Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
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In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.
I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.
That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.
At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.
To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.
P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
Neu-romance-er :)
That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.
I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.
I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.
Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
I am like this with a lot of books. I'll remember a very high level overview ("The Historian is about a modern day hunt for Dracula, and it's really cool, and I liked how the story was told, but I can't remember why or any of what happened."), but can't remember much about plot details.
It makes re-reading things fun, but also is frustrating because I can't explain why something was good, and I also remember just enough that plot twists don't surprise me the second time. It also means that I completely forget about the "bad" parts of the book, or the parts that didn't resonate with me.
That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.
Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.
PS I read the one by AQUARIUS
:)
>but eventually we divorced 29 years later.
:(
>Still friends.
:)
:(
>handed me Neuromancer
:)
(Kind of curious now ... were the other translated editions in non-English languages as powerful? Do readers of science fiction in other languages seek out works by specific translators or publishers known to have great translations?)
We have two translations of Lord of the Rings (Tolkien fans being one of the more picky bunches of book geeks here, I'll refer to it in depth.) The older one, by Lavnit, is considered more beautiful and poetic and flowing (my nick comes from it though I was never much of a Tolkien geek, just hung out with them - Elves were translated into the Sons of Lillith from Hebrew mythology, and my mother's name is Lillith...). It's also long out of print and goes for (lowish I believe) collector prices. The newer one by Dr Emanuel Lotem is more... I don't know, academic maybe would be the word? Anyway, the Tolkien community hates him so much that he's one of their main memes. He also translated Dragonlance, which I grew up with, so I had no ill will towards him myself, and at some point I realized he's the one who managed to translate the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is... quite a feat. I wouldn't expect it to be translatable. So now I hold a deep appreciation for him.
The local Harry Potter geeks treated the translator as a minor celeb.
Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any other translators that are held in special regard.
Shakespeare is perhaps impossible to translate properly to Spanish, just like Don Quijote to English, and yet we keep doing it because even the small glimpse afforded by the translation gives you an idea of the greatness behind it.
Funnily, I’ve always found the Spanish translation of the Lord of the Rings significantly more readable than the original, perhaps because Tolkien went out of his way to write in an old form of English that is a bit too distant for me. Or maybe it is because I read the story in my youth and re-reading it is a way to recapture some of the wonder that I felt then.
Can't say about Shakespeare, there are many translations, and in my eyes all of them lack something that the original has, but Russian translations of such writers as O'Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald and Jack London have some irresistible charm and familiarity that is completely absent in original English texts.
I attribute it to censorship: many talented writers couldn't actually write because of it in soviet times, and to provide for themselves they took jobs as translators.
(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)
(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)
Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".
On the other hans, I find that French translators usually utterly fail to capture the dry kind humor from British authors. From Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, it reads so serious in French translations!!
I think I read the same text in a 1996 reprint some years later, in 1999 - coincidentally also during my last year of highschool with impending doom^Wexams afoot.
Definitely mind-expanding, and helped shape my early cyberpunk tastes, though it didn't get me hitched :)
I do think the translation was excellent, he definitely must have put hard work and passion into it!
Did you read the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy too? What do you think of the other books?
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.
It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.
It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!
What you're missing in his writing is plausible sci-fi stuff: he doesn't care about the details of how biotech or AI will become tools of oppression, he just knows they will.
Stephenson is a good writer too, but he's pandering to an audience: the technical details are fleshed out and the good guys win an unambiguous victory via the virtues of being a nerd.
I'd like to live in Stephenson's world, but that one is made up.
Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.
One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).
I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...
EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.
Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.
Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
To go straight to the nitpicks:
> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.
Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.
1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.
I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.
What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
Those were made in Britain by British creators.
It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.
I would suggest you think about what you don't know.
Producing more in quantity, with far biggest allocated budget, and even better quality on everything that can be measured at surface level, all that is no guarantee to reach a work that is deeper in spirit.
