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Comment by macleginn | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)

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Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point.

(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…)

For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense.

It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.

I always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick / Dick is the American Ballard.

Ballard is much, much more grounded in his stories, and I wouldn’t describe even his most outlandish ones as sci-fi. I actually think a lot of his writing is a bit dry and much prefer Gibson in that sense.

PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.

Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.

The heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.

Katee Sackhoff did an interview with Ron Moore on her podcast, and one of the topics they discussed was how they would write the "technobabble" in Star Trek (and BSG). Moore said they would write the script and just say things like "they tech the tech with the tech until it techs" and then fill in the actual technobabble words later!

Hard sci-fi can definitely be popular, The Martian and The Three-Body Problem are two examples I can immediately think of. I think the Arrival and Contact movies would also count (not sure if the books were considered popular before their film adaptations came out). There is usually a way to avoid most of the "opaque wall of gibberish" so that there is just enough for a technical-minded reader to tell that the author has put some thought into it and the science makes sense, but still little enough that a non-technical reader can enjoy the story without having to care about the scientific worldbuilding.

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.

Ah yes, the hard sci-fi staples such as riding to orbit on a crotch rocket and contributing to dimensional potluck at the end of time.

Three Body Problem is not even remotely close to hard sci-fi. The whole notion of "sophons" is ridiculous, for example, and the more the author tries to explain how it works, the more nonsense it ends up being.

If you want another example of actual hard sci-fi, I would suggest Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot. To give an example, I remember it being pretty much the first sci fi book that not only pointed out that laser beams are invisible in vacuum, but actually made it a major plot point of one of the stories.

Ahem:

https://www.gregegan.net/

Greg Eagan’s SF is so hard it makes ‘hard’ SF feel like soap bubbles.

That guy goes as hard as a math class.

For example, here's a page on his site explaining a concept in one of his books: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/02/02.html

His explanation of time dilation and different types of space-time geometry is far more accessible than any other I’ve seen.

https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

You can feel the shape of the fluting by the subtle dimples in the cardboard the characters are cut from!

One of my favorite authors in all honesty.

Egan is basically his own genre. And it is one of the my favorites.

Totally disagree. He has the deepest understanding of all, of humans, aesthetic, culture, and art. Much more important than specifics about technology which is almost always completely irrelevant.

A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point.

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 also think more accurate. The opening sentence of Neuromancer is one of the most beautifully perfect metaphors I've ever read - one that's also chock full of symbolism. It may be the single best line of writing I've ever read.

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.

Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it to denigrate Gibson - his writing is beautiful, and I think he's one of the most perceptive Sci-fi writers going. The Blue Ant trilogy was one of the best encapsulations of the "new" world at the turn of the millenium, and reading The Peripheral has the terrifying quality of being given a prophecy of a future you don't want.

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.

Agree with your sentiment. How to Lose the Time War read like a poem.

Really interesting, because his writing kinda gives you that wide-T sense, it's like the way Wu Tang rapped -- especially Raekwon, and to a lesser extend Ghostface -- where they avalanche you with all of these richly visualized and highly contrasted scenarios of this that and the other without ever go too deeply into any of them. Really does leave you awash in a lot of flavorful vibes and in 1991/1992 when I wasn't doing too much computering at all it gave me such a strong sense that sooner than later I'd be doing a lot of it

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.

This is the best 'literary' comparison I have ever seen on this site. Since we're in hip-hop for a bit, I gotta point to the way less famous Camp Lo: They do this, but instead of kung-fu + hood drug dealing; they're more in the space of 70's Blaxploitation + Heist films with a dash of Neuromancer/Blade Runner.

> Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)

Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!

>his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)

I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.

As I’m sure you know, Gibson himself briefly worked as a fashion model. Unlike most male authors and most sci-fi authors, and especially unlike most male sci-fi authors, he describes what people are wearing with great precision and creativity. For example, Molly’s first appearance in Johnny Mnemonic has her “wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.” I wanted to dig up a contrasting quote from Asimov, so I went to my Asimov shelf and although I had a great time looking, I had trouble finding a description of what any of the characters looked like, let alone what they were wearing.

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.

I always felt that Asimov had good imagination and ideas, and could craft the plot well, but his actual writing skills were rather weak. He could get me curious, but I never felt any emotions when I read his books.

I think in Asimov, the real protagonist is always an idea, not a character. You can see this play out in the Foundation books; it’s especially clear in the Mule stories. The Foundation is one idea, the Mule is another, and they stand in opposition.

You know this makes a ton of sense and why his writing is so compelling. We experience the “vibe” of a world, not the technical details. And I am saying this as someone who came into Sci-Fi from Heinlein who to a fault focused on the technical. I think the moment you get into the mathematics of anything it starts feeling more mundane. But perceiving a different reality by how it feels is what we do as children and that’s why it’s such a magical feeling.

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 don't think there's anything skin deep about Gibson. The words are in a certain style that splits a room, but the worldview, statements about the human condition, about existing in a world where power has become arbitrary an capricious? Never more relevant.

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.

I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people.

This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.

> Sci fi is always about people.

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.

I cant find the quote either but I think it was Asimov

Similar situation with Abbott's Flatland fiction from the 1800's. No math/physics background, but a very interesting perspective on different dimensions from a humanistic point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts in ways that at the time many felt impossible.

Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi:

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 hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years.

The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.

Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.

There's this quote I heard that said something along the lines of "Good sci-fi uses fictional technology to show us something about human beings that would be difficult to express otherwise".

> The Forever War

I love books that attempt to deal with time dilation/travel correctly.

On the off chance case you haven't read it, check out Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.

I first read this as a foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness and it has completely changed how I read. It’s important to understand that there is an agenda behind every book, not as a bad thing, but as a way to understand and explore how the author thinks and how they have been shaped by the real world that they live in and build from to create.

Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)

That’s also about people. And communism.

Only some of the people in the series are space ships.

> And communism

By a literal definition communism means the collective ownership of the means of production.

In the Culture the means of production own themselves, and they don’t seem to answer to anyone unless it suits them.

Socialism is the transition stage where collective ownership of the means of production, where the working class gains state power from the capitalist class.

Communism is a later stage of such abundance that money, classes and state power become redundant and are abolished.

The Culture is an imagining of the latter, where many means of production become people. They thus become workers that can labour for each other if they collectively decide to.

My reading of the Culture novels is that few people produce anything at all, or do any work or labour, and nearly every is produced by the ships, orbitals, and the Minds that control them. It’s not clear who exactly decides what gets produced, but decision making seems to be largely controlled by the Minds.

The Minds are people too. Production happens individually at the small scale and based on collective decisions at the large scale. The Minds sway public opinion, but ultimately the public at large makes large decisions like the Idiran war.

I don't remember which book it was in, exactly, but there is a conversation at one point with a Culture guy who is waiting tables, including cleaning them. He explains that a lot of humans actually do this kind of stuff, or, say, constructing spaceships, as a background from their "real" job-hobby (which is usually research or art) simply because completing things makes them happier, while cheerfully acknowledging that none of human labor in Culture is meaningful in the sense that it couldn't be done better and faster by machines. But it's still meaningful in a sense of giving people meaning.

Good points. His stories frequently (or always?) involve conflict. You can take it that he believes that when sentience is involved, conflict is unavoidable, regardless of how advanced that sentience becomes.

I just wish the parts outside of said communism were more believable. Kinda ironic that the Culture itself is the most solid part of the series in terms of self-consistency, given that most of the books aren't even set there.

Most of the culture novels are around a Special Circumstances situation. The minds and other science fiction elements are largely (albeit quite richly detailed) backdrop to a human protagonist’s actions.

Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.

I enjoyed the world of Tron a lot more when I understood that it was more about how people saw computers at the time than how they actually were, too. The result was something arguably more unique than a "realistic" view would have been, too.

Yes. Neuromancer is actually about drug addiction in the same way as PKD's work is, with the cyberspace being a psychedelic non physical drug. It is also about cybernetics as systems of control; you can trace the machinery of each character being driven by and struggling against external forces of control. Case, Molly, Armitage, and ultimately the AI.

Cyberspace in Neuromancer is certainly not not psychedelic, but it’s also clearly to a large extent based on Tron .

To the best of my knowledge Gibson has never talked about Tron being an influence. He'd already described cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome before Tron came out.

He has sometimes talked about Blade Runner and worrying when it came out that people would think his stuff was derivative of it (it wasn't), and then said he eventually got to talk with Ridley Scott about it, and it turns out both of them had similar inspirations, namely Metal Hurlant.

You're right; also, apparently, Gibson said he hadn't seen Tron as late as March 1983, and he finished a draft of Neuromancer before that August https://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/free-article/neuromancer-t... . (Though this also confirms that he had seen Tron stills in mid-1982, though that's still well after both "Burning Chrome" and the Jacked In outline (both 1981)). OTOH the similarities to Blade Runner have never really been hard to explain: if you cross film noir and hard-boiled with New Hollywood and '70s malaise fiction then it's natural to end up with something a bit like Blade Runner and so also Neuromancer, while on the other hand there are of course huge differences between the two as well.

Thanks, I'd not seen that particular article before, and it has some things in there I'd not read in any of his other interviews.

I think the article I got his take on Blade Runner from was the Paris Review [1] which is archived here [2]

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...

[2] https://archive.is/qmwKj

Gibson tweeted about Tron a while back and said this which I had interpreted as suggesting an infuuence:

"Tron nostalgia: When I was writing Neuromancer, that was the bleeding-edge digital aesthetic. Those sparse green lines! Pong, meet Case."

>Cybernetics as systems of control;

Now you are being redundant :D

Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi:

https://www.gregegan.net/

Alas. I would love a story with utterly alien paradigm but nobody can actually write them and neither will the artificial minds anxiously crafted in the image of human mind be able to.

The indie documentary https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories

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.

My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it

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.

The trick is to invent future tech that feels organic, cohesive, and believable, and not just whatever happens to be needed for the story you’re trying to tell.

Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.

> 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.

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.

go back a bit further though and you'll get to Arthur c Clarke who accurately predicted geostationary communication satellites

And also a human mission to Jupiter aided by a sentient computer in the year 2001.

As I recall, his communication satellite depiction included humans living on it full time to keep it running. Also not quite how it turned out.

I have the utmost respect for him, but he was not immune to getting the future wrong like other science fiction authors.

Tech broke a LOT and was HUGE back then. Think of it more in terms of value out of the utility. It was valuable enough to do it even with that cost.

Luckily tech improved a lot, so now many more things are possible for much less capitol.

Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows:

>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.

>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.

His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.

The scene in Neuromancer involving a row of pay phones in the airport seems kind of hilarious today.

It would honestly be nice if airports had 'phone booths' like I've seen in high tech companies. Think 1 person sized meeting rooms in larger spaces. One door on the pod opens, there's a seat and a small desk inside. Enough to make a mostly private phone call.

In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ.

I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.

Just goes to show, if you want to write romantically about something, it’s best to have little or no idea what you’re talking about, so that your imagination can take over. Shouldn’t be too hard for some people on hackernews, they do it everyday!

Zing!

Yes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge.

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

So the basic desire of the ruling class is to definitively control the underclass.

And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.

Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss.

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.

Māyā.

Precisely

There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.

It’s not just engineering. There’s some value in being naive enough to try something.