The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk
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sabukaru.online
“Please, he prayed, now—
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now—
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”
I'd be interested in reading descriptions of cyberspace that are better than Neuromancer's.
So far I haven't found any.
The internet did not become a new reality. Instead, our own reality is melding with the internet through always-on devices and miniaturized sensors and wide wireless networks.
Instead of some kind of digital lovecraftian portals hidden away in parts of realspace that connect to this magical deadly realm, the modern vision of cyperbpunk should probably have included something more like an ethereal plane -- a perfect mirror of the real world that happens to ignore its physical constraints and provide ways to manipulate and bypass the realspace.
The data analyst guy who ends up obsessing over the VR idol and ends up in a cardboard box in the Tokyo subway is super super interesting. Probably my favorite part of the whole trilogy. If I am not mistaken, Gibson actually took a lot of inspiration for that character from his own experiences with photography. The ability to intuitively line up the right F-stop, shutter speed, and film speed with a scene and natural light in a second is the inspiration for the way the analyst intuitively senses 'nodes' in a social network.
And I personally think that it is this notion that led the author to write about causality in the Peripheral-Agency series.
And then the artist says 'the internet is e-ver-ting'.
Chombo says "Somebody told me that cyberspace was 'everting'. That was how she put it." (Spook Country, pp. 64). Feel like the girl he is referring to may be the one I'm thinking of. Must be Pattern Recognition.
Thanks :)
I still love his vision.
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful. “So I was listening to it as an English honours student. I would take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a world from those bricks. Consequently there are other things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson...
His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently metaverse-like:
The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine" – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson...
Neuromancer is not supposed to be a manual on navigating real-life computer networks.
It's science fiction. Readers are expected to suspend disbelief.
Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we still don't have "professional road surfers", but that doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant:
"Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball joint. As the wheel rolls, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it. If you surf over a pothole, the rubber prongs probe its asphalt depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds, smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right - you cannot be a professional road surfer without smartwheels."
I mean, stealing the whole "skitchn" thing and slapping "Smooth move, ex lax" on a car when they try to shake you is just campy.
"Poor impulse control" -- just slapstick comedy at that point.
That's part of the fun in my view, but it's equally fair just not to like it - de gustibus etc. Or maybe it's just a timing thing; I first read it when I was young and it was new, and maybe that has as much to do as anything with why I liked it so well and still regard it fondly.
Fun for five pages, but when that tone keeps going, my brain just ends up feeling burnt out.
Neuromancer on the other hand has aged incredibly well. The ICE tech doesn't make much sense, but the characters feel honest and real, and so many actual contemporary issues (AI ethics, transhumanism, transgender issues, mass surveillance, anonymous coordinated activism, economic oligarchs heading into space, even a tank war in Europe!) resonate throughout the book in ways that don't feel dated.
Ironically although, I had a hard time reading Neuromancer while snow crash was a breezy fun read in high school
PAIGE: This is William Gibson, Harry.
HARRY: Oh, yeah... Neuromancer, right?
PAIGE: He invented the word "cyberspace."
GIBSON: And they'll never let me forget it.
Drugs that make you see Cathedrals, a cult and politics intertwined... and a rhinocerous. LOL.
Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:
For instance, Gibson frequently skips exposition, and he delivers the narrative with a disconnected, stream-of-consciousness feel that is meant to evoke the sense of disconnection when “channel-hopping” or digging through large amounts of information on the internet. Combined with the frenetic pace of the story it can be confusing if the reader isn’t paying close attention. I’ll add that this was also Gibson’s first novel.
Compare to Snow Crash, which has a pulpier writing style (it was original envisioned as a graphic novel) or even The Matrix, which has a tight narrative. Those are more accessible to a mainstream audience.
Edit: formatting
edit: A lot of Gibson's stream of consciousness writing style can be attributed to the effect of beat writers like Burroughs on him. It's unique but it's also an intentional stylistic decision. Not really an attempt to capture the aesthetics of logging into the net. And as you may know, Snow Crash may seem pulpier but Gibson grew up on pulp like Edgar Rice Burroughs and it affected his work a bit.
As an interesting aside, There’s an old Canadian documentary film about Rochdale and the hippie scene in Toronto, shot around 1970, that, by pure chance, features a very young William Gibson well before he had published anything - I stumbled across this by chance in the York University film archives about 30 years ago - no idea if it’s available anywhere online and may no longer exist anymore.
It allows him to disguise a literal plot device, which is a nice twist. But overall I thought it was heavy going compared to the Neuromancer trilogy.
I read Neuromancer originally in 1984 and again a few years ago, and for me it still holds up. It's not the greatest book or anything, and I found Count Zero to be much better, but apart from those two books I've yet to read anything else cyberpunkish that comes even remotely close.
Before someone mentions Greg Egan or Vernor Vinge, as they have elsewhere in the thread, I read a lot by these authors and didn't like them either. Way too dry, boring, and unimaginative for me. I know some people love them, but they're just not for me.
But he wasn't a Texan, so I suppose I see your angle. Interesting bit of flavor.
Snow Crash is built around an airport novel style narrative.
Neuromancer has a far more literary tone, and is trickier to digest.
That's the entire reason Snow Crash is cited. Airport novel readership is far more widespread.
I found Neuromancer and and Count Zero eminently forgettable. I never read Snow Crash, so I can't really speak to it though I've read a half dozen of Neal Stephenson's other novels, all of which I found rich with ideas. While I appreciate the literary style, I honestly can't remember the plot of either Neuromancer or Count Zero.
Yes, I get that the post-singularity world is supposed to unpredictable/unimaginable in principle... but it's the author's job to imagine it anyway, else why am I even bothering to read his books on the singularity? If he doesn't/can't imagine it, I judge it a failure and a disappointment.
I don't remember details about Egan's work, except that nothing in it seemed particularly interesting and nothing wowed me... hence I really can't remember much about it except the premises of some of his novels, like Permutation City.
This is contrary to works by authors like Gibson, Herbert, and Dick, for instance, which I'll never forget. They're just leagues ahead of lesser authors like Vinge and Egan.
The point of introducing the fantasy element of the Zones of Thought was to allow Vinge to write a FTL space opera without having to deal with post-Singularity speculation.
When species transcended, they left the Beyond and went into the Transcend.
“Hack the Gibson!”
Must have been a call-out :)
The Snow Crash metaverse is infinitely more relatable to most people than the Neuromancer one. (And bonus points when it comes to being widespread, the novel is a lower-effort read. Which isn't a comment on quality... the genres are COMPLETELY different so I don't think that's really a reasonable comparison anyway.)
This has some impact on predictive power too. One reason people tried to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that - more or less, you actually could imagine building that. My friend's daughter talks to the AI, and is learning to read stuff on a glowing screen that knows her name. She doesn't have an abusive step-father, and so fortunately her glowing screen won't need to teach her martial arts for people who are smaller and less powerful than their opponent, and about the importance of running away when there's no way to win. And hopefully her mother will remain a loving physical presence in her life. But the general thrust of the idea in the Primer makes sense, even if we aren't close to "really" building the Primer, ideas from Gibson don't make so much sense.
