I’m constantly amazed at how Metaverse aficionados quote Snow Crash and and other 1990s works as cornerstones of cyberspace, when Gibson invented the term and Neuromancer was written in 1984. Gibson is the original. The passage where Case connects to the matrix (also a Gibson term) again for the first time once his nervous system is repaired is heartbreakingly beautiful. I relate to it as a young phone phreak growing up in South Africa in the 80s and 90s when I would bluebox the home country direct phone trunks to connect to BBSs in the USA. When I could not get through, usually because they were filtering my seize tones, I felt the same deprivation. And when I finally connected I felt the same elation Case feels in this scene…
“Please, he prayed, now—
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now—
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”
By the time I read either book I'd been on the 90s internet for years, and I couldn't recognize it at all in Neuromancer, but I could see it turning into something like Snow Crash. Neuromancer aged faster because the technology evolved very differently (like the 3D real-world-but-never-popular interface in Jurassic Park, for that matter). So the metaverse people are pitching looks more like Snow Crash's "avatars interacting in a world that's otherwise immediately recognizable" than Neuromancer's "stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems" not just because Snow Crash is more prominent, but because it clicks more directly with people.
The Snow Crash metaverse is infinitely more relatable to most people than the Neuromancer one. (And bonus points when it comes to being widespread, the novel is a lower-effort read. Which isn't a comment on quality... the genres are COMPLETELY different so I don't think that's really a reasonable comparison anyway.)
A crucial difference is that Gibson hasn't the faintest idea about the actual technology - he wrote the early stuff on a typewriter - whereas Stephenson has a least a rudimentary understanding. For lots of readers this doesn't make any difference, but if you actually have some idea what's going on Gibson's approach interferes with the immersion more than Stephenson's.
This has some impact on predictive power too. One reason people tried to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that - more or less, you actually could imagine building that. My friend's daughter talks to the AI, and is learning to read stuff on a glowing screen that knows her name. She doesn't have an abusive step-father, and so fortunately her glowing screen won't need to teach her martial arts for people who are smaller and less powerful than their opponent, and about the importance of running away when there's no way to win. And hopefully her mother will remain a loving physical presence in her life. But the general thrust of the idea in the Primer makes sense, even if we aren't close to "really" building the Primer, ideas from Gibson don't make so much sense.
To me I think it's the opposite -- the fact that Neuromancer's technology isn't just a version of what we have makes is what makes it timeless. Kind of how Star Wars tech from 1977 seems less dated than in most SF movies because it wasn't based on real tech. Snow Crash is so obviously just 1992 technology with a coat of paint -- Stephenson obviously played MUDs and that's all his virtual world is -- a MUD. And so it hasn't aged well as MUDs weren't the future.
I guess in some sense I agree that "MUDs weren't the future" but they are in fact all that anybody keeps building. Facebook's "Metaverse" is just a shitty MUD, likewise for various "Blockchain" projects that produce some sort of virtual land where you... sort of stand around. The art project I visited at the weekend with a friend had a VR environment which was too limited to really be much of a MUD, but it certainly wasn't anything more than a MUD.
Science Fiction isn't necessarily about "a version of what we have" but it is about the What If? question and fantasy stories don't address that. Unexpected consequences are the story seed in good SF. Asimov in the 1950s notes that a good SF story predicts not the automobile but the traffic jam. That's where I think Stephenson is good and Gibson has nothing to tell me.
Star Wars says Space Wizards fighting laser sword battles may not vanquish Evil and I'm like OK, cool, but so what? Diamond Age (in some sense a sequel to Snow Crash) has a bunch of interesting things to say about society, about what parenthood means, about Cultural Imperialism, and about what we/how we teach children.
I'd argue that Gibson had the most important social prediction in cyberpunk -- one that we kind of ignore today because it became true. In Gibson's future, the real conflicts are not between national governments but between rival tech companies. Obviously Gibson made the mistake common in the 1980s that the tech companies would be Japanese rather than from US or China, but the key prediction was insightful. Later cyberpunk authors like Stephenson also often have megacorps, but they obviously took them from Gibson.
The Vicky companies in Diamond Age are basically John Company, the British East India Company, I think it even more or less says as such, calling it John Zaibatsu. The Victorians appear to live in a plutocracy, but it's very particularly a Victorian plutocracy, we don't see any poor Vickies, the thetes living down in the LT are not Victorians and nor are the artisans on the hillside. The nature of the Mandarins is unclear, whether Doctor X is unusual in operating an actual business close to the LT, or whether actually the Middle Kingdom, too, is controlled by businesses and the Mandarins are the owners.
And as to the idea that it became true, well, here in the real world it is Russia that invaded Ukraine and not an invasion by Gazprom or whoever. The sovereign entities are still fundamentally concrete in a way that a corporation is not.
The Fists in Diamond Age may in some sense be tools of the Mandarins, but certainly the Mouse Army don't work for anybody except Princess Nell, their loyalty to her has been blended into all their learning from infancy, almost without anybody consciously intending this (Hackworth is ultimately responsible, but if/why Hackworth chooses Nell rather than his own daughter is unclear, we don't see enough of the other copies of the Primer to discern whether the other two girls could have led the Mouse Army, the novel is about Nell).
The land war between Russia and Ukraine that's happening right now, and the decade+ of land war the US waged in the Middle East before that, make me think any bickering between Google and Apple still look worlds away from corporate-conflict dystopia (of course, this is a critique that also applies to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, which were corp-heavy).
There's a whole chain of this thinking in SF. Asimov was the first to use the analogy in the 1950s though he never chooses the exact phrase "traffic jam":
Pohl in the late 1960s acknowledges that he isn't the first to have this idea, but does actually use "traffic jam": “Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam”
I rather like Heinlein who a little earlier (1966) suggests SF would have predicted something more interesting, instead of car -> traffic jam, Heinlein says good SF would have predicted car -> teenage fumblings in borrowed car.
The writing is beautiful, but I think Neuromancer has failed to capture a modern audience due to some of the stylistic choices Gibson makes (I’m not necessarily arguing they are bad decisions - I personally enjoyed the style - although I think one could argue that).
For instance, Gibson frequently skips exposition, and he delivers the narrative with a disconnected, stream-of-consciousness feel that is meant to evoke the sense of disconnection when “channel-hopping” or digging through large amounts of information on the internet. Combined with the frenetic pace of the story it can be confusing if the reader isn’t paying close attention. I’ll add that this was also Gibson’s first novel.
Compare to Snow Crash, which has a pulpier writing style (it was original envisioned as a graphic novel) or even The Matrix, which has a tight narrative. Those are more accessible to a mainstream audience.
I have to disagree, Snow Crash is interminably long, like most of Stephenson's books. Neuromancer's whole Ocean's 11 Straylight run job is a very clean story.
edit: A lot of Gibson's stream of consciousness writing style can be attributed to the effect of beat writers like Burroughs on him. It's unique but it's also an intentional stylistic decision. Not really an attempt to capture the aesthetics of logging into the net. And as you may know, Snow Crash may seem pulpier but Gibson grew up on pulp like Edgar Rice Burroughs and it affected his work a bit.
To each his own, but I don’t think the length of the book has anything to do with the clarity of the narrative. And I’m definitely not arguing that Stephenson writes novels that are less confusing than Gibson in general (I liked Anathem! But cmon) I’m just arguing that the style in Snow Crash spells out what’s going on more literally than in Neuromancer.
I'm not using this reply to agree or disagree, I just want to share this piece of internet archeology with you. If you're interested in comparing and contrasting great cyberpunk authors, the esteemed Rudy Rucker himself did this in an interview with punk-cyber legend R U Sirius (of R U A Cyberpunk? meme fame) on his blog back in the day
https://www.acceler8or.com/2012/02/cyberpunk-sfmathematics-l...
Yes, Gibson came out of 60’s counter culture and was his style is a kind of like a pop version of William Burroughs - a writer who, in the late 70s and early 80s had an enormous and overreaching influence on younger writers.
As an interesting aside, There’s an old Canadian documentary film about Rochdale and the hippie scene in Toronto, shot around 1970, that, by pure chance, features a very young William Gibson well before he had published anything - I stumbled across this by chance in the York University film archives about 30 years ago - no idea if it’s available anywhere online and may no longer exist anymore.
I remember having just read Neuromancer and in the same month happened to watch that exact documentary with Gibson a nobody wandering around in Toronto
I found Snow Crash to be really childish, and not even in the same league as Neuromancer.
I read Neuromancer originally in 1984 and again a few years ago, and for me it still holds up. It's not the greatest book or anything, and I found Count Zero to be much better, but apart from those two books I've yet to read anything else cyberpunkish that comes even remotely close.
Before someone mentions Greg Egan or Vernor Vinge, as they have elsewhere in the thread, I read a lot by these authors and didn't like them either. Way too dry, boring, and unimaginative for me. I know some people love them, but they're just not for me.
Snow Crash is in many places meant to be intentionally silly and absurdist as an extrapolated, exaggerated satire on contemporary American lifestyle at the time it was written, such as in the users manual for the "Reason" railgun
And it is pretty obviously referring to 1992 current events. To modern readers L. Bob Rife is just a funny villain, but he was obviously a parody of 1992 outsider US Presidential Candidate H. Ross Perot.
I found Neuromancer and and Count Zero eminently forgettable. I never read Snow Crash, so I can't really speak to it though I've read a half dozen of Neal Stephenson's other novels, all of which I found rich with ideas. While I appreciate the literary style, I honestly can't remember the plot of either Neuromancer or Count Zero.
Here's an example I remember from some Vinge novel ("A Fire Upon the Deep" maybe) I read decades ago: some ancient species/entities were supposed to have transcended a long time ago. What did that transcendence consist of? Where did they go? What's their life like after transcendence? Vinge gives the reader nothing. I call that a failure of the imagination.
Yes, I get that the post-singularity world is supposed to unpredictable/unimaginable in principle... but it's the author's job to imagine it anyway, else why am I even bothering to read his books on the singularity? If he doesn't/can't imagine it, I judge it a failure and a disappointment.
I don't remember details about Egan's work, except that nothing in it seemed particularly interesting and nothing wowed me... hence I really can't remember much about it except the premises of some of his novels, like Permutation City.
This is contrary to works by authors like Gibson, Herbert, and Dick, for instance, which I'll never forget. They're just leagues ahead of lesser authors like Vinge and Egan.
Well, he doesn't know. Most of Vinge's works were about getting close to the Singularity without crossing over, because he expected that technology and society would change massively and unpredictably at that time.
The point of introducing the fantasy element of the Zones of Thought was to allow Vinge to write a FTL space opera without having to deal with post-Singularity speculation.
When species transcended, they left the Beyond and went into the Transcend.
Wow. Wild Palms.... I don't hear that one mentioned often (or ever). Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's seen this weird, obscure, flawed gem of a series.
This finally came out on Bluray not long ago. I remember seeing part of this in the early 90s and was trying to try and find it again forever but it was never available.
And to go with it, The Wild Palms Reader, which has all kinds of little columns, clips, and so forth. I have the Blu-Ray and the Reader sitting in my "COVID Isolation Hotel Media Crate," waiting for the day I test positive.
I couldn't even finish Snow Crash. The fact the protagonist's name was "Hiro Protagonist" is a good example of the intellectual tone of the novel. Every character reminded me of Poochy from The Simpsons, an over-written "edgy" anti-hero, as compelling as an episode of Saved By The Bell.
Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.
I enjoyed it, but it must be read with that in mind - every character is a caricature, and the dystopia they live in is that way too.
If you don't take it as being serious in any way (other than in its satire of cyberpunk and its lambasting of a corporate-owned American future), I find it quite enjoyable.
