[HN Gopher] Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
___________________________________________________________________
Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
Author : keiferski
Score : 353 points
Date : 2025-07-13 07:48 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mbh4h.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mbh4h.substack.com)
| amarcheschi wrote:
| If you're interested in reading about cyberpunk and why today it
| feels "dated" - or at least to me, how it didn't manage to
| reinvent itself and remains crystallized in time -, there's a
| wonderful article here: https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-
| was-cyberpunk-in-memo...
|
| Be advised it's quite long
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses
| the mark. _Literary_ cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or
| less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually
| speculative) is central to the plot. That 's the common thread;
| writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse.
|
| 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.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| It's not my article and I don't 100% agree with it. But I
| think it's interesting to read. I think the article spends
| some time making your points about the esthetic over the
| contents
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| I think _you_ might be missing the mark. The "cyberpunks",
| the original authors who started the genre, raised eyebrows
| because in their stories technology _wasn 't_ described as
| something that invariably had a positive impact on people's
| lives, quite the contrary. That is was what set them apart
| from the techno optimistic utopianism that dominated science
| fiction at the time. The authors were called punks because
| they were going against the grain and, like punk, did a sort
| of reset of science fiction.
|
| 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.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Gibson isn't the only person writing cyberpunk although he
| definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I
| feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about
| some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than
| Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His
| contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from
| words like
|
| >> 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Why not read both PKD and Gibson? Better use of your time
| than the average TV series.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Yes I agree. But people usually want an opinion. In my
| opinion read everything. The more you read the more you
| appreciate everything you read.
| cubefox wrote:
| > Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less
| than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually
| speculative) is central to the plot.
|
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and
| counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple
| decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC
| funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance
| industry, and the goal of every artist to "make it" as a
| creator, there's basically no room for culture that explicitly
| wants to operate outside the system.
|
| 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.
| bloqs wrote:
| fascinating insight
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Another reading is that there is no more counterculture
| because it won and became the culture.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I get where you are coming from but in my mind, when
| mutating into the dominant culture it loses vital,
| essential characteristics.
|
| Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive
| to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within
| existing systems, is no longer a counterculture.
|
| My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or
| was it subsumed and perverted?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| "And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of
| inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not
| in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our
| energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we
| were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So
| now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep
| hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind
| of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that
| place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." -
| Hunter S Thompson
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Over the past ten-ish years I've often wondered what HST
| would make of our current society... not much good, I'm
| afraid.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Counterculture moved underground.
|
| 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...
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| where though?
| amarcheschi wrote:
| I partially disagree, there are still some cyberpunk medias
| that feel fresh for today. But yes, they're definitely not as
| famous as the previous ones.
|
| 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
| keiferski wrote:
| Well, I'm talking more about the culture environment of
| society at large, but even then - mirrors edge came out
| almost twenty years ago. While it might be considered
| "Post-cyberpunk," (and I do enjoy that genre) it really
| doesn't have much to do with the original genre in the
| countercultural sense. It's more like an exploration into
| other aspects of a fictional cyberpunk-esque world.
|
| Cloudpunk is the same thing as the recent Cyberpunk game:
| fun, but operating on stale tropes and aesthetics that
| haven't changed in 40 years. This is a problem that pretty
| much every piece of cyberpunk media has.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It was already a libertarian/neoliberal fantasy - one where
| everything is corrupt, everyone is competing with everyone
| else, and the point of the game is to grab as much as you can
| for yourself while selling your services to the highest
| bidder.
|
| 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.
| saturneria wrote:
| In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were
| basically what your family member could "get you in". I am of
| that age and I remember General Motors was a great place to
| work at that time. My friend "got in" after high school
| because his father was a union boss. For me, "getting in" to
| General Motors was literally impossible because I had no
| connections.
|
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| What makes life so much more interesting today as compared
| to 50 years ago?
| anton-c wrote:
| When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for
| me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an
| endless scroll one phone tap away.
|
| I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s.
|
| I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation
| though. I never used those types of phone apps but
| youtube and the net have endless content.
|
| I think if you searched you'd find other articles
| mentioning the lack of boredom, I don't think I'm an
| isolated incident.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Being bored is good for you my dude. Google for it.
| anton-c wrote:
| Seems you missed the part of my comment where I say I'm
| explicitly trying to cut down on stimulation. I'm aware.
| navane wrote:
| When's the last time you were bored? When's the last time
| you did something interesting?
| anton-c wrote:
| I'm putting out a new track on spotify, as soon as i get
| the master back so I'm excited for that. I'll admit
| though, not a ton of interesting stuff going on. I mean,
| I make jewelry, am learning Japanese and do visual art
| too so I'm not lacking for good hobbies but idk where to
| meet people these days.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not being bored doesn't mean you're leading an
| interesting life.
| anton-c wrote:
| Not at all. I see why you say that. My general thought of
| why things more interesting is not that they truly are,
| rather our time and attention spans have been taken up by
| more frivolous things while boredom leads to ideas and
| innovation.
|
| I meant that boredom I experienced earlier in life was
| arguably a good thing.
| layer8 wrote:
| I see, I thought you were trying to argue for the GP's
| point.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were
| basically what your family member could "get you in"
|
| (UK here). My first job in 1987 was in computing for an
| engineering company and my father had exactly zero
| influence on me getting that job.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think that's an accurate view of what the job
| market was like in the 70s and 80s.
|
| My point was more that I think there was more of a feeling
| of security, in the sense that regular people felt a little
| more optimistic about the future and their personal
| finances. People started low on the totem pole but felt
| confident about moving upwards slowly. That feeling doesn't
| really exist anymore.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| >In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were
| basically what your family member could "get you in"
|
| Perhaps this may have been true for those who didn't have a
| university degree. Otherwise, this experience doesn't line
| up with anyone in my family.
| fao_ wrote:
| > Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and
| counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple
| decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC
| funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance
| industry, and the goal of every artist to "make it" as a
| creator, there's basically no room for culture that
| explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
|
| 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.
