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Comment by leoc | Hacker News Reader

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

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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."

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