But it is a satire. I hope :)
(Market Forces by Richard Morgan is another book I very much enjoyed, which is also very much this way)
Same, I actually tried reading Snow Crash on my kindle a month ago. I've read pretty much all of Gibson and found Snow Crash too... corny? I gave up at about the point where some autonomous dog thing died. Sci-fi is like vi / emacs preferences I guess.
In 2013 at my 30 year HS reunion, I was talking to another student. He'd gone from being in the "jock" click to being a very cool artist in college. We got talking about literature and cyberpunk. He said that if I liked Gibson then I should read Stephenson - as he is the "continuation of the genre". The next year while visiting family in Portland, OR. I saw Snow Crash at a bookstore and bought it. My daughter read it while we were there and, as she thoroughly enjoyed it, I read it upon returning home. Then she and I, during a college trip, listened to the audio book. I've since read the book a second time and also listed to the audio book a second time. I have read at least 6 of his books since. I have thanked my HS friend since then for introducing me to the Neal Stephenson.
It always confuses me when I hear much older people (I'm 34) mention Snow Crash and never Gibson's works. Younger people would be more understandable, but a handful of the tech podcasts I use for background noise at work are staffed by 50-70 year old tech folk that grew up with Gibson.
To be honest, the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts of Neuromancer that hold up least well. The dirtbags, crime, sex, and drugs are all still perfect, and I imagine will remain so.
Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we still don't have "professional road surfers", but that doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant:
"Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball joint. As the wheel rolls, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it. If you surf over a pothole, the rubber prongs probe its asphalt depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds, smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right - you cannot be a professional road surfer without smartwheels."
It is campy and frequently cheesy, and I think probably influenced somewhat by anime which was in the 80s and early 90s both very different from what it is now, and still in the US a very niche sort of taste in that you had to be somewhat "plugged in" even to have heard about it - it wouldn't hit more widely until the mid- to late-90s Web boom made awareness and access much more broadly available.
That's part of the fun in my view, but it's equally fair just not to like it - de gustibus etc. Or maybe it's just a timing thing; I first read it when I was young and it was new, and maybe that has as much to do as anything with why I liked it so well and still regard it fondly.
I don't think you're an outlier really. IMHO the problem with Snow Crash is that it hasn't aged well. I enjoyed it in the mid-90s, but I recently re-read it, and found it hard to get through (until the very end, anyway). It feels like a frozen-in-time product of the early 90s in a lot of ways, not just in terms of the technological outlook but also with respect to some of the social aspects addressed in the book. There's also very little character development; at one point, for example, a character kills another character in a bar over a threat, and at no point later on does he experience any kind of mental or moral anguish over his first experience of killing.)
Neuromancer on the other hand has aged incredibly well. The ICE tech doesn't make much sense, but the characters feel honest and real, and so many actual contemporary issues (AI ethics, transhumanism, transgender issues, mass surveillance, anonymous coordinated activism, economic oligarchs heading into space, even a tank war in Europe!) resonate throughout the book in ways that don't feel dated.
The commentary I've read (and agree with), is that the metaverse itself just didn't hold up.
The internet did not become a new reality. Instead, our own reality is melding with the internet through always-on devices and miniaturized sensors and wide wireless networks.
Instead of some kind of digital lovecraftian portals hidden away in parts of realspace that connect to this magical deadly realm, the modern vision of cyperbpunk should probably have included something more like an ethereal plane -- a perfect mirror of the real world that happens to ignore its physical constraints and provide ways to manipulate and bypass the realspace.
Wasn't it Gibson himself who wrote this, right in the beginning of Zero History if I'm not mistaken, when Cayce is meeting with some French artist in a warehouse in the outskirts of Oakland? The artist is making an augmented reality installation of a cyber whale that you can see in real life with mirrorshades.
And then the artist says 'the internet is e-ver-ting'.
Hollis met a Canadian artist (Chombo) in Hollywood that made a giant squid (Architeuthis) that could be seen with a visor rig... in Spook Country. They love and discuss the internet plenty.. since none of this matches what you remember, perhaps it's a reoccurring theme.
Memory bit rot, I'll have to re read the trilogy now..
Chombo says "Somebody told me that cyberspace was 'everting'. That was how she put it." (Spook Country, pp. 64). Feel like the girl he is referring to may be the one I'm thinking of. Must be Pattern Recognition.
I love Gibson but prefer the Bridge Trilogy over the Sprawl Trilogy. It's a lot closer to what you're describing, and the characters are way more interesting. Characters in the Sprawl seem so two-dimensional to me.
The Bridge trilogy is fantastic but as a fun counterpoint I respectfully refer to you the two deuteragonists of the _first book_, Berry Rydell is a huge meathead and Chevette Washington has less depth than Snow Crash's Y.T., to me, which is saying something.
The data analyst guy who ends up obsessing over the VR idol and ends up in a cardboard box in the Tokyo subway is super super interesting. Probably my favorite part of the whole trilogy. If I am not mistaken, Gibson actually took a lot of inspiration for that character from his own experiences with photography. The ability to intuitively line up the right F-stop, shutter speed, and film speed with a scene and natural light in a second is the inspiration for the way the analyst intuitively senses 'nodes' in a social network.
And I personally think that it is this notion that led the author to write about causality in the Peripheral-Agency series.
Depends on your criteria, I guess. As a poetic fantasy, they are superb. But it's maddening how little sense they make as a way to navigate computer networks. (Why would you visualize servers and executing code in a 3D space that you have to physically navigate, when you could just... execute a command. Gibson's genius was recognizing that real computer hacking wasn't cinematic, and making up his own system.)
I think that’s mostly because he didn’t know anything about computers when he wrote it :)
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful.
“So I was listening to it as an English honours student. I would take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a world from those bricks. Consequently there are other things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.”
His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently metaverse-like:
The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine" – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe."
It makes no sense now, but there were endless experiments with physical metaphors for interacting with computers. At the time it was just not settled that this was not right around the corner and workable.
One depiction of cyberspace that's stuck with me is that of the datumplane in Dan Simmons' Hyperion (Chapter 5). It's only a few pages' worth of content, but it's by far the closest description conceptually to Gibson's cyberspace. Notably, the datumplane is envisioned as a highly organic realm at all scales, not restricted to cyberspace's cubes and hard edges. Both contain structures corresponding to the large-scale organization of their societies' data and programs.
And didn't Gibson write the screenplay for the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic where they coined the term iPhone in that one random scene for two seconds? Or did I imagine that?
Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:
Neuromancer isn't really my kind of scifi but Gibson's descriptions are so good and poetic I get the urge to re-read select chapters at least a few times every year.
Neuromancer's opening line is probably one of the most remembered first sentences in american fiction. Every friend of mine who read the book, most of them in the 90's, seem to remember it verbatim.
Now that I think of it, do younger people know what he's talking about? I mean, at some point dead channels changed from the noisy grayscale beehive-like granulates to a still blue screen.
It's always been my understanding that a tv tuned to a dead channel was that solid grey color, like when the transmitter is powered on but there is no picture being sent. In other words, not the same thing as just setting the receiver to a frequency with no transmission (static)
All the people I know who've read the novel agree with me that it was supposed to mean static. I wonder if anyone asked Gibson about this, since the advent of the blue screens.
One thing I read somewhere -- and it might have been an interview with Gibson or with someone else talking about his work -- is how much William Gibson despises derivatives of cyberpunk in the books, videogames and movies that followed.
Specifically, he dislikes the focus on the aesthetic, neon lights, mirror shades, etc. I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then.
I think he means we need a different kind of critique now, not anchored to neon lights and vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics which look like what the 80s thought the future would be. And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it.
That said, I love that aesthetic myself, and have no problem being stuck in the past. But I see his point.
I think the aesthetic, whether Gibson likes it or not, is interesting & compelling enough to stand on its own, outside of any specific or inherent social commentary. Though I agree that as an environment for stories its no longer well suited to commentary on society today. Some of what he envisioned has become mundane parts of everyday life, in some form or another. Others never much materialized. For the former, well, mundane doesn't cut it if you're after edge-walking commentary on society's direction at the intersection of technology and human behavior.
Charles Stross's early works came in at tail end of cyberpunk, lets call it the silver age, and to me they read like they're trying to find a way forward for the genre, and he ultimately decided that wasn't the way to go. So he branched out from there, including to near-future sci-fi. This was ultimately a dead end because he kept finding that, no matter how strange the plot, by the time a manuscript was really starting to take its final form he was already proven right by current events. And publishing schedules being what they are, his book wouldn't hit shelves until a year or more later at which point they'd read like derivative commentary on year++ old events. Essentially, his predictions were pretty good, but his expected timeline was far too generous: the future was coming too fast. All of his work is worth reading though, and I think his Laundry Files & Merchant series would appeal to different, somewhat overlapping sets of HN readers. For one of the most interesting mind fck time travel stories, check out his short work Palimpsest.
Strongly recommend the Laundry files. Note that they start rougher (hewing very close to the original concept of "grumpy sysadmin in weird circumenstances") but quickly mature into more.
Pretty sure Mr. Stross is a regular around here. I personally couldn't warm up too much to his Laundry or Merchant Princes books, but Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are excellent, and Accelrando was also fun.
> Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world's first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk curled up and died).
You're right on in your first sentence. Aesthetics trump message when art reaches wide popularity.
... I swear that I used the word "trump" above unintentionally, but my example for this is Trump rallies using music from bands like Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young and R.E.M. The music contains messages that explicitly speak against the type of political power being wielded, and! the artists themselves speak up about how much they despise the people using their music. The fact that the message is being misused couldn't be clearer. But the people using it are there for the aesthetic: the general sound and feeling of being rebels, ahead of the curve, etc.
And honestly I think that's a good thing. Creative reuse results in good and bad; jazz and Christian rock. Creators can't control their art once it's in the public, and the world would be a smaller place if they could.
Sorry I didn't reply to the part about Charles Stross, it looks like an interesting commentary but I'm not familiar enough with Stross in particular.
Anybody who was/is as rich as he was even when he started is inherently a part of the political establishment, especially so when you don't just stay low and mind your own business (see: Bezos' impact on unions in the US)
He wasn't when he ran; he is now; neither fact matters at all for the point, which is that the message of the art (the songs being used in campaign events) was being misused / destroyed, by direct testimony of the artists. Same as Gibson saying he doesn't approve of how his cyberpunk message is being used.
> I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then.
I'd argue that another game released in 2020 understood the "punk" part of cyberpunk much better than CP2077 -- Umurangi Generation. Instead of giving you a gun, the game gives you a camera, and tells you to go out and document how everyday people are reacting to the end of the world. The game was primarily inspired by the early 2020 brushfires in Australia, while its add-on DLC pack Macro was heavily influenced by the protests following the death of George Floyd, and both heavily criticize how the state misleads, reassures, and generally fails to respond to dire situations.
I’ve come to disregard Gibson’s disdain for deviated works. Disregarding Gibson’s authority and deviating on his art in a way that pleases the creator is very punk in spirit.
In his defense, there are few things more punk than disdain for derivatives and veneration for originality and progenitors. Punks are a conservative bunch. They're still playing the same records from 50 years ago like they came out today.
Honestly, the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with less than any real messaging behind it. I guess to say it more plainly it's what you see the rock or rap genres of today as. While very few people "innovate" just like the music industry the writing industry is a monopoly full of those whose only interest is in revenue generation and shiny lights rather than the actual message. While it may be fun to rather generalize and insult others to put on the face of superiority. Maybe think bigger.
> "the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with less than any real messaging behind it"
Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore. Now it's just a trope. So I disagree with what some are saying that cyberpunk is currently used to convey a message; it's not, in general. It's used to convey a trope that's lost most of its barb.
>Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.
I have to express a hard disagree here. I think the message can be made at higher or lower resolutions, in vague or deep ways, and can comment not just on broad vague themes but in deep ways about specific mechanisms.
The merit and pertinence of the message as radical criticism is going to have everything to do with ground level execution of details, depth of world building, clarity of vision, etc., which will turn out different depending on any particular media.
I do think it's fair to say that most things downwind from Neuromancer can be fairly assessed as tropey, but I think that's a sturgeon's law thing rather than something unique about the genre as distinct from other genres.
> evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.
It seems like you would have to go pretty far back to find a time where that would be a genuinely radical message. The 19th century saw the trusts and rail barons. There was also the East India Trading Company and its affect on India.
I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.
I think in retrospect you can say what you said. But think about your stereotypical grandfather whose big ambition was to be a company man, to work his way through life and be rewarded with a modest pension and a reasonably comfortable retirement. Think also about the fact that while in the US this is less of a dream now, in Japan this sentiment seems alive and well.
Your sterotypical grandfather who worked 9-5 and earned enough every five years to buy a new house in a relatively middle-of-the-road job did so because of a prosperity boom following WW2 which was built on the back of repairing economic hardship and was a rather unique time in history even for being a boom portion of the cycle. Compare that to your father working in the 70s where twice annual cost-of-living adjustments to account for rapid inflation were the norm - or the 1920s and earlier in America where the majority of people suffered under absolutely atrocious working conditions and lived entire lives trapped in debt cycles to a single company.
It ebbs and it flows - there are times in history you can fondly remember for their plenty and times you can remember for their scarcity.
The only really new trend, IMO, is that in the modern world (I think for the first time ever) working continuously for the same company is a financial trap. The strangest innovation of the current day is that churn is accepted and retaining skilled employees is de-emphasized compared to... hiring new replacement employees with less skill. This incredibly bonkers habit has gained wide enough acceptance that it's sort of the default business state.
> I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.
A quote from one of the RPGnet moderators, something to the effect of...
"Transhumanism is about how technology will fundamentally reshape how we live, and how we perceive what it means to be human. Cyberpunk is how it won't."
>Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.
"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less disney shit for this reason alone.
It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming true goes away.
Well, but evil evolves and the pitfalls of society do too. You cannot stick to representations of the past. Also, cyberpunk was supposed to be a vision of the future (used as an excuse to look at the then-present time)!
More books and games about how evil the Nazis were, unless presented in an innovative way, feel derivative and boring to me.
I don't think Gibson would object to a cyberpunk game that went beyond the aesthetics and merely replicating a message that has become a trope.
> "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
...or helps a dictator dehumanize the population of a country he wants to conquer for propaganda purposes.
Yeah, so creating a nazi military batallion out of a nazi paramilitary to fight an ethnic civil war against Russians may not have been the genius military move Poroshenko thought it was :(
Yeah, so you're basically pushing Putin's narrative, which is bullshit.
The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.
Putin's narrative? The Ukrainian government are entirely open about what Azov is.
Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it.
It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, which is an interesting hill to choose to die on.
No, I'm saying that the use of Nazi paramilitaries is not in fact a cause of the Russian invasion. It has certainly been a welcome opener for Russian propagandists, but they're using the Nazi card so indiscriminately that they never really needed it. To the Russian propaganda, every Ukrainian who doesn't welcome the invaders enthusiastically (which nowadays includes the vast majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians) is a Nazi.
> "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
Hows that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains.
People forgot how popular the Nazis were, both in the US and elsewhere. And no one can really articulate why they're popular now outside of "day racis", which is a thought terminating cliche.
>"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
It's enabled people like Valdimir Putin, who managed to invade a country on the grounds that it's full of Nazis.
>> Honestly, the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with less than any real messaging behind it.
Yes, well, like punk-punk. See Jello Biaffra and The Melvins, "Those dumb punk kids will buy anything":
Plenty of punks are making and listening to new music. Your nearest major city undoubtedly has a punk scene in which people play shows, record and put out each other's albums, and otherwise build a community very much focused on the present and future. Are they stuck 50 years in the past or is your idea of them?
Cyberpunk 2077 receives too much grief for its rejection of the mainstream state of affairs, making it quite punk. IMHO.
The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner loves who they are and not what they look like).
And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a hot commodity.
The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, plastic and superficial culture.
Sorry to gatekeep but corporate produced anything cannot be punk. At most, they can serve as a rent seeker for passing along punk to the masses but that's not even what Cyberpunk 2077 is. This is 100% corporate, focus grouped, committee approved, beige trying too hard to be punk. Which is fine if taken for what it really is but what it really is, which isn't punk.
Calling something corporate is far too vague for any sort of meaningful qualification. Neuromancer was published by Ace a subsidiary of Penguin - thus making it the product of the corporate machine.
I will whole hardily agree that corporations manage to water down a lot of interesting things to drive mass market appeal but building something interesting within a corporation doesn't negate its message. We live in a world where 90%[1] of genuine political discussion happens hosted by either Google, Facebook or Reddit - those are our forums for discussion in the modern world.
I'd also just briefly disagree with litmus testing and gatekeeping as generally useful concepts - in almost all the cases they're applied they're used to try and reduce a complex spectrum discussion into a binary choice (aka capital punishment, weed legalization, abortion legality) and they add nothing of value - merely providing an easier tool to help clump a wide discussion into the theming of Us vs. Them.
1. I have no facts for this but I think it's a reasonable ballpark.
Try to gatekeep all you want; but punks failed to defend their anti-corporate credibility and not only tolerated, but embraced corporate appropriation of their culture. They rode out punk's credibility while riding on boards from Zumies, wearing Hot Topic, and listening to Sum 41 .
CDPR is about as authentic as you'll find in high-budget video game development; and as I enjoy high-fidelity entertainment, as well as Pondsmith's take on Cyberpunk, I quite enjoyed CP2077.
It's tragic that you refer (erroneously) to "punks" so firmly in the past tense, while awarding credibility to a company best known for its exploitative overtime practices. How's the view from Arasaka Tower?
It's best known for its award-winning games and its digital distribution network.
The alleged egregious overtime was acknowledged as a voluntary undertaking by several team members, and it seems as though the journalists didn't bother to investigate into the allegations they received from a couple of complainers and opted to report them at face value. The subsequent response from the company affirmed my understanding, where they publicly apologized for bugs, reported to shareholders about their efforts to correct internal development processes, and so forth.
As though working an extra 8h a week during the final months before a hard deadline is either unheard of or intolerable. There was no exodus of talent from CDPR.
Yes. When a movement whose entire thesis is "fuck the establishment" gets co-opted by the establishment, it becomes invalid as a movement, a hollow and pathetic shell of itself. Punk is anti-society, anti-religion, anti-government, anti-authority, anti-conformity, anti everything, even anti-music to a degree. Its relevance died as soon as the last punk lived past 30 and it became old people music. Just another style to buy at Hot Topic.
Then there is no punk now. Every inch of life within society has been co-opted by moneymen.
You, by living in society, are not punk. The novels you label as punk are not punk because they are made for profit, advertised to appease and sedate a sense of counterculture, and bought with money made from corporate work.
Chan manifestos are the only thing that might qualify.
I liked Paolo Bagciaglupi's "The Calorie Man" (which I read in "Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology") as an example of this kind of "if we project today's state of affairs 30 years into the future, what is the dystopia it produces?" line of reasoning.
The story is about megacorporations greedily controlling the supply of food via patents on GMO crops in a post-peak-oil society. There's no artificial general intelligence lurking in the electrons to save or doom us, just the consequences of our own choices.
I read a scathing review by a Thai that accused Bacigalupi of engaging in Orientalism, which of course he was. And still, not being Thai myself, I enjoyed the novel immensely, thought its greater themes were very interesting, and I think it wasn't dismissive of Thai culture, even if it dealt in stereotypes.
I suppose Gibson is guilty of this as well, only with the Japanese instead of Thai. It doesn't bother me.
Oh, I'm well acquainted with Bacigalupi's work and I think he is not writing mere derivatives, but actually updating the concerns and doing something interesting with them. The aesthetic is completely different as well.
I've no idea if Gibson has read Bacigalupi or what he thinks of his work, but I am definitely a fan!
CP2077 appears shallow on the surface. Compared to Deus Ex the gameplay feels shallow. Story wise though... I'm not sure playing as a terrorist who detonated a nuke in a city and rose from the dead to finish the job is well within the "playing it safe" area of current storytelling.
And, honestly, outside of the main story the setting is absolutely dripping with theme and care - buggy the game may be, but poorly written it is not (in most cases - there were definitely some misses).
Hell, cyberpsychosis, a pretty plot-minor series of encounters, delves into one of the more interesting considerations in the game. That a fair number of people are unable to handle the implant tech at all and lose their ability to function in a balanced way - each encounter has a harrowing series of notes about the person degrading into insanity and each is just sort of... ignored by most of the people around it and accepted as a cost of technological advancement.
I know the devs get a lot of hate, but I think that there is a whole lot of heart and soul poured into that game.
I picked it up on sale after the recent 1.5 big huge update and after something like 75 hours, I haven't really encountered any glaring bugs and have loved it. Glad I didn't pick it up at launch otherwise my opinion may have been soured.
I picked it up at launch and still shoved 120 hours into it, finishing it, before taking a break. I never experienced much more than two or three quest-breaking bugs requiring a reload; lucky I guess.
Doing a replay now after 1.5 and the new stuff is good
I remember seeing people complain that CP2077 wasn't punk because you could do jobs for the police and get paid for it... Which to me is actually incredibly punk in message. Sure the character might not be punk, but the suggestion that in the future we will have people basically getting hit jobs from the cops via an app like they were uber drivers is incredibly dystopian and punk in message to me
Neuromancer was a critique of the era that birthed it. Reagan might be gone, but the frameworks cemented into place back then are still the same frameworks we operate under today. Gibson may have unintentionally been predicting the future. As the world further aligns with the cyberpunk dystopia, the mainstreaming of cyberpunk aesthetic is inevitable.
I'm reminded of that line in The Matrix when Neo breaks The Oracle's vase, "What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"
As Gibson himself has said, science fiction is a commentary on the moment in which it's written, and almost never succeeds in predicting the future. That doesn't mean it can't help shape the future (which I think Neuromancer did, at least a little). But that's a different thing.
The fun thing is I read the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies over the past year and oh my effing my how extremely accurate some of his extrapolations turned out to be. So rare and unusual, but post-2016 could not have turned out much different I guess
Ironically, focusing criticism on the aesthetics is itself "staying shallow". Much cyberpunk media does serve as a critique of the status quo or an imagined future dystopia, as I assume he would prefer, but with some neon on the surface.
I don't think Gibson minds the aesthetic in particular; what he is saying, if I understand him correctly, is that nobody cares about cyberpunk except for the aesthetic. There's nothing beyond it. If there is something, it's the same old tropes about big bad evil 80s-style corporations, usually with a vague Japanese or Asian theme. Everything that was novel about cyberpunk has now been absorbed into the mainstream and has become just another trope to be used by videogame/movie/anime authors.
I would argue that reading, today, absolutely is punk. When the main-stream is delivered at a sixth grade level, in 15 second sound bites with talking heads or funny dances behind it. . . what is more punk that being extraordinarily well-read?
>what is more punk that being extraordinarily well-read
Having recently been to several punk rock shows (read: damp basement noise fests), I'd say: having a blue collar job, being against "the system", doing copious amounts of cocaine and speed on their time off, and having their entire body blasted with tattoos such as a hand flipping you off, a trash can overflowing with garbage, and many insults. I thought this particular kind of people didn't exist anymore, but no, they're still alive and moshing in the basements of most cities.