| totetsu wrote:
| Which is one reason I think novels like Neuromancer and
| count zero and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the
| World, feel so dated today, is that they are so decidedly
| not-queer in their sexual dynamics.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells
| lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer
| sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily
| disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex
| hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's
| boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you
| can see the real thing effortlessly.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| The other factor both of you are failing to see is that
| the majority of males are hetero normative and don't like
| watching sword fighting. This is not an outdated take but
| factual reality. There is nothing wrong with the
| alternative, but depicting only "hetero-normative" stuff
| is the statistical norm back then and even now.
|
| It's absolutely the right thing to do to legitimize "non-
| hetero-normative" in the same way left-handedness is
| legitimate but saying any of it is "normal" and declaring
| anything not involving it as "dated" is absolutely out of
| touch with reality.
| karolinepauls wrote:
| Sadly, the minorities (in the Anglosphere at least) don't
| deliver at either "think" or "independently". Their
| counterculture is as countercultural as joining a church.
| Just another way to fit in. Be be slightly different and
| they'll chastise you - a high-profile example of this
| mechanism has just happened again https://archive.is/qeDfU.
| Unless that's what it's always been.
|
| Hooligan-like countercultures are also excluded as far as
| "think" or "independently" goes for an obvious reason.
|
| Thus, the only independent thinkers I've encountered are
| individuals who don't aim to have all the answers, who can
| accept disagreements, who attempt to know themselves - but
| those are individuals, not countercultures.
|
| I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about
| independent thinking. They were about fitting in with
| different people.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never
| about independent thinking. They were about fitting in
| with different people.
|
| This is my understanding. Was it really different in the
| 60s/70s?
|
| Being unique, by definition, means you don't fit in with
| a "culture". There's something inherent in human nature
| that causes people to form tribes (and copy others
| leading to cargo-culting, groupthink etc.); those who are
| too different to want to join the mainstream group still
| want to join some other group, they want to be accepted,
| which means they still have pressure to conform.
|
| The main thing I see today is that most liberal
| "countercultures" don't tolerate political differences.
| But they seem to tolerate other differences (at worst if
| nobody else has your difference it'll be ignored which
| has always been the case), and perhaps 60s/70s counter-
| culture tolerated political differences more but had some
| other taboo.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk"
| appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in
| Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's
| mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea
| that all technology is socially transformative, just not in
| the ways we hope it will be.
|
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Perhaps publications like _Mondo 2000_ and _WIRED_ (and
| _Boing Boing_ ) killed Cyberpunk the way _The Many Loves of
| Dobie Gillis_ stuck a knife in the beatniks of the 1960 's.
| Not that they made fun of Cyberpunk, but rather they so
| overly-embraced it that they kind of unintentionally made a
| mockery of it (so perhaps not so much like _Dobie Gillis_?).
| That was the way I saw it in the 90 's anyway.
| keiferski wrote:
| Good point. Over-enthusiasm is definitely a way to make a
| cool thing uncool. There are a few contemporary writers who
| seem to labels themselves as involved with cyberpunk, but
| whom really make it all a bit juvenile and silly.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Computers, the internet, it is all mainstream now, the
| opposite of a counterculture.
|
| 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.
| xvilka wrote:
| An example of cyberpunk that is not dated - Hyperion Cantos[1].
| It might not look like cyberpunk at the first sight but it
| definitely is.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I'd say parts of the universe and one and a half of the
| pilgrim's tales are cyberpunk, but a lot of it isn't tonally
| so.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I disagree. Hyperion has some of the surface elements of a
| cyberpunk work - primarily by way of "The Detective's Tale"
| (Lamia's story) - but it isn't cyberpunk overall, no more
| than it's a horror novel by way of Dure's story (for
| instance).
| navane wrote:
| It's because punk died, which is half of cyberpunk. All the
| cyber is corporate now. We live in cyber corp. We live in the
| part that Gibson found, rightfully, totally uninteresting to
| write about.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I don't know about that. There are very powerful corporations
| in Neuromancer, more like governments than corporations. They
| (or powerful people inside / owning them) largely drive the
| action in Neuromancer.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Hey, everyone gets older...
| elcapitan wrote:
| Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions,
| ideas, concepts from Scifi stories, without all the plot and
| character stuff?
|
| 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.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This is akin to asking someone explain Tolkien's works, but
| without all the world-building. The set and setting matter,
| they're a part of the message, if not even the main message.
| elcapitan wrote:
| That's why I don't read Fantasy in the first place, but Scifi
| often has technological concepts and ideas that are
| interesting by itself. I don't give a damn about mountains,
| whether people have green or pink skin or the stupid songs
| they enjoy to sing though.
| sethammons wrote:
| > The difference between science fiction and fantasy...is
| simply this, science fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.
|
| -- Orson Scott Card
|
| There is hard and soft types that muddy the quote, but it
| largely stands.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Another definition that almost works is the distinction
| between _Not-Yet-Possible_ and _Never-Possible_ -
| although this may fail when things like Faster-Than-Light
| drives are considered.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| These ideas are not supposed to be predictions about the
| future. They're cool changes to introduce to the fictional
| world to make the stories more fun. (Almost) nobody thinks that
| they are the actual future
| cubefox wrote:
| > Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions,
| ideas, concepts from Scifi stories
|
| For concepts yes:
|
| http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistalpha.asp
| elcapitan wrote:
| This is really great, thanks! Looks like it's also possible
| to group them by book, e.g. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Aut
| horSpecAlphaList.asp?BkNum=...
| surfingdino wrote:
| The US government used to consult sci-fi authors, especially
| when they were writing stories somewhat based on extrapolations
| of current advancements of technology or science. I'm not sure
| any of the notes from those meetings are available online, but
| I'd love to read them and compare.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Ender's Game (1985) has a ton of spot on predictions of the
| future, if you haven't read that you might enjoy it (and the
| story and later universe are fascinating as well, with twists
| and turns, and the "two threads" storylines, where you can read
| the same events from two different characters in the
| plurilogies of books)
|
| 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
| anupj wrote:
| The most fascinating detail here is that every piece of tech in
| Neuromancer is Japanese or German. Hitachi computers, Sanyo
| suits, Braun drones. Gibson was extrapolating from 1984 when
| Japan dominated consumer electronics and Germany led
| manufacturing. Fast forward 40 years and we're having the exact
| same conversations about Chinese tech dominance. TikTok, DJI
| drones, BYD cars. Today's "future tech" assumptions mirror
| Gibson's perfectly. Makes you wonder what we're getting wrong
| about the next 40 years.
