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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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

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/

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.

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.

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