I'm not entirely convinced of that attitude; plenty of science fiction in a cyberpunk setting have strong underlying messages, of e.g. personal identity, capitalism, privacy, overpopulation, sex work, drugs, classism, AI, environment / global warming, etc; some of the big names there would be (imo, I'm no expert and I can't think of much) Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, The Matrix, some episodes of Love Death & Robots and even Black Mirror, to name a few.
This is contrary to numerous interviews where Gibson praises aesthetic and for example, says that Blade Runner spot-on nailed what he was going for with Neuromancer. Gibson all throughout Neuromancer equally himself focuses, almost hyper-focuses on surface textures and visual aesthetic to juxtapose antique forms and purpose with high tech modern materials. It would seemingly be at odds for him to not like aesthetic and neon and city "Sprawl" after going to lengths to directly praise Ridley-Scott's "spot-on" interpretations.
First, Blade Runner came BEFORE Neuromancer was released, so it cannot have been a derivative, and there weren't any good representations of the aesthetic on screen either; its visuals broke new ground in many senses. Gibson rightly feared that:
> "BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."
Are there any other visual works of cyberpunk that came after Neuromancer and that Gibson praised? There must have been, but how common were they?
Second, I don't think Gibson's main objection was the aesthetic, but rather, that derivative works didn't do anything with it. They just copied, losing the punk spirit and rebelliousness.
I think that's a great assessment. Other than being great friends with Bruce Sterling I'm not aware of afterward works considered derivative that he's directly praised. Maybe some Stephenson works and Sterling?
For example here[1] is an interview in which Gibson waxes lyrical about pop culture, imagery, prose style and selective use of detail, and also says he didn't "have the patience" to flesh out details like the backstory of what was supposed to actually have happened to the US because they'd only detract from the reading enjoyment. He's saying that he was influenced by how cheesy Cold War era blockbusters could imply a lot happened with a few well chosen casual words, not claiming to make a case for a different politics or to channel Brave New World
And let's be brutally honest, the politics of Neuromancer isn't really more sophisticated than "counterculture is cool" and a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF. The writing is fantastic, but it's all about imagery and ideas.
Even his polemical writing on Singapore and the Golden Age seem more concerned that paternalistic ideas of ideal societies are dull than anything else.
Even the most cynically commercial use of cyberpunk cliches embraces the idea that counterculture - or at least 1980s cyberpunk idea of counterculture - is cool
Well, like I answered in another comment, Blade Runner is not a good example because Neuromancer wasn't published by then, and also because it was a groundbreaking visual work of art, not a derivative one (yes, I'm aware of Metropolis. The point still stands.)
> "[...] a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF"
That was no small feat. It seems pretty major to me. It took me some work to mature from my young SF fan self to notice the rightwing undertones in much of it. Call it naivete, if you want.
What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye-popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to deviate so much as an inch from them.
I haven't said anything about Blade Runner. I reference Gibson claiming inspiration from the line "you flew the Gullwing over Leningrad, didn't you?" in Escape from New York because he loved how 'a casual reference could imply a lot', which is all about his admiration for the style of SF (and trope-heavy style at that).
> What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye-popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to deviate so much as an inch from them.
But eye-popping style was all it ever was. Neuromancer didn't fight against John Campbell's opinions on slavery, or capitalism, or Cold War politics, it just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias.
Well, the comment you were replying to with a "this" did mention Blade Runner.
> "[Gibson] just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias."
You are not wrong, but I'd argue that it had a meaningful message beyond plain aesthetics when placed in the right context, i.e. when Neuromancer and cyberpunk were born. Now it's just the aesthetic, and the "message" of hi-tech lowlives and evil megacorporations is a lazy one, just rehashing mindlessly what was before. I'm not saying nothing interesting and new can be said about this, but that it has become a codified trope you can write on autopilot.
It's easy to say it was always like this, but it's false. Yes, Gibson drew from pop culture, and he used it to create something new, for whatever reasons. Now it's just rehashing for the sake of rehashing, and some of the tropes are hilariously outdated but still copied by the faithful.
It certainly had more novelty when it was new! But the tropes being familiar and so outdated that using some of them in future settings is positively anachronistic is part of the appeal, just like it is for most of the earlier scifi canon, and Gibson seems to have enjoyed consuming trope-heavy genre fiction far too much to be precious about people doing the same with themes he invented or popularised. Not everything he's written mashed up ideas with such originality either.
(and the Matrix was both an iconic film and something which borrowed more directly, liberally and naively from Neuromancer than most of the low effort stuff)
(At this point this is a conversation which I hope we both find interesting,. Don't read anything I write as trying to counterpoint anything you say, it's not my intention)
I agree cyberpunk now is anachronistic, which has its own appeal. I did say I liked its aesthetics! It's a world that could have been, but never really was. Sort of like Stranger Things is anachronistic and I like it for it (well, the first season, anyway).
But that's the thing, isn't it? Some other commenter in this thread mentioned that cyberpunk originally was about rebellion and now it's about nostalgia. I am of course more cynical, I think many authors (of videogames, anime, etc) simply copy the looks because that's the easy part.
The nostalgia is doubly puzzling because the world described by cyberpunk is not nice, it's hopeless. It's almost like feeling nostalgia for the world described in Orwell's 1984. Not exactly though, because there's adventure and a rich cast of rogues and lowlives in cyberpunk, whereas in 1984 everything is hopeless, gray and doomed, but still... it's weird to long for any dystopia.
The Matrix: you definitely have a point. The Matrix, style-wise, was impressive when it opened! But I feel the same irritation towards the abuse of effects and tropes it brought into the cinematic world.
Curious if someone can find a URL for Gibson saying such things.
I've never seen Gibson describing Neuromancer as a critique of Reagonomics or having any particular political agenda. Interested to see it if so! I don't think of Gibson having nearly as much "political" agenda or grounding as some other early "cyberpunk" writer's like Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker.
(I don't think Gibson himself referred to his work "cyberpunk" or "punk" originally)
I did a cursory search, and there's certainly "What I tried to do was give people a future that is the world of the Reagan ’80s carried five steps forward and the volume turned up 20 clicks" in an article[1] from 1994.
This sounds very hand-wavy, and I wish Gibson was more explicit in drawing the connections.
Slums and the dominance of megacorps and the ultra-rich I understand, but what do cyberspace and AI's (two of Neuromancer's more original and iconic themes) have to do with Reagan? Nothing, from what I can tell.
Based on other stuff I've read him say, I feel like he might actually indeed be implying that things like slums and the dominance of megacorps and the ultra-rich are to him more central/significant themes/aspects of Neuromancer than AI's or cyberspace! Or at least that they are more central/significant than people focused only on the cyberspace thing recognize.
Gibson had of course famously never used the internet when he wrote Neuromancer (on a typewriter).
Have you read much of Gibson's other work? He's very clear about his attitude towards sci-fi as a way to examine the present day in many of his essays.
Yep! Oh for sure, as a way to examine the present! Just his political commitments or agenda, if any, aren't as obvious as some peers. i'm curious for places he's revealed them in interviews!
That's interesting. I guess the two are coming from very different places. Gibson comes from a place of rebellion. The current fascination with cyberpunk comes from a place of nostalgia.
> And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it.
In Pattern Recognition, the character Cayce is “allergic” to Tommy Hilfiger clothing because the style is so completely generic. Your comment makes me wonder if that was a commentary on the works derived from his initial vision in the Sprawl trilogy.
> In Pattern Recognition, the character Cayce is “allergic” to Tommy Hilfiger clothing because the style is so completely generic.
I remember this a bit differently? I thought she wore nondescript de-branded clothing specifically because she had a behavioral/neurological/information processing/sensory overload condition that caused her to have tics and flip out in the presence of excessive visual input. I remember her intentionally choosing this clothing, as it jumped out at me. And I thought she wore Levi’s, not that it matters, though they do have minimal brand motifs compared to some brands.
I didn’t finish the book, and it has been a while, so I could well be mistaken or outright wrong. I don’t remember TH being mentioned specifically.
> next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it's all started to go sideways … Some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball. … Tommy Hilfiger does it every time … A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head
This is about an unexpected encounter with these clothes (not wearing them), and it doesn’t sound good to me.
You’re right, of course, that she’s reacting negatively. Do you have a quote describing her attire choices? I think the book does go into more detail on the nature of her condition(s) when it describes what she wears and why she chooses to dress thus.
Tommy Hilfiger clothing was considered kinda prep style, but got appropriated by street style and a lot of rappers would wear it in the 90s up til Tommy outed himself as a racist, by publicly saying that he didn’t want black people wearing his clothes, as he thought it brought down the value of the brand, or some such racist drivel.
That is to say, I am curious what style or aesthetic she’s recoiling against. To me, it seems like she’s vaguely working class attired, and recoils against professional costumes.
Cayce's black bomber jacket and Fruit of the Loom shirts and black Levis make a terrific outfit. The mil spec sneakers in that same series are described with similar care.
But beyond mil spec, the whole Blue Ant series is just a beautiful tableau of different fashions and designed objects. Made me really want a Curta.
>I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example.
He specifically said this about the game: "The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future, but hey, that's just me."
"Capitalism is very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari say, is a 'motley painting of everything that ever was'."
IIRC, the Cyberpunk RPG is explicitly all about the aesthetic. I find it obnoxious personally, but on some level I respect that it knows what it wants to be and is that. I do think it's a certain strain of punk, but a different one than the more politically-minded Gibson punk.
I suspect you could combine the "vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics" with a more modern political critique. To some extent, I feel like the original Deus Ex game is still relevant as it tangles with the corruption of power and how technology enables that process, which is more relevant than ever.
I wonder what Gibson thinks of solarpunk. I think its a very compelling aesthetic, and much more rejecting of societal norms (particularly around consumptive consumerism)
Cyberpunk 2077 is very much a disappointment in every sense other than the scope of the project. Every single aspect of it is a cheap, shallow rip-off. It adds nothing of value to anything, though enjoyable in the way Mortal Combat is. Still, Mortal Combat was far more ground-breaking and original - that about sums up how much of a "derivative work" Cyberpunk 2077 is.
What? It was a fantastic game that spent a lot of time ruminating on topics like transhumanism, sex, and corporate power. It let players explore heterosexual and homosexual romantic relationships in first person and uncensored. Character writing is for the most part top-notch. The universe is unfailingly coherent and incredibly fleshed out. Few games have moved me to the point of tears in the credits, but this one did.
If you're one of those folks inexplicably bitter about prerelease trailers then maybe I can understand your stance. But dismissing the monumental amount of effort that it has taken to deliver what some of us perceive as one of the highest works of art in the genre, is ridiculous.
Just as the Witcher games are basically fan fiction paying homage to Sapkowskis books, CP2077 needs to be seen as a homage to many classics of the cyberpunk genre. Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell to name a few obvious ones (I also see a lot of Elysium in it, FWIW). The story CD Projekt synthesized based on the concepts of these works is very fitting and surprisingly consistent, IMO. And because it's a homage, criticizing the lack of original ideas in the plot/world misses what the creators apparently set out to do. What _can_ be criticized is that they fell short of their technical ambitions. And despite its flaws, I found the game to offer quite a remarkable experience.
Yes, it is of course based on the Cyberpunk TTRPG IP, which sets many world building aspects. However if compare the content of the Cyberpunk 2020 TTRPG guidebook with what is in 2077 you'll quickly notice the monumental difference in scope and how much the latter drew of these other works in ways obvious and subtle.