|
| 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.
| artofpongfu wrote:
| Many things are obvious in retrospect. In this case, it seems
| few truly understood that all information will be made digital,
| and that print, audio, video etc are all just different kinds
| of information.
|
| Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI,
| but isn't.
| Klonoar wrote:
| The more time moves along, the more impressed I am by his call
| in "Pattern Recognition" than "Neuromancer".
|
| The latter is still one of my favorite books of all time,
| though.
| rubslopes wrote:
| Pattern Recognition is the most accessible book of his that I
| have read, and it has such a great story. Neuromancer is
| incredible, but it's often hard to understand his prose.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Overall an interesting read.
|
| 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.
| pieds wrote:
| Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was
| also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even
| creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell
| and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the
| authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The
| Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
|
| 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.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Ah..
|
| 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)
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why would one want to ask an LLM and risk maybe being led
| in entirely the wrong direction?
| videogreg93 wrote:
| I really don't think Yakuza games are anything like GTA
| besides "being in a city". Yakuza has none of the sandbox
| elements like GTA, the city is more like an elaborate menu
| to go from mission to mission/side quest/activity.
| anton-c wrote:
| You can't even drive in most Yakuza games! They made a
| bad comparison.
| Findecanor wrote:
| > Grand Theft Auto, ... Andor
|
| Those were made in Britain by British creators.
| pieds wrote:
| The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some
| ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from
| the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US
| companies with US culture in them.
|
| The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also
| banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour
| elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the
| affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in
| jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off
| in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now
| with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made
| it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening
| in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
|
| I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood
| has still created far more interpretations of science
| fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to
| argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then
| Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also
| almost the only one of note.
|
| A country with major influence on science fiction that
| often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
| cshimmin wrote:
| So... your argument is that it's not counterculture
| unless it's mainstream culture? And that one should only
| credit derivative works once they become mainstream,
| rather than the original inspiring works because they
| were too obscure?
|
| I don't think anyone is trying to "gotcha" you. You've
| just got a bad take.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it is actually pretty difficult to look at
| countries and say which ones have successful
| countercultures. I mean to some extent if a
| counterculture is successful it becomes not a
| counterculture, just part of the mainstream culture. On
| the other hand, a maximally out-of-mainstream
| counterculture is a totally unknown thing that we've
| never heard of as outsiders.
| pieds wrote:
| Counterculture is a culture that is counter to the
| mainstream culture. If a culture is happy on its own, it
| is more of just a subculture. Cyberpunk itself features
| counterculture not just subculture, but is also inspired
| by the counterculture at the time.
|
| Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations,
| harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the
| worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey
| skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed
| environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or
| the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name
| with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture
| so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just
| like it could never be that influential in music.
|
| Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a
| limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the
| Shell (and some video games) have been influential and
| are frequently credited for that, but that is about it.
| Everything else including similar media before and at the
| same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0].
| Just like in music.
|
| Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is
| nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyberpunk_works
|
| tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really
| do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in
| cyberpunk despite having had influence.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also
| banned by the BBC
|
| Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They
| sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that
| had charted but a massive number got through. The songs
| weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
|
| > bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
|
| You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and
| there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and
| clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Tony Gilroy isn't British.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the
| US does.
|
| 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)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the
| US does.
|
| "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.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell
| disconcision wrote:
| > 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
|
| to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly
| maligned) sequels
| pyrale wrote:
| Fascinating how people can make "counterculture" into a
| contest between nation-states.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the
| outsiders.
|
| 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?
| pja wrote:
| IIRC Switch was originally conceived as having one gender
| in the outside "real" world but another when incarnated in
| the Matrix (where your own self body image defines you).
| Hence their name - they switched.
|
| This was all dropped at some point - the only surviving
| relic being the name of the character.
| leoc wrote:
| Right: bascially, 1980s-vintage William Gibson is a post-New-
| Wave SF writer who's a fan of hard-boiled novels and of New
| Hollywood "outlaw" bohemianism, so his heroes are pimps,
| thieves and murderers. 1980s-vintage Shirow is a fan of
| military SF, so his heroes are paramilitary death squads.
| Now, that's a _little_ jaded, but I think mostly simply
| accurate. I don 't think that generalises well to a US/Japan
| distinction though. As others have said, _Akira_ is surely
| more of an outsider story. (Beyond cyberpunk, have a look at
| the political backgrounds of senior Ghibli people like Isao
| Takahata, Kondo Yoshifumi and Hayao Miyazaki. I 've read
| somewhere, but can't confirm, that people like that tended to
| end up in animation precisely because Communists were
| blackballed out from more respectable industries.) And the US
| is the land of _Dirty Harry_ and Niven and Pournelle as much
| as _Bonnie and Clyde_ and _Blade Runner_.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Do you know how the Japanese think of and/or talk about
| "Japanese Cyberpunk"; e.g. Tetsuo: The Iron Man? It's
| interesting to me that there is "Japanese cyberpunk" and then
| there is regular cyberpunk made by Japanese artists (e.g. Ghost
| in the Shell). Do the Japanese consider these completely
| separate genres? Variants of the same genre? Are most fans even
| aware that Westerners make the distinction?
| rl1987 wrote:
| The way I see it, works like Tetsuo is Japanese _extreme_
| cyberpunk - niche-within-a-niche kind of thing.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > Tetsuo: The Iron Man
|
| 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.
| als0 wrote:
| Most interesting news: https://www.apple.com/tv-
| pr/news/2024/02/apple-tv-announces-...
| metalman wrote:
| everything Gibson "Holly Fire" Sterling "Diamond Age" Stephenson
| both have dated passeges, but will then segue into lucid
| precience
| gerikson wrote:
| Sterling's _Heavy Weather_ haunts me to this day.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| You can't say he was prescient and use the future as
| justifications... 'he's prescient because virtual reality in his
| novel is just like how it's going to be in the future'. Also I
| don't think these (cybernetics, virtual reality) are uncommon
| enough predictions to be credited to him.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| There's a podcast, "Shelved by Genre" that did a section on
| Gibson the year, reading Burning Chrome (short story collection,
| "world prequel" to Neuromancer) and the Neuromancer Trilogy
| (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
|
| 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).