Science Fiction isn't necessarily about "a version of what we have" but it is about the What If? question and fantasy stories don't address that. Unexpected consequences are the story seed in good SF. Asimov in the 1950s notes that a good SF story predicts not the automobile but the traffic jam. That's where I think Stephenson is good and Gibson has nothing to tell me.
Star Wars says Space Wizards fighting laser sword battles may not vanquish Evil and I'm like OK, cool, but so what? Diamond Age (in some sense a sequel to Snow Crash) has a bunch of interesting things to say about society, about what parenthood means, about Cultural Imperialism, and about what we/how we teach children.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/10/23/traffic/
Pohl in the late 1960s acknowledges that he isn't the first to have this idea, but does actually use "traffic jam": “Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam”
I rather like Heinlein who a little earlier (1966) suggests SF would have predicted something more interesting, instead of car -> traffic jam, Heinlein says good SF would have predicted car -> teenage fumblings in borrowed car.
And as to the idea that it became true, well, here in the real world it is Russia that invaded Ukraine and not an invasion by Gazprom or whoever. The sovereign entities are still fundamentally concrete in a way that a corporation is not.
The Fists in Diamond Age may in some sense be tools of the Mandarins, but certainly the Mouse Army don't work for anybody except Princess Nell, their loyalty to her has been blended into all their learning from infancy, almost without anybody consciously intending this (Hackworth is ultimately responsible, but if/why Hackworth chooses Nell rather than his own daughter is unclear, we don't see enough of the other copies of the Primer to discern whether the other two girls could have led the Mouse Army, the novel is about Nell).
Matrix isn't Gibson's term. Doctor Who used the term Matrix back in the 70's referring to a supercomputer simulated reality environment.
Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.
If you don't take it as being serious in any way (other than in its satire of cyberpunk and its lambasting of a corporate-owned American future), I find it quite enjoyable.
But it is a satire. I hope :)
(Market Forces by Richard Morgan is another book I very much enjoyed, which is also very much this way)
Specifically, he dislikes the focus on the aesthetic, neon lights, mirror shades, etc. I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then.
I think he means we need a different kind of critique now, not anchored to neon lights and vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics which look like what the 80s thought the future would be. And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it.
That said, I love that aesthetic myself, and have no problem being stuck in the past. But I see his point.
It's as lazy as it gets, and definitely not punk.
Reading is not very punk, though arguing what punk is is definitely punk.
Having recently been to several punk rock shows (read: damp basement noise fests), I'd say: having a blue collar job, being against "the system", doing copious amounts of cocaine and speed on their time off, and having their entire body blasted with tattoos such as a hand flipping you off, a trash can overflowing with garbage, and many insults. I thought this particular kind of people didn't exist anymore, but no, they're still alive and moshing in the basements of most cities.
He has a point IMHO;
Big fan of Invurt:: groks cyberpunk; made no attempt to copy the aesthetic;
One dimension of Cyberpunk as envisioned by William Gibson genuinely was explicitly aesthetic, in the way in which it was meant to be understood and experienced. So derivatives focusing on that aren't necessarily missing the point.
However, it's still certainly possible to reproduce those aesthetics in bad ways, or to lean on them to the exclusion of any deep message or story of any kind, etc. And it's certainly fair to criticize any given derivative for shallowness of vision. So, as a criticism of Cyberpunk 2077 it's perfectly appropriate, but I don't think execution of aesthetics in and of itself misses the point.
Point of correction: I'm trying to convey what Gibson said. If there's a generalization, it's not mine but his. The guy invented cyberpunk, so I think he has a right to holding very strong opinions about it.
I do tend to agree with Gibson, but I also like the aesthetic and I'm content reading and looking at cyberpunk, as long as it's not too lazy.
I'll look harder later ;)
If you're one of those folks inexplicably bitter about prerelease trailers then maybe I can understand your stance. But dismissing the monumental amount of effort that it has taken to deliver what some of us perceive as one of the highest works of art in the genre, is ridiculous.
I definitely think CDRP had a lot of help world building from the source material (perhaps leaning on it too much) but I'd definitely buy a sequel, maybe not on launch though!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(role-playing_game)
I also loved the game. Really don't understand all the hate it received.
I can't say anything about C2077 because I haven't played it, I can just repeat what Gibson said about it. And he didn't play it either, he was just judging the trailer.
What I can say is to note the three things you mentioned, "transhumanism, sex and corporate power" are also explored in other highly derivative and uninspired works of cyberpunk-influenced fiction, like Altered Carbon. Boy, was I disappointed by that show [1]! It's completely shallow, uninterested in exploring the philosophical ramifications of the technology it introduces, and instead goes for flashy visuals, endless action and explosive gore. I watched season 1 because I wanted to know whodunnit -- it was disappointing -- and season 2 was unbearable.
Whether you agree with me or not that Altered Carbon on Netflix was garbage, at least you must concede using those cyberpunk tropes you mentioned is not enough to determine quality or complexity of the plot and/or message. They are just tools in a toolbox, and can be used to build something interesting or something utterly uninspired, just another "gritty" cyberpunk copycat.
---
[1] and from what my friends tell me, the book series is not fundamentally different. Only the details vary.
Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon books (as well as his Black Man, published as Thirteen in North America) are very angry and bleak in tone, from what I recall. (But they were not angry at technology itself, the way the characters of the Altered Carbon TV series were; in-universe characters weren't trying to eliminate the cortical stack in the books.) They also have some spectacular action sequences, which is probably why they were picked up for TV. They have some horrific tortures (both in VR and out of it), much worse than shown in the TV adaptation, which is why I haven't re-read them like I did Neuromancer.
But as a fan of the genre I think that CP2077 did what it set out to do and then some. And while those points may be somewhat tired cliches -- and admittedly these are my favorite kinds of narratives so I don't really care -- the only pieces of any kind of media that made me truly feel like I was in the driver's seat roleplaying that experience was the original Neuromancer and Cyberpunk 2077. Not Rifts RPG, not Blade Runner, not The Ascent (and holy shit what a suprise blessing that game was), nor anything else.
I’ve always loved the the affordable beauty line:
“In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”
Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore. Now it's just a trope. So I disagree with what some are saying that cyberpunk is currently used to convey a message; it's not, in general. It's used to convey a trope that's lost most of its barb.
All in my opinion, of course. And Gibson's.
I have to express a hard disagree here. I think the message can be made at higher or lower resolutions, in vague or deep ways, and can comment not just on broad vague themes but in deep ways about specific mechanisms.
The merit and pertinence of the message as radical criticism is going to have everything to do with ground level execution of details, depth of world building, clarity of vision, etc., which will turn out different depending on any particular media.
I do think it's fair to say that most things downwind from Neuromancer can be fairly assessed as tropey, but I think that's a sturgeon's law thing rather than something unique about the genre as distinct from other genres.
"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less disney shit for this reason alone.
It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming true goes away.
More books and games about how evil the Nazis were, unless presented in an innovative way, feel derivative and boring to me.
I don't think Gibson would object to a cyberpunk game that went beyond the aesthetics and merely replicating a message that has become a trope.
...or helps a dictator dehumanize the population of a country he wants to conquer for propaganda purposes.
The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.
Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it.
It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, which is an interesting hill to choose to die on.