I'm with you 100% the game is a mess from a gameplay point of view but the story (and load of side stories) is fantastic if a little cognitive dissonance inducing when being constantly told "You're dying! Hurry do the thing!" Then spending 10 hours dicking about.
I definitely think CDRP had a lot of help world building from the source material (perhaps leaning on it too much) but I'd definitely buy a sequel, maybe not on launch though!
> "It was a fantastic game that spent a lot of time ruminating on topics like transhumanism, sex, and corporate power"
I can't say anything about C2077 because I haven't played it, I can just repeat what Gibson said about it. And he didn't play it either, he was just judging the trailer.
What I can say is to note the three things you mentioned, "transhumanism, sex and corporate power" are also explored in other highly derivative and uninspired works of cyberpunk-influenced fiction, like Altered Carbon. Boy, was I disappointed by that show [1]! It's completely shallow, uninterested in exploring the philosophical ramifications of the technology it introduces, and instead goes for flashy visuals, endless action and explosive gore. I watched season 1 because I wanted to know whodunnit -- it was disappointing -- and season 2 was unbearable.
Whether you agree with me or not that Altered Carbon on Netflix was garbage, at least you must concede using those cyberpunk tropes you mentioned is not enough to determine quality or complexity of the plot and/or message. They are just tools in a toolbox, and can be used to build something interesting or something utterly uninspired, just another "gritty" cyberpunk copycat.
---
[1] and from what my friends tell me, the book series is not fundamentally different. Only the details vary.
Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon books (as well as his Black Man, published as Thirteen in North America) are very angry and bleak in tone, from what I recall. (But they were not angry at technology itself, the way the characters of the Altered Carbon TV series were; in-universe characters weren't trying to eliminate the cortical stack in the books.) They also have some spectacular action sequences, which is probably why they were picked up for TV. They have some horrific tortures (both in VR and out of it), much worse than shown in the TV adaptation, which is why I haven't re-read them like I did Neuromancer.
I enjoyed the first season of Altered Carbon but I was really looking for something to scratch the Westworld itch while I was waiting for the next (disappointing) season to come out.
But as a fan of the genre I think that CP2077 did what it set out to do and then some. And while those points may be somewhat tired cliches -- and admittedly these are my favorite kinds of narratives so I don't really care -- the only pieces of any kind of media that made me truly feel like I was in the driver's seat roleplaying that experience was the original Neuromancer and Cyberpunk 2077. Not Rifts RPG, not Blade Runner, not The Ascent (and holy shit what a suprise blessing that game was), nor anything else.
Right, and I wouldn't want to generalize too much from that example, as I think parent commenter does.
One dimension of Cyberpunk as envisioned by William Gibson genuinely was explicitly aesthetic, in the way in which it was meant to be understood and experienced. So derivatives focusing on that aren't necessarily missing the point.
However, it's still certainly possible to reproduce those aesthetics in bad ways, or to lean on them to the exclusion of any deep message or story of any kind, etc. And it's certainly fair to criticize any given derivative for shallowness of vision. So, as a criticism of Cyberpunk 2077 it's perfectly appropriate, but I don't think execution of aesthetics in and of itself misses the point.
Point of correction: I'm trying to convey what Gibson said. If there's a generalization, it's not mine but his. The guy invented cyberpunk, so I think he has a right to holding very strong opinions about it.
I do tend to agree with Gibson, but I also like the aesthetic and I'm content reading and looking at cyberpunk, as long as it's not too lazy.
And my point was, and is, that I don't think he's making the point you seem to think he is making. And sure, he's got every right to be opinionated, but you're not quoting or citing anything (although I understand you're referencing a tweet of his re: Cyberpunk 2077 and are referencing an interview), so what we are working with here are extrapolations that you and I are attributing to him.
The Sprawl trilogy and its fashion/world is formed a lot by politics. Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics and the problems it exasperated (or, at the very least, failed to address). The rampant drug abuse, sovereign corporations, the ever increasing gap of poverty and technology -- I think a lot of derivative media adopts these elements to look cool (without actually understanding their context or meaning).
I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world. Versus the information-excess world we now live in.
In the former, I remember concepts being so much bigger and more concrete. E.g. the "War on Drugs" or "Reaganomics". These were things that existed because powerful people said they did. And there was debating, but ideas were still clearly defined.
So even though CP authors were imagining our future, it was a pretty fundamental shift to go from books-at-libraries to everything-anywhere-all-of-the-time.
Now, every concept seems to have much fuzzier conceptual edges. Because there are a million opinions about it circulating publicly and loudly.
"I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world."
There's just as much scarcity of valuable information today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of garbage which is more accessible than ever before.
That information glut, if it does so exist, leads more towards dis-belief imo & skepticism, especially in the main.
Yeah there's a lot of meme-viruses, num shrubs, other ways to go wrong or really wrong. Radicalization happens. Before we didnt used to be connected enough to see this shit, and the asymetric nature of the loud & shitty versus the peaceful/coherent/quiet/skeptical mainstream means the delusional & extremists have outsized visibility.
The disbelief keeps growing. We dont need Adbusters as much because the thin transparency of the world, of being sold garbage mounds of low-grade content is well known, we understand how shallow things are. And disbelief keeps rising.
In contrast to the higher trust, respected mainstream media, the limited availability of information which came before. Which gel'ed the world into place, which created shared beliefs & allowed agendas to be driven. Where-as now the all-defector anti-agenda is the default mode for many.
I'd never thought about info virality (aka memeticness) that way, but it's a good perspective about the phase change that seemed to happen between past and present.
I.e. That info memes have some inherent max to their virality, which has stayed constant throughout time.
But the cost of transporting information from one person to another has plummeted (measured by time, money, and pretty much every conceivable metric).
Consequently, things that would not have spread virally in previous eras are now easily able to do so, and do.
It's really the ease of transport that's enabled this, not any fundamental shift in the info memes themselves.
But I'm sure the same thought occurred to everyone when newspapers and radio were popularized as well.
> Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics
The (now-)standard Cyberpunk settings strikes me as, in part, asking "what would it really look like if David Friedman's ridiculous capitalism fan-fic happened?"
His The Machinery of Freedom was published in '73, and was a big part of the Reagan/80s zeitgeist.
I was in a bookshop in Germany the other day, and saw a "Neuromancer" cover with a cool stylized photograph of Seoul, South Korea, in the background. The most perfect metaphor for the West's present switch-over from Japanmania to the Korean Wave.
Similarly now have the modern Korean alphabet bleed into the neon signs of Cyberpunky streets of more recent movie productions where in the past you had Japanese or Chinese writing systems. The shifting representation of Asia in Western exoticism/escapism content is fascinating to observe.
"The most perfect metaphor for the West's present switch-over from Japanmania to the Korean Wave." if this is a thing, it has been largely unnoticed. I think educated people think of SK as one of the few countries competing with US tech income (others being Australia, Japan, Singapore, and some (but very few) parts of England (London Finance), Germany (not sure on this one), and Switzerland (banking )). Other than that, Korea goes mostly unnoticed by the west.
We're talking in a pop culture context here, where even just in 2020-2022 Korea and Korean culture/heritage has had significant soft power success in a number of markets/media:
- Export of majorly successful pop music (e.g. BTS, Blackpink - those hits are often penned by Western composers however, so a bit murky on what product is flowing there)
- Ditto TV (e.g. Squid Game setting TV records with a lot rooted in Korean schoolyard games)
- Ditto cinema (Parasite, a story about social mobility woes in Korean society, winning all the Oscars)
- Ditto gaming (PUBG, other MMOs)
- Ditto literature (bestellers including "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982", again on social issues in the country)
- Ditto cosmetics exports, beauty trends ("Korean Week" in malls, say), etc.
- Even some Western productions focussing specifically on Korean diaspora/ethnicity (e.g. most recently the expensive "Pachinko" on Apple TV+ (and the novel it's based on), or stuff like Kim's Convenience)
I think you can definitely make a case that Korea is the Asian-country-du-jour among the Western audience (and that's before you get into, say, Latin America, which is far deeper into Korean TV content, also bleeding over into Latin minorities in the USA).
That's an interesting perspective. The only thing I can relate to here is Squid Game, but it went mostly unnoticed as a "trend shift" by me, because it seems to just fit the trend of Korea having pretty good movies (Chingoo, Old Boy) for the niche audience that liked things like Japan's original Battle Royale.
Also, the trends of Korea seem to very much run in parallel with the trends of Japan - overworked business people tired of working all the time with a lack of meaning.
Thanks! I do think there's a shift there from niche audience to much more significant mainstream attention (which can of course be fleeting, which was also kind of built into the original argument: attention moves on from time to time ...). I do recall the time when movies like "Old-boy" were favorites among the arthouse track/festival circuit-going audience as well, but those were never the headlining poster in a multiplex the way that a "Parasite" now pulls off.
I lived and worked in Korea for a German tech company for a few years (since returned to Berlin), working on-site with customers, and since about 2018/19 there's a very significant uptick in other people showing an interest and asking me questions about the experience. This often takes the form of "my teenage daughter is a BTS fan and learning Korean" and things like that.
Korea and Japan have a lot of shared history and have deeply affected one another, and in particular the business culture and the economic structure of Korea are heavily informed by Japanese influence, yes.
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On a completely separate note, re interesting depictions of fantasy-Asia in a Western popculture/punk context: The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok. I've never been to Thailand and can't comment on how ham-fisted or not this may be, but it was also an interesting step away from the Japanese culture-dominated vibes of speculative fiction pre-2000.
>The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok.
Bacigalupi falls for japanophilia with the Japanese fetishization of geisha (the windup-girl of the title). His emphasis on mechanical power (i.e. springs and animal labor) was interesting though.
I find the storyline of the titular Windup Girl is the least interesting part of that (pretty great) novel.
The setting, the Thais, the Contraction, the genetically engineered foodstuffs and plagues, and the story arc of Hock Seng, the Chinese aid of the AgriGen exec, are all more interesting.
I agree the Japanese windup girl is heavily fetishized though. But the Japanese themselves are unimportant in the novel. AgriGen is an American company.
Besides Squid Game and Parasite, I've not heard of most of them and in the case of PUBG, I wasn't aware it was from SK or in any way special in this seemingly endless pool of "the same game with another skin"-genre.
Sure, but is there a Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian film or TV show you think just as many people around you know from the same time frame? And I mean, that's still anecdotal - what isn't anecdotal is that the upscale KaDeWe department store I live nearby in Berlin had a Korea week a while ago, and so on. And whose pop music export has flash mobs and dance troupes dancing to it in the streets of every major city for years now?
As for gaming, I think another good example is the celebrity of various Korean e-sports athletes. I assure you there's plenty of young kids who can name them.
In the end, my assertion is this: Right now, in terms of attention/popularity in Western pop culture (since we're relating to Neuromancer and fiction here), there's only one Asian country that is gaining at such a rate and is the most comparable to the attention Japan enjoyed in the time Neuromancer was written.
I would also readily say that the Korean Wave isn't nearly at the same levels als Japanmania was in the 80s, though. Actually, not sure - I think it both isn't and is also dwarving it at the same time, due to changes in how media is consumed directly vs. impressions by proxy. Depends on the metric.
Obviously there's also a lot of attention on China, but that's more related to economics and politics - although Liu Cixin's works as a scifi author would be a great and very topical example to the contrary! (There's other interesting comparisons to China to make, e.g. both had successful stretches in arthouse cinema with Wong Kar-Wai for example, but so far it's not really converted over to the mainstream for Chinese film.)