| cubefox wrote:
| Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk
| stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future,
| you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just
| have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things
| that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the
| past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new
| present. Nobody in the future would bother to phrase things in a
| way that is digestible for people from the past.
|
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Exactly. I imagine something like "he glanced at his phone and
| saw he didn't even have LTE". The author wouldn't be trying to
| make you think about the details of modern communication
| systems. They'd want you to infer that the subject of the
| sentence was barely on the edge of communications.
| johngossman wrote:
| Ada Palmer makes this point. She teaches Renaissance history
| and tries to write her sci-fi as if she was trying to describe
| today to someone from the 15th century. Stanislaw Lem was also
| brilliant in describing his future worlds in ways that were
| hard to understand, as alien as he guessed they would actually
| be.
| cubefox wrote:
| In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are
| hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand
| for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make
| sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in
| Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in
| Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the
| Bathtub".
|
| 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.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Of all the cyberpunk authors, Gibson, while one of the first, is
| probably the least interesting. Stephenson and Sterling are
| better writers and explore more complex ideas. Gibson has the
| occasional shadow of an idea that he explores with a few one
| dimensional characters. That said, I liked "Virtual Light".
|
| Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic
| Kingdom" are also very good.
| gavinray wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted.
|
| 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."
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Give Stephenson a try. "Snow Crash" in particular.
| layer8 wrote:
| Downvoting is for mere disagreement as well, and has always
| been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674260
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| What I always appreciated with Neal Stephenson is the level of
| nerdy detail in his books. It's what makes re-reading his books
| very enjoyable. Which is something I do every few years or so.
| Gibson's Neuromancer is often recommended as a thing to read
| next. But to me that's a very different type of book.
| Basically, Gibson uses a lot of word soup to create a
| futuristic vibe and mood but in the end it's just a stylistic
| thing rather than a coherent view of the future and at this
| point it's a bit dated. As a vision it was all a bit dystopian
| and cool at the time. But not very coherent.
|
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50
| years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next
| two._
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I think there's a slight difference. Amara's law is about "a
| technology" - just one - and its initial impact vs second-order
| effects.
|
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| This jumped out at me as well. I think it's fair to say that if
| you aggregate all predictions, there will be those who vastly
| over- and under-estimate progress on any given time frame, so
| depending on who the authors were paying attention to, both
| could be correct. The interesting question is whether there is,
| in aggregate, a tendency to over- or under-estimate on a given
| time frame. My money is on Amara's Law for that.
| makaking wrote:
| I got Neuromancer as a birthday gift earlier this year. I found
| it simultaneously very captivating but requiring a lot of effort
| to read through the dense terminology and try to accurately form
| a picture of what Gibson was trying to convey. Sadly I couldn't
| finish it since its the type of book that, if you stop reading
| for a week or longer, you'll have to start from the beginning.
|
| This post gave me more appreciation of Gibson's impact and a
| boost to pick it up somewhen later in the year.
| davedx wrote:
| I first read Neuromancer in 1998 while I was at university,
| something like 6 months before I got my first mobile phone. My
| 2nd year group project was building a lounge/session discovery
| application for our University's VR meeting software. (Using Java
| AWT!)
|
| So Neuromancer felt like it was on a pretty accurate trajectory
| to me. I couldn't put it down until I finished it.
| xvilka wrote:
| Neuromancer makes more sense after reading remaining two books in
| the trilogy: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They are not as
| good as the first one, especially the last one, but make the
| story complete and more nuanced.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| > _Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025, I was struck
| by how eerily prescient Gibson was in so many ways--but also by
| what he didn't anticipate._
|
| 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.
| NetRunnerSu wrote:
| While some focus on the missed predictions like pocket
| supercomputers, I find Gibson's true genius lies in anticipating
| the _conceptual_ shifts - how our very sense of self, reality,
| and freedom would become inextricably linked to, and perhaps even
| defined by, digital networks.
|
| 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...
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one just getting around to reading
| Neuromancer in 2025! The shocking thing about the story is how
| very few _screens_ there are in the world, and how ungrounded
| "cyberspace" is in physics. Cyberspace's mechanics are vague, and
| in fact are inconsistent with the other extent communication
| technologies. e.g. Case never seems to worry about getting a
| signal for his deck, and yet _does_ worry about getting signals
| for, e.g. fax machines on space ships. It feels like the fabric
| of cyberspace must be ESP or telepathy (which is consistent with
| its description as a "shared hallucination". Gibson seems to be
| wrestling with new technology in a similar way to the authors of
| "Wierd Science" - where basically computers are magic. (And IIRC
| Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL).
|
| 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.
| NetRunnerSu wrote:
| You've perfectly articulated the central challenge that
| inspired my own work. The 'magical', ungrounded reality of
| early cyberpunk cyberspace is precisely the gap we're trying to
| bridge with formalized realism.
|
| 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
| messe wrote:
| > 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?
|
| - https://www.orionsarm.com/
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm
| NetRunnerSu wrote:
| I prefer to call it, the sociology unit test.
|
| https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT
|
| https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15676304
|
| https://github.com/dmf-archive/Tiny-ONN
|
| Let's make sci-fi into reality.
| messe wrote:
| Ah. Now the crank alarm is ringing.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > Cyberspace's mechanics are vague [...] basically computers
| are magic.
|
| 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"
| atombender wrote:
| > And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL
|
| 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...
| Rover222 wrote:
| > It feels like the fabric of cyberspace must be ESP or
| telepathy
|
| Maybe they're using the Ansible
| mindcrime wrote:
| Interesting article. As somebody who is an unapologetic, raging
| _Neuromancer_ fan, it 's always fun to read about someone
| experiencing the book for the first time.
|
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| I'd take that a step further. I don't know how anyone who read
| it back at that timepoints would not have immediately pictured
| the static associated with not getting a signal.
| layer8 wrote:
| The only thing to be confused about is that the sky never looks
| anything like TV static (other than maybe in a snow storm, but
| even then not really).