Those who don't question what's wrong in themselves due specifically to the culture they were fed with are not on the path to elude its sway.
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
GTA "equivalent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)
It's not actually framed as cyberpunk: Shinya Tsukamoto positionned it as "human size kaiju".
On the perception...I think its fans are mostly outside of Japan, and it was basically reversed imported. Tsukamoto sent it to foreign film festivals first, and only brought it to domestic theaters after it won at the Rome festival. Even now in interviews it's only brought back as it's directorial debut, and a stepping stone for getting money for bigger movies.
I have the feeling the whole notion of mixing human and technology just doesn't resonate as much in a country that is way more technology friendly and doesn't see robots as much as a threat than in the west.
PS: the "action hero" genre is basically humans transforming into machines, that speaks to the wide acceptance of the concept.
George Alec Effinger "When Gravity Fails" (1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails
Walter John Williams "Aristoi" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)
And just pre-Gibson: Michael Berlyn "The Integrated Man" (1980) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144056.The_Integrated_M...
Bruce Sterling "The Artificial Kid" (1980) This is not a hacker novel, but eerily presages Instagram/Snapchat and viral stardom, the need for creators to create content, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid
Void Star by Zachery Mason is also good.
The one nitpick I have about the article is just this:
But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981
OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.
Be advised it's quite long
You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive.
Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.
I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.
The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.
Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.
Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.
Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.
Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.
I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any
Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…
If you want a counterculture, look the other way. "digital detox", permaculture, degrowth, etc... In the tech world you have the "small web".
"Maker" movements, repair/reuse/recycling, etc... used to be countercultures but they have gone towards mainstream in the last few years (and I think it is a good thing).
Not all countercultures are "good". For instance what we now call "wokism" used to be a counterculture, it is now mostly mainstream. The opposite is now a counterculture, including incels, red pill, etc...
Countercultures change and go. Very few countercultures of the past still remain, they either integrate in mainstream culture, or become so niche that they effectively disappear.
There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.
Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.
[1] They're almost literally Bruce Sterling's corporations-would-turn-Frankenstein's-monster-into-a-product.
Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"
Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:
-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)
-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.
-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.
Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.
What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology.
The caper plots are just a coincidence.
If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.
>> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer
Or
>> There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process. ~ idoru
I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer.
I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.
I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.
Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades
I don't remember exactly, but I think most of these short stories aren't crime fiction. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" definitely isn't.
Well that’s a new one on me.
And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these "curtains for Zoosha" moments:
My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the cable tuner was too primitive to maintain an active list or you miskeyed a number on a remote.
The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out.
If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.
No, he famously didn't own a computer when he wrote Neuromancer.
“I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, ‘This changes everything!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Automation—it automates the process of writing!’ I’ve never gone back.” [1]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
It was already so at the time - anyone working with real computers knew how thin the veil over the magic tech was. Gibson was doing a good Chandler iteration - "When in doubt, have a man come through shining a laser.”
It must be said that SF always had a lot of magic (ahem, "sufficiently advanced technology") going on, and in the 1980s it translated to shiny zigzagging light paths such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron and implausible "lightsabers"
Maybe they're using the Ansible
Instead of telepathic magic, what if the 'deck' ran on a verifiable, computationally intensive process rooted in a concrete theory of consciousness? We've been archiving our attempt to build just that—the theory, the code, and the narrative simulation. Perhaps a less optimistic, but more grounded future.
You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive
It sounds like you're trying to build the Cyberpunk equivalent of the shared semi-hard-SF Orion's Arm universe / world building project?
I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when they are obvious for the characters. Similar to how books set in the present don't try to be science fiction for people in the past, even though they would be, and therefore don't avoid or explain modern terminology.
This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally.
Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.
I haven't tried reading it again since but I can't help but feel it's related, as I really struggled to get into it, despite reading and enjoying a lot of various sci-fi.
"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."