I've also not noticed anything besides Squid Game and Parasite here in Germany. Also not sure about the esports thing, maybe I'm looking in the wrong corner. 20 years ago when StarCraft was still on people's minds there was a meme about Koreans, but since then I wouldn't say there was anything spectacularly popular.
And because a few K-Pop bands are now a bit more famous I wouldn't call this a hype cycle. Then again it's hard to tell, I've not been to a department store for 2 years, but I've not heard of any flash mob thingy in literal years. Maybe you're projecting Berlin's weirdness to the rest of us and it's just not there ;)
But it also raises the question of whether Japanmania was as big in Germany in the 80s as in the US to begin with (the pop song "Big in Japan" notwithstanding!), or if this was a BBS/Usenet discussion 30 years ago and I had written the same post about Japan instead, a hypothetical 80s you would have felt similarly.
My point is more if I, a reasonably informed person about pop culture, have not noticed because none of my friends (some of whom have been k-pop fans for years) have never mentioned it or posted about it, then I have to assume I am either living under a rock, all my friends are deliberately hiding it, are also part of a bubble of non-noticers, or it's simply not a *mania.
Japanophiles in the 80s were excessive. Scifi from the era has these undertones (Running Man, in 1986, has a bunch of execs being served sushi in post-apocalyptic california, by a geisha). Rising Sun in 1990 personified this fear that Japan would eclipse the US in tech, economy and culture, before they imploded with what we "now" consider an inevitable result of overheated economy.
Try flying through Minnesota, Wisconsin, the automaker capital states. Airports full of now-yellowed directions in Japanese for the consideration of what was frequent visitations by their competitors.
It was a no-brainer to bet on Japanese tech in next generation...even Gibson's dated "5MB of hot hitachi RAM" was far-sighted when he wrote it...just not far enough.
Another interesting contemporary work by a writer who’s still relevant is James Fallows’ “Looking at the Sun.” A solid attempt at sense-making the late 80s economic situation vis-a-vis Japan for the American middle management class, contrasting their institutions with ours… but China is just kind of a shadow in the background of the whole thing.
Blade Runner (filmed in 1981) has a famous scene in a street-side noodle joint where the characters speak a mishmash of Japanese and other languages. Another famous scene features a geisha on a giant computerized billboard.
Blade Runner was based on a Philip K Dick book from 1968. Neuromancer is pretty obviously influenced by these.
William Gibson actually saw Blade Runner before he finished his final draft for Neuromancer. He almost didn't publish it because he was afraid people would think he was ripping off the movie.
The West (specifically in my experience, the United States) have been buying up everything tech and auto South Korean for pushing over a decade now at this point. Kia and Hyundai automobiles are now running against the Japanese cars here. Samsung and LG electronics are highly popular, as the Japanese versions were a decade or three prior. It's now more Samsung, LG, etc here in the US than it is Sony, for example. Also in agreement with a poster above how the Korean cinema is just now taking off since around 2019. Prior to the movie Parasite, I can't even think of a popular South Korean film taking root here but most have seen Parasite and quite a few were into Squid Game. This is a relatively new thing.
> When Gibson penned his opening line ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ he merged reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic today
Tangentially, I find the generational aspect of that line fun. Depending on how old the person you're talking to is, this will mean (as originally meant) a gray/staticy color, or a searingly vivid blue, (or, I guess, something else like a graphical "no signal found" screen in the most modern interpretations).
As with much sci-fi, it's a story of "the future" that's thoroughly grounded in the present day it was written in.
I was sick at home and finally picked up the Neuromancer which had been sitting in the bookshelf for years.
It was an experience indeed. At many points, very high concept (which of course has been copied to death). At other points, naive. Surprisingly few things felt old fashioned.
The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character.
Early cyberpunk tends to be power fantasy wrapped in dystopia. So, Hellblazer with more blinking lights and megacorps instead of demons.
And it bears remembering that Gibson was 34 when he wrote Neuromancer.
You can see a shift in his characterization by the time he gets to Mona Lisa Overdrive (a book and 4 years later). And certainly with the subsequent Bridge trilogy. IMHO, the Sprawl trilogy that starts with Neuromancer gets better with each book, even though the first is the most famous.
Also, plug for Void Star, which I recently finished after a recommendation here. It sits somewhere in Bridge-era Gibson tone, but with the quintessential "What the hell is going on?" Cyberpunk mystery that a lot of retro-CP authors drop. https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250...
It’s definitely worth reading the whole Sprawl trilogy. It establishes something of a pattern in Gibson’s work where characters from the first
book in one of his trilogies return in the third, changed. The scene where Molly and the Finn reunite in Mona Lisa Overdrive is quite powerful.
Personally I feel like the series only goes downhill with Count Zero and worse with Mona Lisa Overdrive, but they're both fine books. Count Zero does world building well, it's cool to see the BAMA eastern seaboard, but Bobby is not as compelling of a protagonist. If anything the simstim star Tally Isham is a lot more interesting but there's a lot of human trafficking adjacent stuff happening there too.
Don't remember Mona Lisa Overdrive very well but the whole A plot with the girl being protected because she has a modem in her head was a bit hard to follow. Though once again great world building. The B plot with an older Molly Millions delivering The Count's cybersarcophagus in the desert was cool af though.
The protagonist is so addicted to the Internet that he's willing to do literally anything to be able to use it again. If that's not a relatable motivation, I don't know what is.
The word "internet" doesn't appear in Neuromancer because in most respects it hadn't been invented yet.
While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel manuscript into production back then: very often, it still does.)
ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a while. But the publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence? That was all in his imagination.
Those three come quickly to mind that were certainly trying very hard to be the " publicly accessible global information network with visual representations of corporate presence" you are speaking of.
While the others did, Gibson seemed not to have been aware of them, and he didn't even own a computer at the time.
You can tell his vision of cyberspace came entirely from his imagination because it doesn't even remotely resemble any actual computer systems of the day.
I don't think that's a very kind thing to say about the medications for people for who ADHD medications like amphetamines and methylphenidates have meant a huge improvement in quality of life.
That it has helped people doesn't make the comparison untrue.
We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that many drugs with reputations of illegitimate/illegal use are readily provided to patients (including children) in a pharmaceutical context, most notably amphetamines and opiates.
In the interview/documentary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territorie... Gibson is quite self-deprecating. He attributes several aspects of the book that people love to his inexperience as a writer. The main character is cold and vague because he didn’t know how to write a fleshed out character. People jack-in a lot because he was uncomfortable writing scene transitions. Something like “What do you say?? He got up and walked down the hallway to the apartment elevator and out the front door to the sidewalk’?”
Which is interesting because his descriptions of travel and scene transition in the most recent 5 books of his are deeply flowery and some of my favorite bits of his writing. I suppose writers change and grow over time, and I wonder if some of his style now is due to him trying to fix what he saw as flaws in his earlier work.
They do for example I started to skim through Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon(original release in 1942) and it is pretty horrid, quite badly aged and disconnected... Although it is translation the comments by others aren't exactly praising.
Writing is like any pursuit, you just need to do it to develop and become better at it. Just like coding.
> The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where everything revolves around the main character.
I feel it's like this for two reasons:
1) Gibson himself says that he hasn't been a very good writer making Neuromancer, and that this is one of his weaker works,
2) but then again, we see the world from the POV of the protagonist and his brain filter. Case is not a very complicated man and this is how he sees the world. He chooses to focus on these things, and he treats people around him like NPCs. (Giving a convincing perspective of a character is what good writers do, so I think Gibson wasn't a shitty writer after all.)
I definitely understand your take, it is definitely an unusual mixture of hard near sci fi concepts and pulp sci fi 'drama'. I personally enjoyed it immensely but can definitely understand why someone would not.
William Gibson was inspired by Jean “Moebius” Giraud, check this quote from the man himself:
> “So it’s entirely fair to say, and I’ve said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel “looks” was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in ‘Heavy Metal’. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’”, and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed ‘cyberpunk’. Those French guys, they got their end in early.”
In particular, "The Long Tomorrow" by Moebius/Dan O'Bannon published in 1977 on Heavy Metal magazine was very influential to Gibson.
Gibson is still telling the same story. If you read his more recent works, like The Peripheral, you'll see it. It's still Cyberpunk. The aesthetic has been modernized. It's less neon and more black and a little too familiar, but the message is the same: Even in an overtly corrupt world, knowledge and information are supremely powerful. Because of this, an underdog can beat the system change everything.
As a 16 year old kid back in 1990, this message meant everything to me. It inspired me and gave me hope. His new stuff has less neon but is just a great to read and feels the same to me today.
There is an a Suntup Editions version that is to drool over https://suntup.press/neuromancer, especially the Numbered Editions. Completely impossible to get except for thousands of dollars on Ebay. I have a Suntup Edition 451 Fahrenheit and it's amazing, so I can only imagine what this one looks like. And the circuit design has an Easter Egg, although I don't know what it is.
High quality rare books can be an expensive hobby...
The 80's were my 20s. It's hard to explain to younger folks how the 80s (especially early 80s) felt, culturally. The whole 'Japan, Inc.' thing was in full swing, and the general feeling was that Japan was eating the world. 'Tech' was this fresh, semi-mystical thing, still opaque to much of the public.
Gibson latched onto that cultural wave and took it into a possible future, and it was exciting to me. Today it's interesting to see that technofuture both commoditized and idolized.
Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live.
Japanese 80s City Pop is one of my favorite musical genres - an outgrowth of the huge economic growth happening in Japanese cities. Big funky happy instrumentals and lyrics often alluding to glamorous lifestyles, social isolation and an unquenched loneliness.
It was a very interesting time in Japan's history, which I personally think has a lot of parallels to the current west-coast tech bubble.
It's hard to explain to younger folks how the 80s (especially early 80s) felt, culturally. The whole 'Japan, Inc.' thing was in full swing, and the general feeling was that Japan was eating the world. 'Tech' was this fresh, semi-mystical thing, still opaque to much of the public.
I'm just a little younger than you then, but I remember the 80's pretty much the same way. Japanese manufacturers (especially of cars and consumer electronics) were sort of "eating the world" and computers and high-tech were still seen as very mysterious and mesmerizing and had a real mystique about them.
Interestingly, for me, the mystique and mystery of high-tech largely persisted up until about 2010 or so. Maybe a little later, maybe 2015 even. It's only been in the last few years that it seems to be wearing off. Not sure if that's just a reflection of my becoming older and more cynical and harder to impress, or if its down to changes in society/culture at large, or what. But my recent re-reading of the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies was, in part, I think an attempt to recapture some of that. Not sure if it worked or not, but it was fun reading all that stuff.
Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live.
There are aspects of the "cyberpunk future" that still seem appealing in some regards, but it doesn't necessarily feel like the exact world I'd want to live in, that's for sure.
Cyberpunk aesthetics are mostly hidden IMHO. I saw a few Youtube videos of chip factories that make flash drives, SSDs and integrated circuits, etc and was amazed at the efficiency & precision of the robots that make them. If you want to be reminded we're living in the future, visit some of these factories, they're mind blowing.
The Shockwave Rider should definitely be considered something like "proto Cyberpunk" IMO. And regardless of that, I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet.
I just picked up a copy of Stand on Zanzibar, looking forward to getting into that soon.
You know, I feel silly admitting this, but I still haven't ever watched "Heavy Metal". Now I'm thinking I should make that my top TODO item after work tonight. That's been on "the list" for, like, forever.
The Josan Gonzalez “Deathburger” images on the article could be lifted directly the Heavy Metal movie. And Gonzalez did artwork for the Heavy Metal magazine.
When Musk launched a Tesla into space, there was a lot of speculation that he was inspired by the opening scene in the Heavy Metal film [0] [1].