| jwrallie wrote:
| Agreed, I was born in 1989 and remember it, so it was a thing
| even 10 years later. Dead channels only truly died after
| digital TV became the standard.
| surfingdino wrote:
| One thing that Gibson nailed is the story of Operation Screaming
| Fist, which eerily reminds me of what's going on in Ukraine. From
| the Neuromancer wiki:
|
| "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."
| macleginn wrote:
| 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)
| qiine wrote:
| fascinating
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| itomato wrote:
| Maya.
| reactordev wrote:
| Precisely
| api wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| It's not just engineering. There's some value in being
| naive enough to try something.
| mindcrime wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
| swayvil wrote:
| The uneducated engineer addresses reality. The educated
| engineer addresses the best modern ideas about reality.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| go back a bit further though and you'll get to Arthur c
| Clarke who accurately predicted geostationary communication
| satellites
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| The scene in Neuromancer involving a row of pay phones in
| the airport seems kind of hilarious today.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| I cant find the quote either but I think it was Asimov
| bradly wrote:
| 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.
| plq wrote:
| 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...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| maest wrote:
| 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".
| matwood wrote:
| > The Forever War
|
| I love books that attempt to deal with time
| dilation/travel correctly.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| On the off chance case you haven't read it, check out Tau
| Zero by Poul Anderson.
| bobbinson wrote:
| 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.
| koverstreet wrote:
| Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)
| dontlaugh wrote:
| That's also about people. And communism.
|
| Only some of the people in the series are space ships.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| leoc wrote:
| Cyberspace in _Neuromancer_ is certainly not _not_
| psychedelic, but it's also clearly to a large extent based
| on _Tron_ .
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| 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.
| leoc wrote:
| 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.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| 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
| anthk wrote:
| >Cybernetics as systems of control;
|
| Now you are being redundant :D
| anthk wrote:
| Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi:
|
| https://www.gregegan.net/
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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!
| throwaway328 wrote:
| Zing!
| roughly wrote:
| 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...)
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick
| / Dick is the American Ballard.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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.
| readmodifywrite wrote:
| 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!
| anthk wrote:
| Ahem:
|
| https://www.gregegan.net/
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| 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.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| 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!
| ANewFormation wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| 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.
| readmodifywrite wrote:
| > 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!
| lbrito wrote:
| >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.
| sevensor wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 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.
| corysama wrote:
| 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.
| beefnugs wrote:
| 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
| swayvil wrote:
| 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.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| > I found that Gibson's prose felt almost identical to the
| placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used--so dense with jargon
| and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences.
|
| 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.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| Comparing anyone to Tolkien is massively unfair. Tolkien was a
| seasoned linguist and he worked on LotR for about a decade. It
| is going to be extremely hard to match these expectations for
| other authors.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| You're suggesting their arent any other authors who have
| taken over a decade to write a book? Prousts' In Search of
| Lost Time took 13 for example.
| uaas wrote:
| You are ignoring the part about being a linguist, though.
| Spending 10 years writing a book is also not quite rare.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Sylvain Neuvel is also a linguist. But I'm sure this will
| also be disqualified because he's in a different genre.
| Groxx wrote:
| tbh I don't think "researches language structure" has
| much at all of a correlation with "uses language in a
| pheasant manner".
|
| it _happens to_ with Tolkein. but it 's kinda like
| claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good
| video game developer simply because games use compilers.
| johngossman wrote:
| I've been comparing Iliad translations. Some of best
| classicists, who best understand Greek and the original
| text, are lousy poets.
| Groxx wrote:
| Far too late to edit now, but I got a laugh out of the
| autocorrect "pheasant" at least
| johngossman wrote:
| Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and
| great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare
| Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to
| Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature
| professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious
| qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly,
| some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists
| and (mostly) wrote very quickly.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for
| about a decade
|
| 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.
| throwaway328 wrote:
| There are worlds of difference between analysing the syntax
| and semantics of languages in a structured and scientific
| way, and writing "good" prose (as subjective as that is).
|
| I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?
|
| In which case, have you read https://archive.is/2024123102491
| 6/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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I read it in the 90s and found the opposite experience: it's
| evocative. It doesn't describe things, instead it gives hints
| and lets your imagination build its own answers.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Exactly. If anything, Gibson's evocative style reminded me of
| the Strugatsky brothers; while the story is different, you
| get this sense of looming despair all through the book.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I struggled with Neuromancer and never finished it (as far as
| I recall), and I've later discovered I have aphantasia.
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is
| one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to
| be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.
| criddell wrote:
| I like his books, but I have to read them at least twice to
| understand what's going on. Sometimes I'll read the plot
| summary on Wikipedia and realize I missed a lot. I think I've
| read everything he's written though because I enjoy the prose
| even when I'm not really following along.
|
| I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably
| intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated
| reader though...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective
| he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson:
|
| "It was as if adjectives flocked to him--neon, recursive,
| glinting things--clinging like wet chrome to every noun he
| touched."
| saltcured wrote:
| It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I
| loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992.
|
| I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read.
| I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more
| punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.
|
| I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a
| paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax
| tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow
| simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle
| into the mind and fade out.
|
| (Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long
| sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to
| understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)
| cherryteastain wrote:
| I recently read A Farewell to Arms, and disagree with you
| on the Hemingway comparison. Hemingway is perhaps the
| clearest, easiest to read author among the 'greats' so
| far for me. I felt his style is pretty much the exact
| opposite of Gibson's.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, my thought reading _Neuromancer_ too. I 'm fine with
| Clockwork-Orange-esque jargon in prose, but even removing that,
| Gibson's text still didn't flow in a story-telling
| (conversational?) way for me. It was too stilted or something.
|
| 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.
| kenoath69 wrote:
| I want to recommend Vernor Vinge's books to anyone looking for
| some new sci-fi... I've read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire
| upon the Deep. They were exemplary to the kind of logical
| structure of SciFi and made some relevant predictions which I
| won't spoil. The guy was a professor of computer science (RIP)
| samsartor wrote:
| Deepness in the Sky is one of my favorite books of all time!
| Fire Upon the Deep is a serious let-down by comparison, but the
| wolves are a cool concept.
|
| 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.