I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...
the exhaustion is the point. Gibson is great because he turned the essence of the genre, media oversaturation, into a prose style. Cyberpunk is all about everything being in your face. Things are flashing by, too fast, too dense, you're disoriented, etc.
You aren't supposed to understand or put every term under a microscope, you should feel as disoriented as the characters. One of the strongest aspects of the book is how successful he is at making you feel as if you're hooked into something running on 120% speed.
Not unlike Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New Sun, where Wolfe recombines words and invents language as the conceit is that the narrator is translating from a future work into contemporary English, having to make use of words that don't yet exist. You're not supposed to grab the dictionary and try to figure out what each term means, you're supposed to take it in as you go on.
This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.
I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?
In which case, have you read https://archive.is/20241231024916/https://www.newyorker.com/... in which Michael Moorcock calls Tokein's work:
"...a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".
Which I'm not saying should change your opinion on anything, I just find it's always a good exercise to find the juiciest criticism of one's darlings.
I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.
This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.
Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
It's personally very boring to read about how the book and technology is dated blah blah. The vibes still feel incredibly fresh to me and that's much more important. A lot of modern books (especially written during covid) won't nearly hold up as well
As I've gotten older I've realized that I have very little in common with Vinge philosophically. But he was a person who thought very deeply, and it shows.
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
Stephenson's world building has a bit more depth to it. You can pick up the Diamond Age today and it still reads well and in a way a lot of stuff that is going on with LLMs make that a super relevant book right now. There are a lot of ideas and moral dilemmas that the book raises. What happens if you take the notion of a poor girl receiving a quality education from an AI and it starts subverting the child's mind with crazily addictive story telling, and adaptive behavior. What happens if you create an army of a quarter million girls with a copy of the same AI book.
The reality of an ipad like device that might have some beefed up version of chat gpt on it that starts bonding with a toddler and executing an educational agenda over years is not that unimaginable any more. A lot of kids know how to unlock their mom's phone before they learn to walk/talk these days. Not the same thing of course but the whole morals and ethics around the topic are exactly what Stephenson explored in the early nineties with that book.
A lot that is science fiction in that book still is; but some of it just became science fact. In the same way, Snow Crash is still pretty fresh. The whole Meta thing a few years ago was directly inspired by that book. And they made a mess of it. We still don't have proper VR. But the tech is definitely getting closer.
Neuromancer never had that quality to me. It's alright as a book but ultimately a bit shallow.
i used to really enjoy Stephenson (especially having not gone to college- i feel like i was exposed to some interesting ideas through his writing that i might not have otherwise).
now that i'm a bit older, i find him to be kind of a know-it-all blowhard, especially in light of his extremely-lucrative work with what are basically the precursors to the giant horrible corporations he wrote about so disparagingly.
i still enjoy snow crash, and i want to re-read cryptonomicon and anathem, but it's really hard to weigh the message he used to send against his more recent work in meatspace.
I've not read any of the authors listed, but "downvote" on HN is not an "I don't like your opinion." button, it's a "What you've said contributes nothing, and/or is unsubstantiated or inflammatory."
Philip K. Dick (Man in the High Castle)
William Gibson (Neuromancer)
Neil Stephenson (Diamond Age)
Vernor Vinge (Across Realtime)
Greg Egan (Permutation City)
Robert Reed (Sister Alice)
John Varley (Eight Worlds series)
I'm sure every generation has its pantheon--I wonder what it is for Millennials and Gen Z.
Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.
Some predictions in the first book:
- touch-screens in general and tablets in particular
- use of AI to adapt difficulty levels in games
- use of AI and virtual simulations for military training
- the Internet, and more specifically:
- the wide usage of forums, blogs, etc. (lots of references that kinda seem like social media, with propaganda spread, message control, etc.)
- the usage of sock-puppet accounts to influence elections and general political discourse (and the creation of "influencers" out of ... thin air)
Later in the series we also get:
- Cryptocurrencies
- AIs in control of financial systems
For concepts yes:
Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans.
Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
I'm not a natural scifi-cyberpunk literature person. I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
One thing that did stand out was this: Everywhere had memory foam mattresses.
Some horrid bedsit: Memoryfoam matress
Uber fancy sky hotel: memoryfoam.
My experience reading A Scanner Darkly was super painful. Switched to audiobook and quit quickly even then.
> I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
Agreed, but the prose are also so beautiful. This is not some garden variety pulp (not that there is anything wrong with pulp)
It's the fate of all writers who create stories about the near future to eventually have time catch up with their imagination. It's sad, because many times their writing is often dismissed once their ideas don't seem so fantastic. Stories about upper class aristocrats in the 1800s still get movies made about them every year, but old science fiction novels lose their luster as time goes by.
Like the article said, the ideas from futurist authors are either incredibly prescient, or miss the mark in ways that make their predictions quaint in retrospect.
Jules Verne wrote about submarines and space travel. H.G. Wells wrote about lasers and military aircraft. Arthur C. Clarke predicted computer miniaturization and global telecommunications (including geosynchronous satellites). Douglas Adams predicted the smart phone and annoying Alexa responses. And on and on: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Huxley, Dick, Niven, and more.
And everyone has predicted the coming age of AGI. I think it's pretty exciting that I might get to see who called it correctly within my lifetime.
Snow Crash would be a hollow joke without Gibson etc.
It is now just a joke with some encyclopedia mixed in.
Terrible ending. As always with the author btw.
If you read it after 25 it's laughably on-the-nose.
In highschool it was the greatest book I ever read.
Some books require the reader to be in a particular place in their lives.
It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.
"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
- music
- movies
- microcode (software)
- high-speed pizza delivery"
It's going to be very hard to navigate between faithfulness to the book and still have it feel fresh.
That and inherent difficulty of taking Gibson's prose to the screen. Maybe it will be by voiceover.
I like that we now also have "Amara's Law" [1] that makes the exact opposite point:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
So either that "futurist" was an idiot, or this shows that with respect to future developments, really no one has any idea what they are talking about.
e.g. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, and it had impact in that area. But the real impact on people of this kind of fast social media came about from it's longer term use in shaping public discourse, and how that role is weaponised.
See also the saying "We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us"
As for the other quote, I don't know if it's true that "we massively underestimate what will happen in the next two years" but it seems to be a statement about the volume of change, the number of new things, rather than the continued impact of one.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the Apple adaptation. I think they did as good a job as The Peripheral deserved (although it did end on a really dumb note). Although Gibson's writing has gotten less strong as he's aged, his world-building is still top-notch and some good writers of narrative taking a pass at it was I think mostly successful.
The Sprawl Trilogy is great front to back, each book has its charms. And of course the world is so rich, beyond Neuromancer. So if they do it right they could set themselves up for a compelling multi-season series.
The question with Neuromancer that took until now to start realizing was - how do you do it and not look like a fool by mangling a classic? I think that its world has advanced sufficiently (as the author of this piece highlights) that a lot of the kinks have been worked out by reality. Now, a central conceit of an ultra technological society without cell phones is going to be interesting in and of itself! I'll stop now, but excited to see this continue.
Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently both xenophobic and Orientalist [1]. In the context of the 1980s (before 1987 when Japan's bubble popped), this makes perfect sense. There was a genuine fear of the Japanese taking over. Japanese tech companies were at their relative peak. So people both feared and fetishized Japanese culture and products.
Interestingly, I did read Snow Crash when it was published (1992 and that did have a big impact on me. I also think that book is solely responsible for a whole generation of people thinking VR was ever going to be a mainstream thing when in fact the metaverse is fundamentally flawed because of network latency.
To me, cyberpunk was pretty inaccurate. Technology for the longest time was rebellious and hopeful. It's only really in the last decade that tech has turned dystopic. I can actually see a techno-feudalistic future now but it's not at the hands of the Japanese (or, now, the Chinse).
