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Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

An interesting brief history of what is, if I was forced to pick one, (still!) the best among the thousands of novels I've read.

The whole Sprawl trilogy is fantastic, and while I agree with other commenters here that Gibson's subsequent novels have become somewhat less awesome, it's hard to complain too much about that if you believe, as I do, that the author in question's first attempt resulted in the best novel of all time.

Still, Neuromancer is indisputably dated, as any such work would inevitably be, so I am glad to have originally read it in the 1980s.

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I recently re-read Neuromancer this year as part of my VR research, and while it basically had no technical relevance, it stood head and shoulders above the rest (Snow Crash, etc) as a literary work, and if you rework some numbers/treat as slang the few bits of technical flavor ("three megabytes of hot RAM"!!!) it actually doesn't feel very dated to me - mostly due to just how clear/strong the writing is.

I was surprised by how strongly it evokes this sort of late-80s oppressive paranoia though. A reminder/argument for science fiction as a lens on contemporary society I suppose.

Yeah, it doesn't feel that dated until you get into the technical details. I think part of that stems from the fact that Gibson didn't really know anything about computers and technology (and, IIRC, wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter). The novel itself is about humans. Well, and a couple AIs also.

But a glaring example, as Gibson himself has mentioned, is that lack of cell phones. In fact, once of the most powerful scenes in the novel -- that I remember raising the hairs on the back of my neck as a read it -- involves the AI, Wintermute, wanting badly to talk to Case. Case is walking through an airport, past a bank of payphones, and the AI causes each phone to ring in turn as he passes it.

There aren't even long banks of cellphones in airports anymore, but that notwithstanding, why wouldn't Case and Molly and everybody have cellphones, in this future-world where they have fully immersive VR interfaces to the matrix?

Of course they would. But you can't really hold that agains the decades-old novel... especially since it was so remarkably prescient in so many ways.

People turn off their cell phones when they really don't want to be disturbed, or sometimes in anticipation of the "turn off your devices" rule of air travel, or it's just a dead battery. What's an AI to do when wanting to talk to someone who's phone is off? ring every cell phone he walks by?

That would actually be even cooler.

Existence of cellphone and google turns so many plots of even pre-1995 movies void.

Not only sci-fi, all of them - romances, dramas, action movies - it's very common to build drama by showing people doing something wrong because the other person can't tell them they are mistaken, or because they can't remember something and have to go to library or ask friend/old monk/whatever.

It's completely different world we're living, despite no hoverboards.

Maybe those particular plots, but just last night I was watching (more like passively observing) a show on NBC where something bad ended up happening because a character was distracted from answering her cell phone.

Indeed, now days you could still have dramatic tension by showing the character being distracted by some new attention seeking appliance.

Yeah, that was such a powerful scene, though it wasn't an airport but the lobby of the Istanbul Hilton. We shared the same reaction.

Everything in the Sprawl plugs into something. The most common verb I can remember for using cyberspace back in the 90s was "jacking in". Characters had "cortical sockets".

This was an intensely connected future. But it was an intensely connected future hooked together by <em>wires</em>.

I've read science fiction most of my life. I grew up in a 70s and 80s that looked absolutely nothing like what books from the 60s predicted. And now that the twenty-teens looks nothing like what books in the 90s predicted, I'm not surprised. SF is about asking "what if", not saying "I think this will be". And it is especially prone to making good guesses about a few things, and looking incredibly silly because the author failed to anticipate some out-of-left-field thing that made a huge change in how society works.

(It does, however, never cease to amuse me that the polyamorous, legal-dope-smoking societies I laughed at in 60s books is pretty much what I live in now that I'm an adult in 2015 Seattle. I'm not sure how much of that can just be chalked up to moving from "kid in the South" to "grownup on the West Coast" though. But I digress. Probably because of that legal dope.)

> ("three megabytes of hot RAM"!!!)

Hell, even today, three megs of RAM can be pretty expensive: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SMI-2MB-Premium-RAM-Card-for-HP-48GX...

I personally find it only superficially dated. A few specifics, like the pay phones, maybe, but...

We've got viruses to attack physical infrastructure, a Beijing that looks not unlike Gibson's Tokyo, billionaires beginning to create their orbital empires, and even the 'trodes. Search for TDCS. It's not an interface technology, but it's close enough.

The politics are also dead on. This is looking more and more like Gibson's post nation state "criminal age," with elite criminality and corrupt intelligence agencies mixing with corporate power to form a global postmodern nihilistic meta-state.

Let's think about this once more : "global postmodern nihilistic meta-state"

ouch !

stF

Straining to describe something for which there isn't a good word. We have socialism, capitalism, etc. but no good term for this.

The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson used the description "transnational" and "metanational" to describe the corporations that have arisen as nearly state-actors in power and influence. Today Goldman-Sachs and BP (among many others) probably significantly exceed the international influence of many countries. Just a matter of waiting for them to coalesce into entities big enough to stop pretending to be under any kind of control and it'll be a perfect analogy...

Another couple of aspects of the government you describe are transparency and passivity.

Nobody feels inclined to hide or dispute the blatantly corporate government; relatively inconsequential people know the intimate details of corporate corruption. There are no real "politics" as they relate to most people, merely figures of power moving pieces on a chessboard in full view for those who care to watch.

Just so that this doesn't stand entirely unchallenged: Gibson's newer stuff is excellent and continues to be prescient and quite a lot of fun. The Blue Ant trilogy ("trilogy", like the Sprawl books) is a very sharp look at the decade past, especially the middle book, Spook Country.

Strongly agree on Spook Country. It is my second favorite Gibson by quite a bit and I feel it's generally underappreciated.

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