| kenoath69 wrote:
| (ok mild spoilers ahead) Really why! I enjoyed them both and
| I read Deepness in the Sky first. It was a bit of a shock
| about FTL for me but I kind of granted narrative license so
| he could explore the range of consequences there, like with
| FTLness being distributed over a field of sorts. But yeah the
| dogs were dope, their packs, the interaction of the
| technological bootstrapping with them. Yadda yadda. I can't
| say I am familiar with his philosophy either
| layer8 wrote:
| His Realtime series (The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime) is
| also pretty good, in terms of "what if".
| robsws wrote:
| Maybe I should read the book again making notes like the author
| did. I finished it understanding how novel this would have been
| when it was released and impressed with how much worldbuilding
| was fit into a relatively short book, but ultimately pretty
| disappointed by the plot itself. Without giving away too much, I
| feel that there were a few segments that fell pretty flat for me
| (to be specific, with minor spoilers: the new recruit around the
| middle of the book and the hacking subplot towards the end).
| plq wrote:
| Man, I loved Neuromancer when I read it as a kid. Yes, it's a
| tough book to read, especially today where there are too many
| distractions as well as too many works of art built on the sci-fi
| ideas of that era.
|
| 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?
| user____name wrote:
| When I talk about this book to other readers the first thing they
| bring up is the difficult prose. I think I only found a single
| other person like me who enjoys the writing style.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| My first thought when I read the review:
|
| You are so lucky to have read the book for the first time in
| 2025.
| grimblee wrote:
| Achually the first Cyberpunk work ever was Do Androids Dream of
| Electric Sheeps by Philip K. Dick
| sim7c00 wrote:
| i love this trilogy. its so mind boggling. ppl slack off on the
| second 2 parts but the atmosphere totally captured me anyway.. I
| can also recommend his more recent book Agency. its amazing.
| anton-c wrote:
| Necromancer was cool. Never managed to get through the other
| cyberpunk classic Snowcrash though. Did I get the right book?
| Pizza delivery?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Just my opinion, but neither were .. _revelatory_ for me. They
| were both just okay. I 'm not really an avid reader though.
| anton-c wrote:
| I mean idk when you read it, but like the author said I've
| seen this language be absorbed so I can't take it in as fresh
| innovative stuff. I was born after the novel came out so
| obviously was decades old when I read it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I did read both when they came out (in paperback anyway).
| But I know what you mean. Friends who had not read _The
| Lord of the Rings_ but saw the films can be excused for
| thinking the story was "derivative".
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| If you read Snow Crash before the age of 25 it's revelatory.
|
| 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.
| Krasnol wrote:
| There is a huge difference between both.
|
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and
| talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought
| we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should
| really read it now!"
|
| 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.
| brianjlogan wrote:
| Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim
| is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You
| may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never
| read it and went "This is garbage."
|
| In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because
| the writing was extremely grating to me.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I didn't say it doesn't have meaning. I'm saying that I
| prefer simple language around complex topics, rather than the
| other way around. As one example, the discussion of "quality"
| in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the language
| isn't difficult or opaque, but that's a concept that has
| stuck with me since I first read it in the '80s.
| mingus88 wrote:
| The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with
| dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in
| strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a
| single line of dialogue.
|
| 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.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he
| hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a
| lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the
| language, which he imitated in his works.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I was alive at that time and working in tech. That
| paragraph is not a good imitation of the atmosphere and
| cadence of the language. :-)
| tialaramex wrote:
| Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this
| discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly
| the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US
| Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what
| they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?"
| stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers
| to the question are no better than a random man on the
| street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile =>
| Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage
| fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense
| like Johnny Mnemonic.
|
| I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's
| target audience anyway, but I find it just completely
| misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or
| special forces yarn.
| gcanyon wrote:
| > The prose is the art
|
| I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over
| writing style.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| i'm not a huge long form reader, but neuromancer was quick and
| terminology reused heavily. you will pick up the slang without
| too much difficulty. i wouldn't let the sample paragraph color
| your view that heavily.
| atombender wrote:
| An interesting aspect of Neuromancer again was how obviously
| perfunctory and mechanical the plot appears when you're not as
| absorbed by the mystery of what will happen next. It's easy to
| see that Case is almost entirely a passive observer, only
| stepping in with his hacker skills for a brief mission in
| cyberspace, then not doing anything except follow the gang as
| they travel to a new location to pick up another McGuffin that
| the mysterious man with unlimited financial resources needs. It's
| creaky, but works despite its McGuffin-chasing adventure caper
| aspect because it's so well written and Case becomes a proxy for
| the reader, allowing us to observe the plot from a relative
| outsider's POV, and enjoy all the fantastic sci-fi world
| building.
|
| 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.
| gavmor wrote:
| As a creative writer, "plot" and "story" have always eluded me.
| There's something mechanical--pushing, pulling--I just can't
| seem to construct, but I know when it's missing in books.
| gerikson wrote:
| I think this is a fair analysis, but for me the pleasure of
| reading Gibson has basically always been the use of language
| and jargon. Yes, _Virtual Light_ is a stupid caper story but
| both Chevette and Berry are great characters, hard-luck
| protagonists trying to make it in a crapsack world. Berry 's
| background is especially deftly told in a few telling
| vignettes.
|
| 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.
| atombender wrote:
| Agreed. I find the books enjoyable because of the language
| and world-building, and Gibson can write good action set
| pieces and decently fleshed-out characters.
|
| 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.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren
| Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a
| significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the
| perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all
| the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best
| cyberpunk manga after Akira.
| prettyblocks wrote:
| It's a masterpiece. Surprised it hasn't been adapted as a film
| or series.
| xoxxala wrote:
| I've reread Transmetropolian more times than Neuromancer and
| Snow Crash. And I love Neuromancer and Snow Crash. It rewards
| rereads like few graphic novels. Highly recommended.
| daremon wrote:
| I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too
| many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was
| originally in Greek).
|
| 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.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Fascinating story :-).Neuromancer is a book I reread often -
| like Dune, it has a rich tapestry of background world building.
| There is nothing surprising about plot anymore, but it is like
| a place I like to return to.
| charlesrobertd wrote:
| Here's a story I wrote as a little homage to one of my
| favourite sci-fi writers, Kurt Vonnegut:
|
| https://medium.com/@highbrowscifi/ai-embracing-
| chaos-b87f757...
| theli0nheart wrote:
| This is a lovely story. Thanks for sharing.
| ilamont wrote:
| Wow. What a great story. An in translation, no less. The Greek
| translator must have been very talented.
|
| (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?)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "translated by GPT"
| grujicd wrote:
| I believe parent was talking about translated book, not
| about the comment.
| mortos wrote:
| I'm fairly certain their post is translated, they said
| the received the book in 1993 which predates GPT by at
| least a couple years
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I think they're talking about both the comment being
| translated by ChatGPT and that the book was a Greek
| translation of Neuromancer.
| daremon wrote:
| Yes exactly, I had this story written in Greek and used
| GPT to translate it. The Greek edition I read was from
| 1989.
| unsigner wrote:
| The Bulgarian translation I read was a valiant effort by a
| guy who ran the Bulgarian "science fiction and fantasy BBS".
|
| (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".
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to
| surpass the original. We Israelis also had one of our more
| famous poets (Alterman) translate some Shakespeare but I'm
| not aware of the translation being considered a masterpiece
| on its own (personally it felt too archaic to appreciate).
|
| 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.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I only read Shakespeare in the original Klingon
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Russian culture considers translated (I think)
| Shakespeare to surpass the original.
|
| 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.
| daremon wrote:
| He really tried IMO. Actually I wrote this story to him, the
| translator of the Greek edition when I happened to find him
| on Facebook. He told me he felt he didn't do justice to the
| original work and always felt a bit bad.
| daremon wrote:
| Generally I don't like translations. After the Internet
| became a thing and Amazon started shipping to Greece
| (probably after 2000) I never read Greek translations of
| English literature again.
| silenced_trope wrote:
| Nice!
|
| Did you read the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy too? What do you
| think of the other books?
| daremon wrote:
| Yes I read them and I loved them. Not the same effect of
| course, as Gibson's futuristic world was already described,
| but good nonetheless.
| slim wrote:
| I read it in 1996. and it was a t-file from a bbs. I had to sit
| in front of my 386sx everyday to read the text in dos edit. it
| took weeks. because it was in english and I was learning
| english at the same time. you gave me the urge to reread it now
| :)
| Bluestein wrote:
| > I married the girl who gave me the book
|
| Neu-romance-er :)
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| >I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids
|
| :)
|
| >but eventually we divorced 29 years later.
|
| :(
|
| >Still friends.
|
| :)
| nocoiner wrote:
| "The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified."
|
| 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).
| johngossman wrote:
| Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on
| Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by
| a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their
| works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Zanzibar holds up as well or better than Neuromancer. I
| recently reread both and Molly having a clock in her eye
| inserts really dates that one bit in Neuromancer, the chyron
| like news updates in Zanzibar call to mind todays social media
| sound/video bites.
| johngossman wrote:
| Agree. Same experience. Zanzibar (1968) is almost eerie
| sometimes.
| wpietri wrote:
| It has been a million years since I read Stand on Zanzibar,
| but that technique of giving a set of cultural snippets to
| paint a picture really stuck with me. These days I'll be
| reading news headlines or Reddit's front page and be struck
| by how easily I could compose one of those that would be
| perfect for a novel imagining our era.
|
| And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these
| "curtains for Zoosha" moments:
|
| https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/114819416384262242
|
| https://infosec.exchange/@cjust/114820379745453988
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Totally agree. "Stand on Zanzibar" has a modern-world feel to
| it although some parts have been visited by the Suck Fairy.
| "Shockwave Rider" is also interesting - IIRC characters use
| their landline phones to access large computer systems. Because
| Brunner never really goes into too many techy details - it's
| just phones and computers - it's less jarring to read now than
| books where technology-heavy authors such as Arthur C Clarke
| tried to describe in detail what future computing devices might
| look like.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Stand on Zanzibar is often mentioned for it's amazing
| predictions, but if you actually read it I would be amazed if
| you didn't think it was crap.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Neuromancer was a much easier read to me than "A scanner darkly"
| I had the same trouble physically reading it as I did with a
| picture of dorian gray. (top tip, audiobooks totally made them
| easy and enjoyable to "read")
|
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm by no means a quick reader and I devoured Neuromancer. I
| really had zero problem parsing the introduced words. Easier
| even than A Clockwork Orange.
|
| 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)
| allthedatas wrote:
| The prose immediately made me think of a clockwork orange
| when I read it way back. Two of my favorites and that is a
| big reason. Not easy to pull off.
| angry_octet wrote:
| My favourite lesser known post-Neuromancer works:
|
| 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
| j-krieger wrote:
| Thank you so much! Neuromancer had such a profound impact on my
| career and my life. I've been searching for similar works for
| years and by this point, I've read all the obvious ones twice
| over.
| ondravn wrote:
| I'll add Pat Cadigan's Synners to the list.
| mbravorus wrote:
| Synners is a very much an underappreciated jewel
| silenced_trope wrote:
| nice, anyone who provides links with their recs is top-notch!
| damontal wrote:
| The sequels got really strange and focused on voodoo god personas
| sort of running things. I probably read Neuromancer once a year
| just to revisit the place and always try to give the sequels
| another go but they just don't grab me like the original did.
| endorphine wrote:
| Any suggestions for sci-fi books everyone should read in 2025?
| mbravorus wrote:
| Read all you can grab. The more you do, the richer you will be
| (as a person, not monetarily :))
|
| 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
| greatgib wrote:
| I don't understand the success of "a scanner darkly", I had hard
| time to finish it so boring it was. There is almost not a story
| in it. Maybe the initial setup in interesting, but then it is
| like a boring action less long blabla about it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past:
| 24-hour news had been around since 1980
|
| 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.
| nebalee wrote:
| And game consoles, home computers or VCRs provided ample
| opportunities to experience this during setup when using the RF
| connector. Also, the successful 1982 Poltergeist movie had some
| very prominent scenes involving TV static.
| werdnapk wrote:
| I had static on my TV well into the 90's.
| solaire_oa wrote:
| > The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a
| dead channel.
|
| > 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).