This film was Ivan Reitman before he did Ghostbusters and same year he did Stripes, and became really famous. A film like this could never be made today; there are way too many unpolitically correct scenes. Just don't bother with "Heavy Metal 2000", the 2nd film that came out 20 years later -- it was not good at all and had no involvement from the original creators as I understand.
There's a striking similarity between Josan Gonzalez's work and that of Geof Darrow[1] who was famous for his 1990'ish collaboration with Frank Miller on Hard Boiled[2].
Some samples of Darrow's work: [3] - [8]
Gonzalez also seems to have a bit of a Moebius vibe.
I couldn't finish the book, it just had too much unexplained fictional techno-jargon to be able to enjoy for me. I know thats the style of immersion he was going for, but it didn't click for me, even though I'm a big sci-fi reader.
I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer. Maybe because so many people raved about it or that I read it many years after it was written. I honestly don't know. It was... OK. But amazing? I don't see it.
I love science fiction. One thing you have to realize about science ficiton is that it is a product of the time it was written. It may share many of the aesthetics, themes, philosophies and politics of that time. Like it's hard not to look at the original Star Wars and not see the impact of 70s aesthetics.
Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. There was a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were "taking over". The depiction of a dystopian future dominated by megacorps mirrors fears of Japanese culture and influence.
40 years later this dystopian future still hasn't eventuated.
Neuromancer was groundbreaking in its time. I read it when it came out in 1984 and it blew me away.
These days so much other media has been influenced by it that it doesn't look nearly as original.
But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies about:
- cyberspace inhabited by AIs
- neural interfaces
- corporate armies
- insanely rich people living in Earth orbit
- genetically engineered assassins with body augmentations
- slum-dwelling hackers who break in to corporate data stores
Neuromancer brought all this and more in to popular consciousness in a blinding flash.
After Neuromancer, Gibson came out with Count Zero (which I liked even more than Neuromancer itself) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (which wasn't nearly as good as either of the books that preceded it). I stopped reading Gibson after that.
I'm quite a bit younger than you, and not entirely clued up on cyberpunk and related genres, but I'd think "Blade Runner" (1982) and its source novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) brought many of the same/similar ideas to the fore a while earlier.
Neuromancer still sounds ground-breaking and I hope to read it one day.
As an aside - something interesting I just found was Gibson's thoughts on Blade Runner. He had seen the first 20 minutes of it and thought his book would be seen as a copy of the film. [1]
Edit: I uh finally read the article after spending ages in the comments and see that they mention this exact incident in there. Whoops.
Blade Runner was fantastic and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was ok, but they had neither neural interfaces nor cyberspace (nor the entities dwelling within it), which were pretty central to Neuromancer.
Neuromancer was influenced by both Blade Runner and DADoES, but it's not like it was a ripoff of either, neither in themes, nor characters, nor dialogue, nor plot. It was mostly influenced by these in style.
My favorites are the Bigend trilogy, especially the first, Pattern Recognition. It's like he decided the real word (in 2001) was science fictional enough.
I think to focus on Neuromancer's use of Japanese culture is to stay at the surface level. The background of Neuromancer is one of income inequality, human destruction, and almost-absent government and community (partly caused by a ubiquitous global information network that seems to have broken everything.) We don't have brain-computer interfaces today and Chiba City isn't the center of the tech world (maybe that's Shenzen now ;) but we sure have the income inequality and broken societies.
I was a sci-fi fan growing up, and Neuromancer wasn't the first cyberpunk novel along these lines (I would definitely recommend The Shockwave Rider for that) but it was one of the most striking spec-fi books I read that presented a realistic future that could be traced to our own world and critically: that wasn't better than it.
Ironically, reading Neuromancer in my older age, the main observation I have is how optimistic it is. The seas aren't rising and the climate seems to be doing just fine.
So many mega corps being Japanese is a product of anxiety about Japan at that time—maybe not even Gibson's anxiety, exactly, but if you were around then and projected which mega corps were gonna be prominent in your nearish-future setting, you'd really be swimming against the current if you didn't make a lot of them Japanese.
Much of the rest of it, though, isn't about Japanese culture, corporate or otherwise, but seems to me like taking AnCaps like Friedman seriously. Many elements are straight out of that kind of, ah, thought.
ok, those exist, but none of them have significance.
There is a point that in the 80s much electronic tech came from Japan and that both Ono-Sendai and Hosaka are named as top of the line cyberdeck manufacturerers, but that is pretty much it, they have no relevant part in the story. I think people are trying to forcefully over-fit that 80s japan craze they read about in an attempt to seem like sophisticated literary critics. Maybe i can't see it because i am not american and my national pride isn't being triggered by jokes like "Mitsubishi Bank of America" and by the idea that globalism may not mean hegemony of the USA. Major roles in Neuromancer are given to companies like Sense/Net, Maas Biolabs, Tessier-Ashpool and the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, yet people cling to side notes about hardware brands because they are offended with the first chapter playing a Chiba City Blues instead of some New York City Jazz.
Gibson has been pretty adamant that interpreting the Sprawl setting as a dystopia is not quite understanding it: the Sprawl is a quality of life upgrade for a lot of Earth's citizens today.
Neal Stephenson gives a spicier take on this in Snowcrash: "... the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity."
Neal Stephenson gives a spicier take on this in Snowcrash: "... the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity."
I don't get it. What does being Pakistani have to do with anything?
Stephenson is referencing the effective slavery that is brick kilns in the subcontinent in particular [1]. It also applies to India and possibly Bangladesh.
"Ironically, reading Neuromancer in my older age, the main observation I have is how optimistic it is. The seas aren't rising and the climate seems to be doing just fine."
Gibson has gone on record multiple times in saying that he doesn't write about the future nor does he try to predict the future, but sees himself as always writing about the present.
Gibson has always said he regards his futures as ultimately optimistic, because we're still here, not having been destroyed in a nuclear war that looked all too possible in the time it was written.
I read it again recently and I found it still pretty interesting.
From a SF aficionado point of view, Neuromancer world has:
-An economy that rely on ubiquitous computer networks.
-Colonization of low orbit.
-An AI rebelling and doing its own thing.
-Digital downloads of personalities.
In 1984.. I mean, OK, the concepts already existed, but it really break with most of the SF that was being done until then.
It's the beginning of a really dark SF, that I suppose was the point: "If we follow the current path, the future will look like corporate feudalism".
By the way, from a political point of view, the fear of the Japanese taking over is now the fear of the Chinese taking over. I will let the "dystopian future dominated by megacorps" comment as an exercise for the reader.
"Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately"
Why does mega-corporation mean Xenophobia against the Japanese? Bladerunner, which came out around the same time, has mega-corporations which aren't run by the Japanese. So does Robocop. The second Sprawl book and third Sprawl book both have wealthy villains who are not Japanese.
Same. No doubt it was an influential book. But I didn't find it well written or that interesting to be honest. I've read neuromancer once. I've read Dune maybe a dozen times. Also, other two books in the trilogy were even worse.
Maybe the hype was so great that nothing could live up to such expectations. I remember being so excited to finally read neuromancer only to be let down.
>> Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. There was a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were "taking over".
I strongly disagree. The core elements are transhumanism, post-liberal capitalism, high tech and low lives with a lot of pulp and noir: sex, drugs and violence at the street level. There are no heroes, no epics, just deeply broken people getting into a mess of intrigues as everyone just tries to fill their own egoistic needs, deal with their personal demons, or gets dragged along a path of least resistance. Claiming this is fear of xenos taking over is to close ones eyes for the very problems of our culture in favor of blaming someone else. The dystopian future has been there all along, you are just to sheltered in your uptown community to know about the perils of addicts and the girls that grew up in the house of blue lights.
I've heard young people argue that the Beatles weren't all that great, and then go on to name modern artists who would have never existed without them.
I'm late Gen-X and my wife is late millennial. We watched Pulp Fiction together and she didn't get it. I realized then how much of it was groundbreaking because of the time of its release. Someone watching it now just won't be blown away like I was when I first saw it. I imagine if we went back and watched Blade Runner it would be another forgettable movie to her and not the groundbreaking masterpiece it was when I saw it for the first dozen times.
Reminds me of the Steely Dan song 'Hey Nineteen'...
Also true of Lord of the Rings, or watching Star Wars etc if you didn't read/watch it early on (either when it first came out to the world, or early on in your life when you were new to the genre).
I won't speculate on why this is the case, but some people claim its because the innovations are copied so quickly the original becomes just another copy of itself.
To my youngest son (born in 1994), The Phantom Menace was his favorite Star Wars movie for years. Many of our feelings about "the best" of something depends on how it coincides with our formative years. For me the original Star Wars was highly influential(I saw it on its first run, between junior and senior year in college), but the most formative science fiction movie for me was 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen on first run in a Cinerama theater).
(My son has evolved somewhat in his view of Star Wars films. I'm just glad his older brother didn't regard The Barney Movie t00 highly.)
Re: Lord of the Rings, while the language itself is a bit outdated and it can be quite tedious in a lot of places, it still set a benchmark that - at least as far as I'm aware - hasn't been met yet in other books in the wider fantasy genre. I've read a few, some of the serialized form, but they often feel awkward and derivative; often full of male power fantasies, coming-of-age hero's journey tropes, worldbuilding that somehow always feels derivative of LotR (which in itself was derivative of others as well I'm sure, but said others have been forgotten or replaced by that of LotR), and they often seem like the goal of the author is volume, write as many books as they can (thinking of Robert Jordan and the like) just to get all their worldbuilding in there.
Check out Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.
It's about a leper from the modern day who finds himself in a fantasy world he doesn't believe in, and rejects the power he has. That's pretty original.
I agree with your critique of many of the derivatives (without naming any in particular), but feel it also applies to the original. And while the original has some bright points, so do many of the derivatives.
* I don’t think you are appreciating the gain in power corporations have acquired in the last 40 years. Those fears of corporations becoming more powerful turned out to be very justified.
* Cyberpunk is a very humanist point of view. So often the tragedy in cyberpunk is that humanity is oppressed by a bureaucratic or technical system.
I’ll write my comment to outweigh the negativity towards the game.
I’m still enjoying the game, still riding through Night City, finding new details every day: in the roads, tunnels, on the walls. A random pedestrian might have some link to a book or a movie - you just need to check their clothes and phrases. So exciting.
REDEngine is great - of course, performance is awful, but the idea of ray-traced lights is great and it looks amazing. Also, the details level and the skin rendering - are truly amazing.
Of course, the game needs more, much more work - to make it more entertaining, deeper. But still, it's an interesting world, and I’m pretty sure the price was fair.
One of the most interesting and entertaining parts for me: Cyber Engine Tweaks. Some days I spend more times for hacking than playing:)
I think you're being too specific. This article, I'm pretty sure, is about the aesthetic of the entire genre of cyberpunk, rather than the video game Cyberpunk 2077.
Ah, I see what you were going for. It's a bit confusing that you didn't put this in the thread about Cyberpunk 2077, so I assumed you were commenting on the article itself.
I quite appreciate the author's use of Death Burger art as illustration in the article. For me it captures the aesthetic of modern cyberpunk quite well.
> When Gibson penned his opening line ‘the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel’ he merged reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic today
It feels like Gibson was riffing on the vibe created by John Foxx's "Metamatic" [1] in 1980 (never mind his "Ultravox!" [2] in the years before that). Maybe it was Foxx though that claimed he was channelling the mood of novels like Ballard's "Crash" [3] from 1973. Computerization, synthesized music, alienation were a part of the zeitgeist of the 70's, 80's.
Regarding J.G. Ballard, my understanding is that the early Cyberpunk authors were all absolutely heavily inspired by his works. Somebody (I forget who) said something to the effect of "We were all competing to see who would out-Ballard who".