Hows that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains.
People forgot how popular the Nazis were, both in the US and elsewhere. And no one can really articulate why they're popular now outside of "day racis", which is a thought terminating cliche.
Those tiki torch people arent exactly running the country now are they?
It's enabled people like Valdimir Putin, who managed to invade a country on the grounds that it's full of Nazis.
It seems like you would have to go pretty far back to find a time where that would be a genuinely radical message. The 19th century saw the trusts and rail barons. There was also the East India Trading Company and its affect on India.
I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.
It ebbs and it flows - there are times in history you can fondly remember for their plenty and times you can remember for their scarcity.
The only really new trend, IMO, is that in the modern world (I think for the first time ever) working continuously for the same company is a financial trap. The strangest innovation of the current day is that churn is accepted and retaining skilled employees is de-emphasized compared to... hiring new replacement employees with less skill. This incredibly bonkers habit has gained wide enough acceptance that it's sort of the default business state.
A quote from one of the RPGnet moderators, something to the effect of...
"Transhumanism is about how technology will fundamentally reshape how we live, and how we perceive what it means to be human. Cyberpunk is how it won't."
Yes, well, like punk-punk. See Jello Biaffra and The Melvins, "Those dumb punk kids will buy anything":
Hey, we're back Show us how much you care
The merch booth's right over there
And if our scam works What a bandwagon it will be
https://genius.com/Jello-biafra-those-dumb-punk-kids-will-bu...
And music:
"Capitalism is very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari say, is a 'motley painting of everything that ever was'."
The story is about megacorporations greedily controlling the supply of food via patents on GMO crops in a post-peak-oil society. There's no artificial general intelligence lurking in the electrons to save or doom us, just the consequences of our own choices.
I've no idea if Gibson has read Bacigalupi or what he thinks of his work, but I am definitely a fan!
Most of his stories in "Pump Six and Other Stories" are very good. Depressing, but good.
My friend is Thai and said he (Bagciaglupi) couldn't speak the language to save his life, but otherwise liked the book.
I suppose Gibson is guilty of this as well, only with the Japanese instead of Thai. It doesn't bother me.
Hell, cyberpsychosis, a pretty plot-minor series of encounters, delves into one of the more interesting considerations in the game. That a fair number of people are unable to handle the implant tech at all and lose their ability to function in a balanced way - each encounter has a harrowing series of notes about the person degrading into insanity and each is just sort of... ignored by most of the people around it and accepted as a cost of technological advancement.
I know the devs get a lot of hate, but I think that there is a whole lot of heart and soul poured into that game.
still lotta T-poses though
I've never seen Gibson describing Neuromancer as a critique of Reagonomics or having any particular political agenda. Interested to see it if so! I don't think of Gibson having nearly as much "political" agenda or grounding as some other early "cyberpunk" writer's like Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker.
(I don't think Gibson himself referred to his work "cyberpunk" or "punk" originally)
[1]: https://ew.com/article/1994/08/26/william-gibson-first-man-c...
Slums and the dominance of megacorps and the ultra-rich I understand, but what do cyberspace and AI's (two of Neuromancer's more original and iconic themes) have to do with Reagan? Nothing, from what I can tell.
Gibson had of course famously never used the internet when he wrote Neuromancer (on a typewriter).
See https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1988/demo/p23-15...
I'm reminded of that line in The Matrix when Neo breaks The Oracle's vase, "What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"
First, Blade Runner came BEFORE Neuromancer was released, so it cannot have been a derivative, and there weren't any good representations of the aesthetic on screen either; its visuals broke new ground in many senses. Gibson rightly feared that:
> "BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."
[source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.willia...]
Are there any other visual works of cyberpunk that came after Neuromancer and that Gibson praised? There must have been, but how common were they?
Second, I don't think Gibson's main objection was the aesthetic, but rather, that derivative works didn't do anything with it. They just copied, losing the punk spirit and rebelliousness.
For example here[1] is an interview in which Gibson waxes lyrical about pop culture, imagery, prose style and selective use of detail, and also says he didn't "have the patience" to flesh out details like the backstory of what was supposed to actually have happened to the US because they'd only detract from the reading enjoyment. He's saying that he was influenced by how cheesy Cold War era blockbusters could imply a lot happened with a few well chosen casual words, not claiming to make a case for a different politics or to channel Brave New World
And let's be brutally honest, the politics of Neuromancer isn't really more sophisticated than "counterculture is cool" and a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF. The writing is fantastic, but it's all about imagery and ideas. Even his polemical writing on Singapore and the Golden Age seem more concerned that paternalistic ideas of ideal societies are dull than anything else.
Even the most cynically commercial use of cyberpunk cliches embraces the idea that counterculture - or at least 1980s cyberpunk idea of counterculture - is cool
> "[...] a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF"
That was no small feat. It seems pretty major to me. It took me some work to mature from my young SF fan self to notice the rightwing undertones in much of it. Call it naivete, if you want.
What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye-popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to deviate so much as an inch from them.
> What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye-popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to deviate so much as an inch from them.
But eye-popping style was all it ever was. Neuromancer didn't fight against John Campbell's opinions on slavery, or capitalism, or Cold War politics, it just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias.
> "[Gibson] just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias."
You are not wrong, but I'd argue that it had a meaningful message beyond plain aesthetics when placed in the right context, i.e. when Neuromancer and cyberpunk were born. Now it's just the aesthetic, and the "message" of hi-tech lowlives and evil megacorporations is a lazy one, just rehashing mindlessly what was before. I'm not saying nothing interesting and new can be said about this, but that it has become a codified trope you can write on autopilot.
It's easy to say it was always like this, but it's false. Yes, Gibson drew from pop culture, and he used it to create something new, for whatever reasons. Now it's just rehashing for the sake of rehashing, and some of the tropes are hilariously outdated but still copied by the faithful.
Or in his own words: https://twitter.com/greatdismal/status/1164240403270270976?l...
(and the Matrix was both an iconic film and something which borrowed more directly, liberally and naively from Neuromancer than most of the low effort stuff)
I agree cyberpunk now is anachronistic, which has its own appeal. I did say I liked its aesthetics! It's a world that could have been, but never really was. Sort of like Stranger Things is anachronistic and I like it for it (well, the first season, anyway).
But that's the thing, isn't it? Some other commenter in this thread mentioned that cyberpunk originally was about rebellion and now it's about nostalgia. I am of course more cynical, I think many authors (of videogames, anime, etc) simply copy the looks because that's the easy part.
The nostalgia is doubly puzzling because the world described by cyberpunk is not nice, it's hopeless. It's almost like feeling nostalgia for the world described in Orwell's 1984. Not exactly though, because there's adventure and a rich cast of rogues and lowlives in cyberpunk, whereas in 1984 everything is hopeless, gray and doomed, but still... it's weird to long for any dystopia.
The Matrix: you definitely have a point. The Matrix, style-wise, was impressive when it opened! But I feel the same irritation towards the abuse of effects and tropes it brought into the cinematic world.
I'd argue that another game released in 2020 understood the "punk" part of cyberpunk much better than CP2077 -- Umurangi Generation. Instead of giving you a gun, the game gives you a camera, and tells you to go out and document how everyday people are reacting to the end of the world. The game was primarily inspired by the early 2020 brushfires in Australia, while its add-on DLC pack Macro was heavily influenced by the protests following the death of George Floyd, and both heavily criticize how the state misleads, reassures, and generally fails to respond to dire situations.
Errant Signal did an excellent deep-dive (and spoiler-filled) video essay on the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctkeq8IpdQA
Charles Stross's early works came in at tail end of cyberpunk, lets call it the silver age, and to me they read like they're trying to find a way forward for the genre, and he ultimately decided that wasn't the way to go. So he branched out from there, including to near-future sci-fi. This was ultimately a dead end because he kept finding that, no matter how strange the plot, by the time a manuscript was really starting to take its final form he was already proven right by current events. And publishing schedules being what they are, his book wouldn't hit shelves until a year or more later at which point they'd read like derivative commentary on year++ old events. Essentially, his predictions were pretty good, but his expected timeline was far too generous: the future was coming too fast. All of his work is worth reading though, and I think his Laundry Files & Merchant series would appeal to different, somewhat overlapping sets of HN readers. For one of the most interesting mind fck time travel stories, check out his short work Palimpsest.
... I swear that I used the word "trump" above unintentionally, but my example for this is Trump rallies using music from bands like Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young and R.E.M. The music contains messages that explicitly speak against the type of political power being wielded, and! the artists themselves speak up about how much they despise the people using their music. The fact that the message is being misused couldn't be clearer. But the people using it are there for the aesthetic: the general sound and feeling of being rebels, ahead of the curve, etc.
And honestly I think that's a good thing. Creative reuse results in good and bad; jazz and Christian rock. Creators can't control their art once it's in the public, and the world would be a smaller place if they could.
Sorry I didn't reply to the part about Charles Stross, it looks like an interesting commentary but I'm not familiar enough with Stross in particular.
> Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world's first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk curled up and died).
More about that close future scifi dead end :
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-craz...
Including a... pandemic novel !
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/reality...
The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner loves who they are and not what they look like).
And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a hot commodity.
The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, plastic and superficial culture.
CDPR is about as authentic as you'll find in high-budget video game development; and as I enjoy high-fidelity entertainment, as well as Pondsmith's take on Cyberpunk, I quite enjoyed CP2077.
The alleged egregious overtime was acknowledged as a voluntary undertaking by several team members, and it seems as though the journalists didn't bother to investigate into the allegations they received from a couple of complainers and opted to report them at face value. The subsequent response from the company affirmed my understanding, where they publicly apologized for bugs, reported to shareholders about their efforts to correct internal development processes, and so forth.
As though working an extra 8h a week during the final months before a hard deadline is either unheard of or intolerable. There was no exodus of talent from CDPR.
and indeed many original punk bands found commercial success
does that somehow invalidate punks? at best it shows that - like all (?) things before it - punk was also consumed by consumerism.
Yes. When a movement whose entire thesis is "fuck the establishment" gets co-opted by the establishment, it becomes invalid as a movement, a hollow and pathetic shell of itself. Punk is anti-society, anti-religion, anti-government, anti-authority, anti-conformity, anti everything, even anti-music to a degree. Its relevance died as soon as the last punk lived past 30 and it became old people music. Just another style to buy at Hot Topic.
You, by living in society, are not punk. The novels you label as punk are not punk because they are made for profit, advertised to appease and sedate a sense of counterculture, and bought with money made from corporate work.
Chan manifestos are the only thing that might qualify.
Plenty of other punk types. Train hopping crusty punk types come to mind. Moxie Marlinspike has a few great stories about hanging with that crowd.
I will whole hardily agree that corporations manage to water down a lot of interesting things to drive mass market appeal but building something interesting within a corporation doesn't negate its message. We live in a world where 90%[1] of genuine political discussion happens hosted by either Google, Facebook or Reddit - those are our forums for discussion in the modern world.
I'd also just briefly disagree with litmus testing and gatekeeping as generally useful concepts - in almost all the cases they're applied they're used to try and reduce a complex spectrum discussion into a binary choice (aka capital punishment, weed legalization, abortion legality) and they add nothing of value - merely providing an easier tool to help clump a wide discussion into the theming of Us vs. Them.
1. I have no facts for this but I think it's a reasonable ballpark.
The problem with playing the capitalist game is that it demands all of you, and never guarantees anything back.
I suspect you could combine the "vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics" with a more modern political critique. To some extent, I feel like the original Deus Ex game is still relevant as it tangles with the corruption of power and how technology enables that process, which is more relevant than ever.
In Pattern Recognition, the character Cayce is “allergic” to Tommy Hilfiger clothing because the style is so completely generic. Your comment makes me wonder if that was a commentary on the works derived from his initial vision in the Sprawl trilogy.
But beyond mil spec, the whole Blue Ant series is just a beautiful tableau of different fashions and designed objects. Made me really want a Curta.
I remember this a bit differently? I thought she wore nondescript de-branded clothing specifically because she had a behavioral/neurological/information processing/sensory overload condition that caused her to have tics and flip out in the presence of excessive visual input. I remember her intentionally choosing this clothing, as it jumped out at me. And I thought she wore Levi’s, not that it matters, though they do have minimal brand motifs compared to some brands.
I didn’t finish the book, and it has been a while, so I could well be mistaken or outright wrong. I don’t remember TH being mentioned specifically.
This is about an unexpected encounter with these clothes (not wearing them), and it doesn’t sound good to me.
Tommy Hilfiger clothing was considered kinda prep style, but got appropriated by street style and a lot of rappers would wear it in the 90s up til Tommy outed himself as a racist, by publicly saying that he didn’t want black people wearing his clothes, as he thought it brought down the value of the brand, or some such racist drivel.
That is to say, I am curious what style or aesthetic she’s recoiling against. To me, it seems like she’s vaguely working class attired, and recoils against professional costumes.
He specifically said this about the game: "The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future, but hey, that's just me."
In the former, I remember concepts being so much bigger and more concrete. E.g. the "War on Drugs" or "Reaganomics". These were things that existed because powerful people said they did. And there was debating, but ideas were still clearly defined.
So even though CP authors were imagining our future, it was a pretty fundamental shift to go from books-at-libraries to everything-anywhere-all-of-the-time.
Now, every concept seems to have much fuzzier conceptual edges. Because there are a million opinions about it circulating publicly and loudly.
There's just as much scarcity of valuable information today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of garbage which is more accessible than ever before.
Yeah there's a lot of meme-viruses, num shrubs, other ways to go wrong or really wrong. Radicalization happens. Before we didnt used to be connected enough to see this shit, and the asymetric nature of the loud & shitty versus the peaceful/coherent/quiet/skeptical mainstream means the delusional & extremists have outsized visibility.
The disbelief keeps growing. We dont need Adbusters as much because the thin transparency of the world, of being sold garbage mounds of low-grade content is well known, we understand how shallow things are. And disbelief keeps rising.
In contrast to the higher trust, respected mainstream media, the limited availability of information which came before. Which gel'ed the world into place, which created shared beliefs & allowed agendas to be driven. Where-as now the all-defector anti-agenda is the default mode for many.
I.e. That info memes have some inherent max to their virality, which has stayed constant throughout time.
But the cost of transporting information from one person to another has plummeted (measured by time, money, and pretty much every conceivable metric).
Consequently, things that would not have spread virally in previous eras are now easily able to do so, and do.
It's really the ease of transport that's enabled this, not any fundamental shift in the info memes themselves.
But I'm sure the same thought occurred to everyone when newspapers and radio were popularized as well.
The (now-)standard Cyberpunk settings strikes me as, in part, asking "what would it really look like if David Friedman's ridiculous capitalism fan-fic happened?"
His The Machinery of Freedom was published in '73, and was a big part of the Reagan/80s zeitgeist.
Similarly now have the modern Korean alphabet bleed into the neon signs of Cyberpunky streets of more recent movie productions where in the past you had Japanese or Chinese writing systems. The shifting representation of Asia in Western exoticism/escapism content is fascinating to observe.
Edit: Photo of the cover: https://eikehein.com/stuff/neuromancer_seoul.jpg
- Export of majorly successful pop music (e.g. BTS, Blackpink - those hits are often penned by Western composers however, so a bit murky on what product is flowing there)
- Ditto TV (e.g. Squid Game setting TV records with a lot rooted in Korean schoolyard games)
- Ditto cinema (Parasite, a story about social mobility woes in Korean society, winning all the Oscars)
- Ditto gaming (PUBG, other MMOs)
- Ditto literature (bestellers including "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982", again on social issues in the country)
- Ditto cosmetics exports, beauty trends ("Korean Week" in malls, say), etc.
- Even some Western productions focussing specifically on Korean diaspora/ethnicity (e.g. most recently the expensive "Pachinko" on Apple TV+ (and the novel it's based on), or stuff like Kim's Convenience)
I think you can definitely make a case that Korea is the Asian-country-du-jour among the Western audience (and that's before you get into, say, Latin America, which is far deeper into Korean TV content, also bleeding over into Latin minorities in the USA).
Also, the trends of Korea seem to very much run in parallel with the trends of Japan - overworked business people tired of working all the time with a lack of meaning.
Pretty informative post, thank you.
I lived and worked in Korea for a German tech company for a few years (since returned to Berlin), working on-site with customers, and since about 2018/19 there's a very significant uptick in other people showing an interest and asking me questions about the experience. This often takes the form of "my teenage daughter is a BTS fan and learning Korean" and things like that.
Korea and Japan have a lot of shared history and have deeply affected one another, and in particular the business culture and the economic structure of Korea are heavily informed by Japanese influence, yes.
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On a completely separate note, re interesting depictions of fantasy-Asia in a Western popculture/punk context: The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok. I've never been to Thailand and can't comment on how ham-fisted or not this may be, but it was also an interesting step away from the Japanese culture-dominated vibes of speculative fiction pre-2000.
Bacigalupi falls for japanophilia with the Japanese fetishization of geisha (the windup-girl of the title). His emphasis on mechanical power (i.e. springs and animal labor) was interesting though.
The setting, the Thais, the Contraction, the genetically engineered foodstuffs and plagues, and the story arc of Hock Seng, the Chinese aid of the AgriGen exec, are all more interesting.
I agree the Japanese windup girl is heavily fetishized though. But the Japanese themselves are unimportant in the novel. AgriGen is an American company.
Besides Squid Game and Parasite, I've not heard of most of them and in the case of PUBG, I wasn't aware it was from SK or in any way special in this seemingly endless pool of "the same game with another skin"-genre.
As for gaming, I think another good example is the celebrity of various Korean e-sports athletes. I assure you there's plenty of young kids who can name them.
In the end, my assertion is this: Right now, in terms of attention/popularity in Western pop culture (since we're relating to Neuromancer and fiction here), there's only one Asian country that is gaining at such a rate and is the most comparable to the attention Japan enjoyed in the time Neuromancer was written.
I would also readily say that the Korean Wave isn't nearly at the same levels als Japanmania was in the 80s, though. Actually, not sure - I think it both isn't and is also dwarving it at the same time, due to changes in how media is consumed directly vs. impressions by proxy. Depends on the metric.
Obviously there's also a lot of attention on China, but that's more related to economics and politics - although Liu Cixin's works as a scifi author would be a great and very topical example to the contrary! (There's other interesting comparisons to China to make, e.g. both had successful stretches in arthouse cinema with Wong Kar-Wai for example, but so far it's not really converted over to the mainstream for Chinese film.)
And because a few K-Pop bands are now a bit more famous I wouldn't call this a hype cycle. Then again it's hard to tell, I've not been to a department store for 2 years, but I've not heard of any flash mob thingy in literal years. Maybe you're projecting Berlin's weirdness to the rest of us and it's just not there ;)
But it also raises the question of whether Japanmania was as big in Germany in the 80s as in the US to begin with (the pop song "Big in Japan" notwithstanding!), or if this was a BBS/Usenet discussion 30 years ago and I had written the same post about Japan instead, a hypothetical 80s you would have felt similarly.
I'm surprised you've never heard of the kpop groups BTS or Blackpink in Germany.
Try flying through Minnesota, Wisconsin, the automaker capital states. Airports full of now-yellowed directions in Japanese for the consideration of what was frequent visitations by their competitors.
It was a no-brainer to bet on Japanese tech in next generation...even Gibson's dated "5MB of hot hitachi RAM" was far-sighted when he wrote it...just not far enough.
Blade Runner was based on a Philip K Dick book from 1968. Neuromancer is pretty obviously influenced by these.
Oldboy, which was made in 2003, was a pretty popular South Korean film... though nowhere near as popular as Parasite.
Tangentially, I find the generational aspect of that line fun. Depending on how old the person you're talking to is, this will mean (as originally meant) a gray/staticy color, or a searingly vivid blue, (or, I guess, something else like a graphical "no signal found" screen in the most modern interpretations).
As with much sci-fi, it's a story of "the future" that's thoroughly grounded in the present day it was written in.
It was an experience indeed. At many points, very high concept (which of course has been copied to death). At other points, naive. Surprisingly few things felt old fashioned.
The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character.
EDIT: To clarify, I liked the book very much.
We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that many drugs with reputations of illegitimate/illegal use are readily provided to patients (including children) in a pharmaceutical context, most notably amphetamines and opiates.
Hence "speed with a PG rating".
I don't think being unkind to molecules is something to worry about, they can't be offended.
While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel manuscript into production back then: very often, it still does.)
ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a while. But the publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence? That was all in his imagination.
Those three come quickly to mind that were certainly trying very hard to be the " publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence" you are speaking of.
While the others did, Gibson seemed not to have been aware of them, and he didn't even own a computer at the time.
You can tell his vision of cyberspace came entirely from his imagination because it doesn't even remotely resemble any actual computer systems of the day.
And it bears remembering that Gibson was 34 when he wrote Neuromancer.
You can see a shift in his characterization by the time he gets to Mona Lisa Overdrive (a book and 4 years later). And certainly with the subsequent Bridge trilogy. IMHO, the Sprawl trilogy that starts with Neuromancer gets better with each book, even though the first is the most famous.
Also, plug for Void Star, which I recently finished after a recommendation here. It sits somewhere in Bridge-era Gibson tone, but with the quintessential "What the hell is going on?" Cyberpunk mystery that a lot of retro-CP authors drop. https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250...
Don't remember Mona Lisa Overdrive very well but the whole A plot with the girl being protected because she has a modem in her head was a bit hard to follow. Though once again great world building. The B plot with an older Molly Millions delivering The Count's cybersarcophagus in the desert was cool af though.
edit: that's not to say they're not fine books
Writing is like any pursuit, you just need to do it to develop and become better at it. Just like coding.
I feel it's like this for two reasons:
1) Gibson himself says that he hasn't been a very good writer making Neuromancer, and that this is one of his weaker works,
2) but then again, we see the world from the POV of the protagonist and his brain filter. Case is not a very complicated man and this is how he sees the world. He chooses to focus on these things, and he treats people around him like NPCs. (Giving a convincing perspective of a character is what good writers do, so I think Gibson wasn't a shitty writer after all.)
> “So it’s entirely fair to say, and I’ve said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel “looks” was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in ‘Heavy Metal’. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’”, and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed ‘cyberpunk’. Those French guys, they got their end in early.”
In particular, "The Long Tomorrow" by Moebius/Dan O'Bannon published in 1977 on Heavy Metal magazine was very influential to Gibson.
As a 16 year old kid back in 1990, this message meant everything to me. It inspired me and gave me hope. His new stuff has less neon but is just a great to read and feels the same to me today.
I like really well made books, so the edition I have is the Easton Press https://www.eastonpress.com/signed-editions/william-gibson-n..., from Ebay although mine is unsigned.
There is an a Suntup Editions version that is to drool over https://suntup.press/neuromancer, especially the Numbered Editions. Completely impossible to get except for thousands of dollars on Ebay. I have a Suntup Edition 451 Fahrenheit and it's amazing, so I can only imagine what this one looks like. And the circuit design has an Easter Egg, although I don't know what it is.
High quality rare books can be an expensive hobby...
Gibson latched onto that cultural wave and took it into a possible future, and it was exciting to me. Today it's interesting to see that technofuture both commoditized and idolized.
Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live.
I'm just a little younger than you then, but I remember the 80's pretty much the same way. Japanese manufacturers (especially of cars and consumer electronics) were sort of "eating the world" and computers and high-tech were still seen as very mysterious and mesmerizing and had a real mystique about them.
Interestingly, for me, the mystique and mystery of high-tech largely persisted up until about 2010 or so. Maybe a little later, maybe 2015 even. It's only been in the last few years that it seems to be wearing off. Not sure if that's just a reflection of my becoming older and more cynical and harder to impress, or if its down to changes in society/culture at large, or what. But my recent re-reading of the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies was, in part, I think an attempt to recapture some of that. Not sure if it worked or not, but it was fun reading all that stuff.
Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live.
There are aspects of the "cyberpunk future" that still seem appealing in some regards, but it doesn't necessarily feel like the exact world I'd want to live in, that's for sure.
It was a very interesting time in Japan's history, which I personally think has a lot of parallels to the current west-coast tech bubble.
Check out:
Fantasy - Meiko Nakahara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kt8HP1VEPU
真夜中のドア/Stay With Me - Miki Matsubara
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEe_yIbW64w
I Can't Stop The Loneliness - ANRI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bALJxjL8jw
4:00 A.M. - Taeko Onuki
I just picked up a copy of Stand on Zanzibar, looking forward to getting into that soon.
When Musk launched a Tesla into space, there was a lot of speculation that he was inspired by the opening scene in the Heavy Metal film [0] [1].
This film was Ivan Reitman before he did Ghostbusters and same year he did Stripes, and became really famous. A film like this could never be made today; there are way too many unpolitically correct scenes. Just don't bother with "Heavy Metal 2000", the 2nd film that came out 20 years later -- it was not good at all and had no involvement from the original creators as I understand.
[0] https://www.scalemodelnews.com/2018/02/did-heavy-metal-inspi...
[1] https://bleedingcool.com/movies/spacex-elon-musk-use-falcon-...
More great art from Josan Gonzalez: https://www.heavymetal.com/tag/josan-gonzalez/
Some samples of Darrow's work: [3] - [8]
Gonzalez also seems to have a bit of a Moebius vibe.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geof_Darrow
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Boiled_(comics)
[3] - https://i.redd.it/wfb1561hqbe01.jpg
[4] - https://i.pinimg.com/736x/75/71/f7/7571f7929dfd8f3cef2e32af2...
[5] - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/68/3e/15/683e154af1fb4fbc267c...
[6] - https://d2lzb5v10mb0lj.cloudfront.net/common/salestools/prev...
[7] - https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/48/de/d948de58e6cd3ccc01cc...
[8] - https://i.pinimg.com/474x/2a/08/11/2a081125fc927a628f1dfb2b1...
I love science fiction. One thing you have to realize about science ficiton is that it is a product of the time it was written. It may share many of the aesthetics, themes, philosophies and politics of that time. Like it's hard not to look at the original Star Wars and not see the impact of 70s aesthetics.
Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. There was a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were "taking over". The depiction of a dystopian future dominated by megacorps mirrors fears of Japanese culture and influence.
40 years later this dystopian future still hasn't eventuated.
From a SF aficionado point of view, Neuromancer world has:
-An economy that rely on ubiquitous computer networks.
-Colonization of low orbit.
-An AI rebelling and doing its own thing.
-Digital downloads of personalities.
In 1984.. I mean, OK, the concepts already existed, but it really break with most of the SF that was being done until then.
It's the beginning of a really dark SF, that I suppose was the point: "If we follow the current path, the future will look like corporate feudalism".
By the way, from a political point of view, the fear of the Japanese taking over is now the fear of the Chinese taking over. I will let the "dystopian future dominated by megacorps" comment as an exercise for the reader.
I won't speculate on why this is the case, but some people claim its because the innovations are copied so quickly the original becomes just another copy of itself.
It's about a leper from the modern day who finds himself in a fantasy world he doesn't believe in, and rejects the power he has. That's pretty original.
(My son has evolved somewhat in his view of Star Wars films. I'm just glad his older brother didn't regard The Barney Movie t00 highly.)
These days so much other media has been influenced by it that it doesn't look nearly as original.
But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies about:
- cyberspace inhabited by AIs
- neural interfaces
- corporate armies
- insanely rich people living in Earth orbit
- genetically engineered assassins with body augmentations
- slum-dwelling hackers who break in to corporate data stores
Neuromancer brought all this and more in to popular consciousness in a blinding flash.
After Neuromancer, Gibson came out with Count Zero (which I liked even more than Neuromancer itself) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which wasn't nearly as good as either of the books that preceded it). I stopped reading Gibson after that.
I found "The Peripheral" to be refreshingly good. I would recommend giving it a read.
I’ve really enjoyed his last two.
Neuromancer still sounds ground-breaking and I hope to read it one day.
As an aside - something interesting I just found was Gibson's thoughts on Blade Runner. He had seen the first 20 minutes of it and thought his book would be seen as a copy of the film. [1]
Edit: I uh finally read the article after spending ages in the comments and see that they mention this exact incident in there. Whoops.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.willia...
Neuromancer was influenced by both Blade Runner and DADoES, but it's not like it was a ripoff of either, neither in themes, nor characters, nor dialogue, nor plot. It was mostly influenced by these in style.
A book written 125 years ago.
* Cyberpunk is a very humanist point of view. So often the tragedy in cyberpunk is that humanity is oppressed by a bureaucratic or technical system.
* All art is a product of its time.
I was a sci-fi fan growing up, and Neuromancer wasn't the first cyberpunk novel along these lines (I would definitely recommend The Shockwave Rider for that) but it was one of the most striking spec-fi books I read that presented a realistic future that could be traced to our own world and critically: that wasn't better than it.
Ironically, reading Neuromancer in my older age, the main observation I have is how optimistic it is. The seas aren't rising and the climate seems to be doing just fine.
I don't get it. What does being Pakistani have to do with anything?
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/21/the-spiralling...
Gibson has gone on record multiple times in saying that he doesn't write about the future nor does he try to predict the future, but sees himself as always writing about the present.
Much of the rest of it, though, isn't about Japanese culture, corporate or otherwise, but seems to me like taking AnCaps like Friedman seriously. Many elements are straight out of that kind of, ah, thought.
There is a point that in the 80s much electronic tech came from Japan and that both Ono-Sendai and Hosaka are named as top of the line cyberdeck manufacturerers, but that is pretty much it, they have no relevant part in the story. I think people are trying to forcefully over-fit that 80s japan craze they read about in an attempt to seem like sophisticated literary critics. Maybe i can't see it because i am not american and my national pride isn't being triggered by jokes like "Mitsubishi Bank of America" and by the idea that globalism may not mean hegemony of the USA. Major roles in Neuromancer are given to companies like Sense/Net, Maas Biolabs, Tessier-Ashpool and the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, yet people cling to side notes about hardware brands because they are offended with the first chapter playing a Chiba City Blues instead of some New York City Jazz.
Same. No doubt it was an influential book. But I didn't find it well written or that interesting to be honest. I've read neuromancer once. I've read Dune maybe a dozen times. Also, other two books in the trilogy were even worse.
Maybe the hype was so great that nothing could live up to such expectations. I remember being so excited to finally read neuromancer only to be let down.
I've heard young people argue that the Beatles weren't all that great, and then go on to name modern artists who would have never existed without them.
I'm late Gen-X and my wife is late millennial. We watched Pulp Fiction together and she didn't get it. I realized then how much of it was groundbreaking because of the time of its release. Someone watching it now just won't be blown away like I was when I first saw it. I imagine if we went back and watched Blade Runner it would be another forgettable movie to her and not the groundbreaking masterpiece it was when I saw it for the first dozen times.
Reminds me of the Steely Dan song 'Hey Nineteen'...
I strongly disagree. The core elements are transhumanism, post-liberal capitalism, high tech and low lives with a lot of pulp and noir: sex, drugs and violence at the street level. There are no heroes, no epics, just deeply broken people getting into a mess of intrigues as everyone just tries to fill their own egoistic needs, deal with their personal demons, or gets dragged along a path of least resistance. Claiming this is fear of xenos taking over is to close ones eyes for the very problems of our culture in favor of blaming someone else. The dystopian future has been there all along, you are just to sheltered in your uptown community to know about the perils of addicts and the girls that grew up in the house of blue lights.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/01/sciencefiction...
Why does mega-corporation mean Xenophobia against the Japanese? Bladerunner, which came out around the same time, has mega-corporations which aren't run by the Japanese. So does Robocop. The second Sprawl book and third Sprawl book both have wealthy villains who are not Japanese.
I’m still enjoying the game, still riding through Night City, finding new details every day: in the roads, tunnels, on the walls. A random pedestrian might have some link to a book or a movie - you just need to check their clothes and phrases. So exciting.
REDEngine is great - of course, performance is awful, but the idea of ray-traced lights is great and it looks amazing. Also, the details level and the skin rendering - are truly amazing.
Of course, the game needs more, much more work - to make it more entertaining, deeper. But still, it's an interesting world, and I’m pretty sure the price was fair.
One of the most interesting and entertaining parts for me: Cyber Engine Tweaks. Some days I spend more times for hacking than playing:)
It feels like Gibson was riffing on the vibe created by John Foxx's "Metamatic" [1] in 1980 (never mind his "Ultravox!" [2] in the years before that). Maybe it was Foxx though that claimed he was channelling the mood of novels like Ballard's "Crash" [3] from 1973. Computerization, synthesized music, alienation were a part of the zeitgeist of the 70's, 80's.
[1] https://youtu.be/dgaLF2F5LWg
The reader view really highlights how short the article is, now that I'm looking at it.
I think tracking is letter spacing right? It is pretty rough. I think you can enforce fonts and at least in Firefox and Safari you can add custom CSS to help with that sort of thing. I don't think Chrome offers the same feature without an extension.
One thing that really stuck out for me was that _everyone_ had memory foam mattresses. The slums, the really slick holiday homes, everyone.
Interesting; I guess it could be explained in-universe by economies of scale, that is, (memory) foam mattresses being faster and cheaper to produce than other types of mattresses. I'm thinking of spring mattresses, which actually have parts and different materials, whereas foam can be just a single block I think? And when you think about logistics, memory foam can be compacted and vacuum sealed for transport.
Btw, compared to hard scifi like Stephenson (relevant comparison due to Snow Crash), Neuromacer isn't really there; its strengths are outstanding creativity, world-building, character development (including top-notch implied backstories), personal interactions, and artful descriptions.
I really can't think of an author who can stand with Stephenson. Vernor Vinge comes close, but not there on style. Then there are authors with a single good idea that are worth reading, but nowhere near Stephenson's level (e.g. the author of The Forever War).
P.S. Obviously I am not so subtly fishing for people to argue with me and give me book recommendations. Just not the Tri-body Problem please - it falls in with The Forever War - cool concept, cool (very long) intro, not much else.
There was also an early book about VR, which I can't remember the name of. It was about a reviewer of "apples" which gave the people who ate them something like a VR experience.
Finally, the grandaddy of all of these was The Machine Stops[1], by E. M. Forster. Written in 1909, it predicted virtual reality, something like the internet, internet addiction, chat rooms, and more.
[1] - https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...
As for recommendations about post-cyberpunk: our own cstross has written plenty of great books (Accelerando in primis); I've liked anything that Peter Watts as written so far (Blindsight is the most famous, but the rifters saga is also good and the Sunflower cycles is excellent). Alastair Reynolds writing is very uneven, but world building is excellent and so are many of his stories (even outside of the Revelation Space universe).
More generally, Egan (hard sci-fi), Banks (space opera) are some of my favorites. Vance, Wolfe for something more on the fantasy side.
I'm more of a fan of Dick, Herbert, and Lem.
I couldn't even remember what Herbert wrote, even though I read Dune (not the 1000 follow ups though) recently. It made almost no impression on me. Maybe it's like War & Peace where it has been copied so much that the original doesn't seem that, well, original.
Not sure who Dick is.
The only overlap we seem to have is our dislike for Egan. I read a LOT of his short stories (recommended by fans of Lem btw), and it was just entirely boring - the only one I remember is about a health-check ring and two aliens deciding to die after being immortal for a while. Nothing new in there, no story. Basically Egan and Lem seem like the worst of Stephenson - intellectual theory with zero story. It's funny - I like relatively hard sci-fi, but I still insist on it not being a science/social theory book.
Random note - I don't think Clarke was mentioned yet. I read "Rendezvous with Rama" after all the Ouamuamua comparisons and it came off as pretty dry as well, though very well written.
To conclude, I am trying, and having a hard time reconciling why our preferences differ so much. I always think I am missing something, especially about Lem, but I can't tell what.
T.R.Napper is also worth looking out for. "Neon Leviathan" is not what i would call a masterpiece, but the author seems promising.
It's such an amazing series, it so good I find myself trying to pace myself while reading it so I can gestate more of the world and think about it for a while.
I rarely find a book or series that captivates me to this level so I'm basically in love with the sprawl trilogy right now. After I'm done ill probably read Gibsons other stuff because he is really good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy
> The trilogy derives its name from the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, which was abandoned in an earthquake and has become a massive shantytown and a site of improvised shelter.
Seems sadly two heartbeats into the future for today’s Bay Area
I once asked Gibson whether he was influenced by Philip K Dick, and he said that he didn't read Dick when he was young, and was more influenced by Pynchon instead. Still, despite his denial, he seems to be retreading a lot of ground first covered by Dick himself.
I'd read everything at least once before, except Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, so this was a chance to kinda do it all at the same time, finish the stuff I had not read, and kinda have all this William Gibson in my head at more or less the same time.
Having done all that, I'll add this; if you've only read Neuromancer, or even only read just the Sprawl Trilogy, definitely consider giving the Bridge Trilogy a shot. It's markedly different in many ways, but still very Gibsonesque and definitely worth reading. The big differences, IMO, are that the Bridge Trilogy books are less "futuristic" and have less focus on tech technology qua technology, and focus more on the people and their interactions and choices, etc.
I'm rereading Snow Crash now and you cant go 10 pages without reading about The Metaverse. and so much of its VR world reminds me of Ready Player One
everything old thats good seems to get endlessly reinvented, riffed on, or just blatantly ripped off? lol
Given how time goes, I'd say it was the other way around with the references.
go read Neuromancer. then come back here. I'll wait :-)
Thing is, who could even do such a book justice as a film?
As one of them (I'll be 49 in a couple of months), I expect there is a pretty diverse range of opinions among us.
Me? Relative to cyberpunk fiction specifically? I think the old adage "the future is here, its just unevenly distributed" rings very true. Clearly in certain sense we are living in "the cyberpunk future". But by the same token there are obviously regards in which we are not (so far as we know).
I continue to see Cyberpunk as stimulating and fascinating in terms of thinking about the potential of technological developments, while continuing to be a warning about the dangers of certain paths that we might go down (and in some cases, are arguably already headed down). While I'm not as anti-advertising in the general sense as many HN'ers, I will say I dislike the way so much of what we call "tech" has become all about finding ways to serve more ads to more people, more efficiently - as opposed to working on finding better ways to purify water, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, etc. And I believe that there are company executives out there who would actually authorize the deployment of Max Headroom style "blipverts" even if they were exactly as flawed as described in Max Headroom. Not all would, of course, but I expect they exist.
My relationship with cyberpunk is a bit weird though, because I also don't share the broadly anti-capitalist sentiments often associated with "punk" ideology. In fact, I'm very much an an-cap[1]. So while I enjoy this fiction, I don't always interpret the political bits the way some others might. And as much as I see mega-corporations as an affront to human values, human decency, freedom, etc., I see governments as equally so (or more so). Both are just ways to concentrate power and oppress people in my book. shrug
Anyway, speaking more generally, I think the world we livein today is amazing in many ways, and kinda sucks in quite a few ways. I see Khan Academy, Youtube, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, inexpensive but crazy powerful computers, ubiquitous bandwidth, hand-held computers (smart phones) that are basically straight out of science fiction, etc. as adding so much to our world and enabling so many things. But at the same time, you can't ignore climate change, pollution, poverty, rising sea levels, the recent surge in something resembling what you might call "right wing populist fascism", etc. and not be a bit bothered.
We can put men on the moon, but we have people living in cardboard boxes. It's frustrating because I'm convinced we can do better. sigh Sorry for the long rant.
I guess the comparison isn’t perfect but I get what it means. Snow crash made more technical sense but reads like a disaster. Neuromancer reads like a dopamine drip but misses the mark on some of the tech.
Also I wish the sense of humor of Snow Crash was better understood. It really is a laugh-out-loud read and otherwise reads like a comic book (in a good way). I think some of the Americanisms irk British and Euro readers. I'm not usually one for audio books but I have heard the Snow Crash audio book carries the tone perfectly.
Did anyone find a convincing way out?
But there's no convincing way out. In reality the system wins and eats everything, and your only choice is the end in ice or fire.
However, what fiction, art and comics were to us in a time before we could see pictures on the internet of literally everything, travel everywhere, and read the thoughts of random strangers on every conciavable topic, is what cyberpunk signifies now.
Gibson seemed to escape the category of genre and get treated "seriously," as "literary," fiction that is usually character driven, (vs plot driven and didactic fantasy sci-fi) but in Neuromancer's case the technology was so alive it became a character, or so the conversation at the time was about the book.
Literary fiction was a way to extend your experience by developing an empathy for complex characters and exercise it in a way that could be applied to relationships with real people. You could tell when someone had read Catcher and the Rye because it was like they had adopted the mannerisms of another friend you hadn't met. The idea and aesthetic of being or becoming cyberpunk - an anti-hero with super power competence at manipulating the tech substrate of your environment and system you both existed in and were against - was what a generation of young hackers adopted from Neromancer the way boomers read 'Catcher'.
At the time, Neuromancer's Case, Artimage, and Molly replaced the Holden Caulfields, Sebastian Flytes, and Larry Darell (characters from different famous literary novels) as character archetypes a lot of young readers oriented their aspirations and identities around, where relationships with these characters often set them on a real life trajectory. If you read Neuromancer and became a hacker, it's a lot like reading Brideshead Revisited and accepting your sexuality, or reading Razor's Edge and dropping out and living in an ashram.
Fiction before the internet did that, where it was personal experience of a relationship with characters and it had downstream effects on the culture. Post-internet on instagram or a blog someone follows, the characters are literally more real because these are people sharing their lives, but also less complex because the text and images are still representations created by people who aren't deeply thoughtful and practiced writers, and by being real, they don't provide ideals or open aesthetics. Internet people/characters don't provoke and leverage imagination that lets the reader create new and beautiful things, rather, they create concrete symbols to imitate and compare with directly.
When I read the article I was nostalgic, but thought it's not so much cyberpunk that is the artifact of the past, it's that the aesthetics and experience of fiction as a perfect, distant, and open ended ideal that draws out the readers imagination to create something new themselves that feels gone. As in I don't miss cyberpunk so much as I miss fiction being meaningfully upstream of culture the way it seemed to be before the internet. Anyway, piqued.