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| "I actually composed that first image with black and white
| video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost
| painful, a whopping anachronism right at the very start of my
| career,in the imaginary future, but an invisible one,
| interestingly. One that revels a particular grace shared by all
| imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and
| into the real future where we all must go."
|
| You misunderstood from the first sentence. The rest of your
| read is similarly flawed if not worse.
| throwaway328 wrote:
| I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking
| for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European
| sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay,
| watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically
| I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting.
|
| 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.
| johngossman wrote:
| Alan Moore identifies as an anarchist (and is friends with
| Moorcock iirc). Warren Ellis also comes to mind. Yes, both work
| primarily in comics, but of the highest order.
| throwaway328 wrote:
| I've read one or two of Moore's things. Only very recently
| saw Transmetropolitan described somewhere as the best
| depiction of neoliberalism anywhere. Will definitely try
| something from Ellis soon then, thanks!
| archermarks wrote:
| Ursula K Leguin, 100%. The Dispossessed is about an anarchist
| society. Might also check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Kameron
| Hurley.
| throwaway328 wrote:
| The Dispossessed was great! I wanted to read something by
| Ursula K. Le Guin for ages, and then happened to be staying
| in a friend's house where that book happened to be on a
| bookshelf. So I'd the happy experience of just giving it a
| go, knowing nothing. And it was very good.
|
| Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though -
| thank you for sharing!
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Though not 'overtly anarchist' you might like some of Cory
| Doctorow's novels https://craphound.com/shop/
| throwaway328 wrote:
| Recently read and enjoyed Red Team Blues! It was very cool
| yes, readable and a good yarn too, straddled the line between
| "making points" and keeping the story going well I thought.
| Is there any you particularly liked or recommend?
| jmyeet wrote:
| I was very much alive in the 1980s but for no particular reason I
| never read Neuromancer at the time. No specific reason I guess
| other than I never fetishized Japanese culture. I read it back in
| the 2010s and was... underwhelmed. I see this pattern a lot: a
| given work is seminal but it doesn't tend to age well. Much of
| the accolades are based on nostalgia.
|
| 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...
| archermarks wrote:
| While I don't think you're wrong about the orientalist elements
| in Western cyberpunk, consider that Japan also produced two of
| the seminal and genre-defining works of cyberpunk (Akira and
| Ghost in the Shell).
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Never heard of it
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Turn in your geek card on your way out.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the aspects of the Sprawl world that weren't
| personally copied as much - the fuller domes over NYC and (this
| is surprisingly prominent in the book and a significant plot
| point) all the personal hologram tech.
|
| 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
| keiferski wrote:
| Agreed, I re-read the book probably once a year and almost
| inevitably stop after the first hundred pages or so. The vibes
| of the future Chiba / Sprawl are what really appeal to me, not
| so much the VR world or the space station sci-fi stuff.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| Chiba feels a little cliche now in some regards but the
| Sprawl section rules and is probably my favorite but. But the
| space station is also pretty neat and and I'm a big fan of
| the matrix/VR stuff AS LONG AS you recognize that it's
| basically a tech induced-hallucination/drug trip where you
| enter some shared alternative reality that only has a very
| tentative relationship with 1s and 0s, NOT some sort of VR
| headset thing.
| tim333 wrote:
| I still haven't read Neuromancer but just watched a video
| interview with Gibson on writing it. Entertaining if you haven't
| seen it https://youtu.be/x6QH5ixsEEU
| wrp wrote:
| Cyberpunk got the future exactly wrong. In the 1980s, being into
| computer technology meant being into hardware. You could scrounge
| it and tinker with it, and had to be clever and highly motivated
| to do that. Cyberpunk took the computer geek themes of
| cleverness, effort, and hardware and added heavy
| antiestablishmentism.
|
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| In the 1980s, many kids had new computers, but most were just
| playing games rather than programming, despite having to type a
| few commands to load and run them.
|
| 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.
| margalabargala wrote:
| On the other hand, I could see this causing a resurgence of
| exactly that same aesthetic. Software will be eaten by LLMs and
| computers will remain ubiquitous, but hardware for now remains
| where it was. Specialized, niche, and able to be combined into
| something cool only by someone knowledgeable.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interesting how many people mention that Gibson's prose is
| stilted.
|
| 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.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| Great read - it's nice to see something I take for granted with
| fresh eyes (I think I've read all the Gibson). The fact that it's
| someone steeped in the genre humble enough to go back to a
| foundational text is a great device for explaining it.
|
| 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.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| William Gibson seems so prescient at times.
|
| Wonderful writing, I love Neuromancer & Count Zero is superb as
| well, like many others of his books.
| newsclues wrote:
| "In an age of affordable beauty..." is the quote that keeps
| popping in my mind
| gpete wrote:
| not a lot of memories of Neuromancer it seemed to me to be
| created as "Japanese" style of life culture story set in the
| future...in my mind it segues into The Matrix and Terminator.....
| gpete wrote:
| matrix, terminator merge with my thoughts of Neuromancer.....
| jlundberg wrote:
| People who like Neuromancer would probably enjoy reading Snow
| Crash by Neal Stephenson.
| viccis wrote:
| It's funny to read it after playing Cyberpunk 2077 (or the
| tabletop game setting) and realize that almost everything is just
| lifted from Neuromancer, often not even bothering to come up with
| new jargon.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Obligatory reminder to listen to the audiobook read by Gibson
| himself.
|
| 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.
| nycdotnet wrote:
| If you want to experience the Neuromancer vibe (but not story
| line), in 2025, from a contemporaneous source, I can't recommend
| the Commodore 64 adaptation enough.
| sevensor wrote:
| As I say every time Gibson comes up, cyber is just a setting.
| Punk is the whole point. While you can certainly read Neuromancer
| in isolation, it's worth reading the bridge trilogy and even Zero
| History to see how this plays out in different settings.
| theodric wrote:
| Well, time to burn some karma: my wife and I listened to it in
| unabridged audiobook form on a drive back from Norway to the
| Netherlands about 10 years ago, and at the end we both agreed we
| weren't really sure what had happened. It seemed to meander quite
| a lot and got lost in its own sauce.
|
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| For me, reading sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, my pantheon was (in no
| particular order):
|
| 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.
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