel'.
http://www.sensesfive.com/wp-content/uploads/tvstatic.jpg
Not that author intentions matter at all.
Looks green like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uz5hS5cJW0&t=49s
"I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful..."
So, not green.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't"
Man, I think it's time for a HHGTTG re-read.
It took me three attempts to make it to the end, because the violence is so... much. But once you manage to ... let's say "transcend" that, it is a very rewarding experience. I absolutely adore how McCarthy manages to evoke such graphic imagery with such sparse prose (both the violent parts and the landscapes), plus the Judge just has got to be the best antagonist in the history of literature.
And the ending has a certain magic I have not found words for. Strangely serene. I suspect there is some symbolism or reference I am missing.
I remember a discussion about that particular line with Gibson, in an interview, but can't find it at the moment.
"It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the 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 reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel”."
[1] https://www.penguin.com/ajax/books/excerpt/9781101146460
> The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an underpass in Trafalgar Square. The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
Neuromancer didn't seem so earth-shattering to me when I read it. Cool but not overly engaging, I guess. I was quite young when I read Neuromancer and I want to read it again though, to see if I can get more out of it.
An homage to this line by Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere...