Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer. Maybe because so many people raved about it or that I read it many years after it was written. I honestly don't know. It was... OK. But amazing? I don't see it.

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.

View on HN

Neuromancer was groundbreaking in its time. I read it when it came out in 1984 and it blew me away.

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'm quite a bit younger than you, and not entirely clued up on cyberpunk and related genres, but I'd think "Blade Runner" (1982) and its source novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) brought many of the same/similar ideas to the fore a while earlier.

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...

Blade Runner was fantastic and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was ok, but they had neither neural interfaces nor cyberspace (nor the entities dwelling within it), which were pretty central to Neuromancer.

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.

> I stopped reading Gibson after that.

I found "The Peripheral" to be refreshingly good. I would recommend giving it a read.

My favorites are the Bigend trilogy, especially the first, Pattern Recognition. It's like he decided the real word (in 2001) was science fictional enough.

Gibsons later work is worth picking up. None of it is as mind bending as the Neuromancer books but they are good and interesting in other ways.

I’ve really enjoyed his last two.

Read about Paris in the 20th Century, by Jules Verne. Yes, that one.

A book written 125 years ago.

I think to focus on Neuromancer's use of Japanese culture is to stay at the surface level. The background of Neuromancer is one of income inequality, human destruction, and almost-absent government and community (partly caused by a ubiquitous global information network that seems to have broken everything.) We don't have brain-computer interfaces today and Chiba City isn't the center of the tech world (maybe that's Shenzen now ;) but we sure have the income inequality and broken societies.

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.

So many mega corps being Japanese is a product of anxiety about Japan at that time—maybe not even Gibson's anxiety, exactly, but if you were around then and projected which mega corps were gonna be prominent in your nearish-future setting, you'd really be swimming against the current if you didn't make a lot of them Japanese.

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.

Name three japanese mega corporations with significance in the story of neuromancer

Ono-sendai, Mitsubishi-Genentech, and Hosaka.

ok, those exist, but none of them have significance.

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.

Gibson has been pretty adamant that interpreting the Sprawl setting as a dystopia is not quite understanding it: the Sprawl is a quality of life upgrade for a lot of Earth's citizens today.

Neal Stephenson gives a spicier take on this in Snowcrash: "... the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity."

I don't get it. What does being Pakistani have to do with anything?

Stephenson is referencing the effective slavery that is brick kilns in the subcontinent in particular [1]. It also applies to India and possibly Bangladesh.

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/21/the-spiralling...

"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."

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.

He writes about the present in the same way that a winemaker deals in grape juice.

Gibson has always said he regards his futures as ultimately optimistic, because we're still here, not having been destroyed in a nuclear war that looked all too possible in the time it was written.

I read it again recently and I found it still pretty interesting.

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.

Have you seen Elysium? It's basically Neuromancer: The Movie, starring Matt Damon.

"Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately"

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.

Also, isn't Tessier-Ashpool in Neuromancer specifically a Swiss company and generally European?

> I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer.

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.

>> Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. There was a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were "taking over".

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.

Context is important.

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'...

Gibson admired the new (Japan) and the old (England). Perhaps the genre is xenophobic, but I don't think that's his bent:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/01/sciencefiction...

Also true of Lord of the Rings, or watching Star Wars etc if you didn't read/watch it early on (either when it first came out to the world, or early on in your life when you were new to the genre).

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.

To my youngest son (born in 1994), The Phantom Menace was his favorite Star Wars movie for years. Many of our feelings about "the best" of something depends on how it coincides with our formative years. For me the original Star Wars was highly influential(I saw it on its first run, between junior and senior year in college), but the most formative science fiction movie for me was 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen on first run in a Cinerama theater).

(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.)

Re: Lord of the Rings, while the language itself is a bit outdated and it can be quite tedious in a lot of places, it still set a benchmark that - at least as far as I'm aware - hasn't been met yet in other books in the wider fantasy genre. I've read a few, some of the serialized form, but they often feel awkward and derivative; often full of male power fantasies, coming-of-age hero's journey tropes, worldbuilding that somehow always feels derivative of LotR (which in itself was derivative of others as well I'm sure, but said others have been forgotten or replaced by that of LotR), and they often seem like the goal of the author is volume, write as many books as they can (thinking of Robert Jordan and the like) just to get all their worldbuilding in there.

Check out Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.

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.

Incredibly underrated series. As is his Gap Series.

I agree with your critique of many of the derivatives (without naming any in particular), but feel it also applies to the original. And while the original has some bright points, so do many of the derivatives.

* I don’t think you are appreciating the gain in power corporations have acquired in the last 40 years. Those fears of corporations becoming more powerful turned out to be very justified.

* 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com