What I guess is interesting is how white supremacy is so pervasive. It certainly underpins cyberpunk.
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-ge...
During the reading the touch on origins and culture of Cyberpunk. The hosts are (I think) reasonably intelligent and well spoken and they tend to get a bit deeper into things around the books than other book podcasts I've listened too -- which seem to mostly just recount the plot.
I had read Neuromancer as a kid but not the other books, I think if you're a Cyberpunk fan you should at least give Burning Chrome a read. It's quite short and digestible seeing as its all short stories.
They also did the entire Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe and some Le Guin (the Earthsea series, not any science-fiction).
"Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," which planned on infiltrating and disrupting Soviet computer systems from ultralight aircraft dropped over Russia. The Russian military had learned of the idea and installed defenses to render the attack impossible, but the military went ahead with Screaming Fist, with a new secret purpose of testing these Russian defenses. As the Operation team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their computers and flight systems, and Corto and his men were targeted by Soviet laser defenses."
I understand that it's a seminal work for the cyberpunk genre, and there are certainly cool vibes scattered around it, but I don't really see a cohesive whole. Blade Runner similarly was a beautiful screensaver during which I failed to observe any significance plot. Now Snow Crash, that's another matter entirely. Great book. Compelling characters.
I've been in education all through the rise of digital culture and am now dealing with the first ChatGPT generation. What I see is the inverse of cyberpunk culture. Computers are ubiquitous and dead simple to use. Kids spend their time doomscrolling and let ChatGPT do their thinking for them.
Having to solder or breadboard something together is approximately the same experience it was in the 80s. And the sorts of results you can expect are similarly rare and exotic. An at home automated solution for soldering is not coming any time soon.
Today, the cybersecurity scene feels more comparable in terms of power it can provide. The "classic hacker" archetype seems less central now, overshadowed by state sponsored actors and the rise of cryptocurrency related crimes.
This post gave me more appreciation of Gibson's impact and a boost to pick it up somewhen later in the year.
So Neuromancer felt like it was on a pretty accurate trajectory to me. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
I never read Neuromancer in English. I only read it in Czech, and I wonder if the translator changed the vibe/flow a bit. It was a bit staccato, but the language flowed quite naturally.
You are so lucky to have read the book for the first time in 2025.
But then if you read more Gibson, you will come to realize every single Gibson plot is like that. It's always a mysterious man (always a man!) with apparently unlimited resources who needs to hire someone, usually a ragtag group of specialists, to obtain a McGuffin, usually under false pretenses. Sometimes the group is on the run, but the protagonists invariably end up passive observers in an Easter egg hunt (with the possible exception of Turner in Count Zero) and are generally being manipulated into doing what they do. I think the most egregious example of this is The Peripheral, where the heroine does absolutely nothing; it's a classic witness protection plot where the main character is just a pawn, moved around for safety or as bait, while observing as things happen to her. The sequel, Agency, has an ironic title given that the heroine does even less and appears to have no agency at all.
Once you realize the basic skeleton of a Gibson plot, you come to appreciate how well the world building hides it, but it's clear he ran out of ideas quickly after his first book. The two Neuromancer sequels had a bunch of action but were once again about McGuffins and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Bridge novels is another McGuffin hunt with lower stakes. The Blue Ant books even more so. With The Peripheral he seemed to be trying at something completely new, but ended up stuck in the same mold, parallel universes being used to uncover the identity of someone pulling McGuffins from behind the scenes once again. A not-terrible but old-fashioned sci-fi idea well executed, but little more than a potboiler. Agency was awful.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I've come to the conclusion that Neuromancer was Gibson's one good idea, and while his execution — world building and prose and so on — has been top notch throughout, every book has been weaker than the last. I had to look up his post-Bridge books on Wikipedia to even remember what they were really about. There are occasional glimmers (the Burning Chrome collection is fantastic), and none of his books are not enjoyable on some level. But when I look at the wonderful works of contemporaneous authors like Iain Banks, Gibson doesn't measure up. Banks is an apt comparison, I think, because like Gibson his books are also immensely plot-driven and McGuffin-based, and often lean on similar themes, but with very different results.
I do love Gibson's dense, beautiful prose, and will read anything he writes just for the pleasure of it, so there's still that.
That's why the Bigend books are such disappointments to me. Instead of outsiders looking in, or trying to strike it big, we have bougie insiders getting VC money. And Agency is a travesty.
However, in retrospect, I can't rate most of them very highly because they don't work well as stories. I struggle to remember anything from the Blue Ant books except the mildly irritating forays into location-based art, which seemed dated even then. (Gibson frequently injects art into his books. I think his use of Joseph Cornell boxes in Count Zero was fun, and it serves a real plot point, as the boxes are a trap meant to ensnare a particular art buyer. But the use of objects or people as bait or pawns is a ridiculously overused gimmick in his books, to the point where I wonder if it's lack of creativity or actually something pathological...)
Come to think of it, Gibson's career shares some similarities with that of J. G. Ballard. Started out with sci-fi, amazing prose stylist, gradually moved more mainstream, but struggled to escape a certain plot mold (many variations on the idea of wealthy people seeking outlets for their base instincts). I think that like Gibson, Ballard is always super readable, but his best stuff is his earlier works.
it is an endless list,or perhaps I should say a river. Anyone can fish out something, but there's nothing everyone will be guaranteed to enjoy
Wonderful writing, I love Neuromancer & Count Zero is superb as well, like many others of his books.
I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.
Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though - thank you for sharing!
The Dispossessed is excellent literature regardless of one's politics, though. The anarchist society depicted in it is utopian, but shown with warts and all fully exposed, and that makes it that much more believable.
I find that it pairs great with Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which, while very different in terms of language and writing (but also great!), sort of does a similar exposition of an anarcho-capitalist utopia - again, warts and all.
I would recommend Snow Crash instead, another Sci-Fi classic from the same era which I found to be a much more enjoyable read & more commensurate to the hype.
I think they did a great job with that production. He's not a natural but his southern drawl really adds flavour, along with the soundtrack and effects. Love it.
You're welcome. Just listened to the first chapter and the youtube version feels a tad slower than I remember. Perhaps that's just Gibson stoned. Audio versions are on the t0rr3nt sites also
Also wild that he nailed AI and VR but completely missed that everyone would carry a supercomputer in their pocket. The big paradigm shifts are always the ones nobody sees coming.
The latter is still one of my favorite books of all time, though.
Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI, but isn't.
The real 'matrix' isn't just a virtual space we plug into; it's the increasingly complex, often invisible, interplay between our biological cognition and the predictive models that mediate our perception. We're already seeing early signs of 'cognitive debt' and the subtle erosion of our internal models as we offload more mental tasks to external systems. The challenge isn't just building smarter machines, but building anchors for consciousness in an increasingly fluid, data-driven existence.
https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...
> static-filled “dead channels.”
I don't think Gibson was referring to static (which is bland grey and not cyberpunk at all). I think he was referring to SMPTE on a "dead channel", which is a colorful skyline reminiscent of Blade Runner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars
I agree with the author of this article that Neuromancer is a precursor for modern sci-fi, and it serves as inspiration for so much popular culture. But it's a terrible book IMO. The characters are shallow and uninteresting (Cage), the plot is boring (Wintermute), expository dialogue is rattled off without any setup or motivation (the female character explaining her backstory), it's chock full of nonsequiters (shark-head, something about horses being extinct), and new concepts are introduced not because they're engaging but because they're "just so sci-fi bro" (Turning police).
You misunderstood from the first sentence. The rest of your read is similarly flawed if not worse.
I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.
With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.
If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.
I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over writing style.
In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.