The reader view really highlights how short the article is, now that I'm looking at it.
I think tracking is letter spacing right? It is pretty rough. I think you can enforce fonts and at least in Firefox and Safari you can add custom CSS to help with that sort of thing. I don't think Chrome offers the same feature without an extension.
> One thing that really stuck out for me was that _everyone_ had memory foam mattresses. The slums, the really slick holiday homes, everyone.
Interesting; I guess it could be explained in-universe by economies of scale, that is, (memory) foam mattresses being faster and cheaper to produce than other types of mattresses. I'm thinking of spring mattresses, which actually have parts and different materials, whereas foam can be just a single block I think? And when you think about logistics, memory foam can be compacted and vacuum sealed for transport.
I finished reading Neuromancer a week ago. I'd played Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and Dystopia further back. So many of the concepts from those games appear to come directly from Neuromancer! I stumbled upon articles implying they were indirectly influenced; Neuromancer evidently created a whole genre!
Btw, compared to hard scifi like Stephenson (relevant comparison due to Snow Crash), Neuromacer isn't really there; its strengths are outstanding creativity, world-building, character development (including top-notch implied backstories), personal interactions, and artful descriptions.
Gibson pioneered the genre - you have to give him that. He is very much off on a lot of details though. For example, in his other books, his descriptions of mercenaries are comical at best for anyone who has a passing familiarity with the topic. Nonetheless, I place him up there with Stephenson. All this DESPITE the fact that Stephenson stands in a league of his own - he pioneered "post cyberpunk" with Diamond Age and went from having as much style as Gibson to as much scientific grounding as Asimov. With that said, Stephenson's latter books are all science, no char dev, no (interesting) story.
I really can't think of an author who can stand with Stephenson. Vernor Vinge comes close, but not there on style. Then there are authors with a single good idea that are worth reading, but nowhere near Stephenson's level (e.g. the author of The Forever War).
P.S. Obviously I am not so subtly fishing for people to argue with me and give me book recommendations. Just not the Tri-body Problem please - it falls in with The Forever War - cool concept, cool (very long) intro, not much else.
Having not managed to finish a Stephenson book since "Snow Crash" (which I liked) i may not be in the best position to recommend something to you, but I really like Greg Egan. Truly idea-driven SF which also has interesting enough characters and story. I also like that his books are pretty short, even his trilogy is probably shorter than any single Stephenson book. Very little "fluff".
_Diaspora_ and _Permutation City_ are both excellent. If you don't want to commit to a full novel, his short story collections are all fantastic as well.
Bruce Sterling should also be remembered as a major contributor to the formation of the genre, on par with Gibson and Stephenson. Islands in the Net grounded future speculative tech in emerging real-world geopolitics, and Schismatrix took the genre into far future space, introducing the concept of cybernetics vs. biological augmentation.
Also see Greg Bear's Blood Music, which came out a year before Neuromancer.
There was also an early book about VR, which I can't remember the name of. It was about a reviewer of "apples" which gave the people who ate them something like a VR experience.
Finally, the grandaddy of all of these was The Machine Stops[1], by E. M. Forster. Written in 1909, it predicted virtual reality, something like the internet, internet addiction, chat rooms, and more.
I really enjoyed Stephenson's early works, but his later works I've read have all felt like they needed a bit more editing. Don't get me wrong, they're good, but would have really benefited from cutting some of the filler out or admitting they were multiple works and publishing them as a series.
Personally I think that Gibson is vastly superior to Stephenson.
As for recommendations about post-cyberpunk: our own cstross has written plenty of great books (Accelerando in primis); I've liked anything that Peter Watts as written so far (Blindsight is the most famous, but the rifters saga is also good and the Sunflower cycles is excellent). Alastair Reynolds writing is very uneven, but world building is excellent and so are many of his stories (even outside of the Revelation Space universe).
More generally, Egan (hard sci-fi), Banks (space opera) are some of my favorites. Vance, Wolfe for something more on the fantasy side.
Both Egan and Vinge have been very disappointing to me. I read them because they wrote a lot about the singularity, but found them to be extremely boring, dry and unimaginative. Stephenson's Snow Crash was also very underwhelming.
I read Lem when I was young and it was a chore. I read him again when I was older and found his stuff to be pretty dated.
I couldn't even remember what Herbert wrote, even though I read Dune (not the 1000 follow ups though) recently. It made almost no impression on me. Maybe it's like War & Peace where it has been copied so much that the original doesn't seem that, well, original.
Not sure who Dick is.
The only overlap we seem to have is our dislike for Egan. I read a LOT of his short stories (recommended by fans of Lem btw), and it was just entirely boring - the only one I remember is about a health-check ring and two aliens deciding to die after being immortal for a while. Nothing new in there, no story. Basically Egan and Lem seem like the worst of Stephenson - intellectual theory with zero story. It's funny - I like relatively hard sci-fi, but I still insist on it not being a science/social theory book.
Random note - I don't think Clarke was mentioned yet. I read "Rendezvous with Rama" after all the Ouamuamua comparisons and it came off as pretty dry as well, though very well written.
To conclude, I am trying, and having a hard time reconciling why our preferences differ so much. I always think I am missing something, especially about Lem, but I can't tell what.
Adrian tsicoholsky's Children of Time duo are the only Sci-fi books I've read that can stand with Stephenson. Give it a try! (Assuming you're not an arachnophobe)
Mike Pondsmith (and the R. Talsorian Games authors) basically picked up the then-recent Blade Runner (82) and Neuromancer (84) threads and ran with them in CP88.
You should read Snow Crash. While Neuromancer created the style, Snow Crash added in a lot of missing elements and had the benefit of being written 8 years later and by someone with some with a lot more knowledge of computing.
I tried reading it, and couldn't get in to it. It tried to be funny but wasn't (to my taste), and just seemed very childish. I liked Neuromancer and Count Zero much more.
I feel like it's just a very self aware parody of the genre at the end of its natural life, looking back at the previous 10 years of peak cultural cyberpunk
I just got into the sprawl series over the past couple of months. Finished Neuromancer and count zero, now blazing through Mona Lisa overdrive.
It's such an amazing series, it so good I find myself trying to pace myself while reading it so I can gestate more of the world and think about it for a while.
I rarely find a book or series that captivates me to this level so I'm basically in love with the sprawl trilogy right now. After I'm done ill probably read Gibsons other stuff because he is really good.
> The trilogy derives its name from the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, which was abandoned in an earthquake and has become a massive shantytown and a site of improvised shelter.
Seems sadly two heartbeats into the future for today’s Bay Area
Funny you would ask: I just finished All Tomorrow's Parties about a week ago, as the end of a massive read/re-read of William Gibson. I started with Neuromancer and read the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy back to back.
I'd read everything at least once before, except Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, so this was a chance to kinda do it all at the same time, finish the stuff I had not read, and kinda have all this William Gibson in my head at more or less the same time.
Having done all that, I'll add this; if you've only read Neuromancer, or even only read just the Sprawl Trilogy, definitely consider giving the Bridge Trilogy a shot. It's markedly different in many ways, but still very Gibsonesque and definitely worth reading. The big differences, IMO, are that the Bridge Trilogy books are less "futuristic" and have less focus on tech technology qua technology, and focus more on the people and their interactions and choices, etc.
Honestly, this sounds a bit like some of Philip K Dick's work, which was set in the Bay Area after a nuclear war... he wrote it about 50 years before Gibson, though I'm sure Gibson must add something original to the mix.
I once asked Gibson whether he was influenced by Philip K Dick, and he said that he didn't read Dick when he was young, and was more influenced by Pynchon instead. Still, despite his denial, he seems to be retreading a lot of ground first covered by Dick himself.
I just started reading Bleeding Edge, which very much reads like a cyberpunk book in terms of dropping dozens of unelaborated references and allusions, or maybe like Douglas Coupland. Though I’d say it feels more like one of Bruce Sterling’s lighter works- Zeitgeist in particular- than something more like classic cyberpunk. (I’ve always associated the genre with brand-dropping, though that happens a ton in John Brunner’s work, which predates Gibson.) Independently, Pynchon also does that often, even in his novels not about high technology.
I read Neuromancer a few weeks ago, and couldn't get into it. I love books like Snow Crash and The Three Body Problem, but didn't track what was happening Neuromancer half the time and the other half I didn't care. I realize this is probably a personal defect, as so many others laud it as a masterpiece.
It's impressive because it's ~3 years before Neuromancer, and in many ways it's a better predictor of "the internet" as a cultural thing. It nails a lot of the social aspects of online forums, for instance. It lacks the raw style of Neuromancer, alas.
It helps that Vinge is a computer scientist; he probably had a better view of what was coming down the pike than Gibson did. And no, he's a solid writer, but not the stylist Gibson was (and, actually, still is).
I went on a Vinge binge when I'd heard that he was the originator of the singularity concept. Didn't like any of his work, including True Names. I liked Neuromancer and Count Zero way more.
Amusing to see that the last line of the piece refers to "sci-fi on speed", as amphetamines were the drug of choice for the spiritual forefather of the movement, Philip K Dick...
I wonder what the greybeards that grew up on this science fiction, now in their 40s/50s?, think of the world we live in today.
As one of them (I'll be 49 in a couple of months), I expect there is a pretty diverse range of opinions among us.
Me? Relative to cyberpunk fiction specifically? I think the old adage "the future is here, its just unevenly distributed" rings very true. Clearly in certain sense we are living in "the cyberpunk future". But by the same token there are obviously regards in which we are not (so far as we know).
I continue to see Cyberpunk as stimulating and fascinating in terms of thinking about the potential of technological developments, while continuing to be a warning about the dangers of certain paths that we might go down (and in some cases, are arguably already headed down). While I'm not as anti-advertising in the general sense as many HN'ers, I will say I dislike the way so much of what we call "tech" has become all about finding ways to serve more ads to more people, more efficiently - as opposed to working on finding better ways to purify water, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, etc. And I believe that there are company executives out there who would actually authorize the deployment of Max Headroom style "blipverts" even if they were exactly as flawed as described in Max Headroom. Not all would, of course, but I expect they exist.
My relationship with cyberpunk is a bit weird though, because I also don't share the broadly anti-capitalist sentiments often associated with "punk" ideology. In fact, I'm very much an an-cap[1]. So while I enjoy this fiction, I don't always interpret the political bits the way some others might. And as much as I see mega-corporations as an affront to human values, human decency, freedom, etc., I see governments as equally so (or more so). Both are just ways to concentrate power and oppress people in my book. shrug
Anyway, speaking more generally, I think the world we livein today is amazing in many ways, and kinda sucks in quite a few ways. I see Khan Academy, Youtube, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, inexpensive but crazy powerful computers, ubiquitous bandwidth, hand-held computers (smart phones) that are basically straight out of science fiction, etc. as adding so much to our world and enabling so many things. But at the same time, you can't ignore climate change, pollution, poverty, rising sea levels, the recent surge in something resembling what you might call "right wing populist fascism", etc. and not be a bit bothered.
We can put men on the moon, but we have people living in cardboard boxes. It's frustrating because I'm convinced we can do better. sigh Sorry for the long rant.
Thank you for your perspective. A lot of the problems (and technologies to address them) you talk about are actively being worked on by the way, so it's not all doom and gloom!
I love both Snow Crash and Neuromancer. I recall someone saying that Neal is a great hacker but not a great writer - but that Gibson is a great writer / but not a great hacker.
I guess the comparison isn’t perfect but I get what it means. Snow crash made more technical sense but reads like a disaster. Neuromancer reads like a dopamine drip but misses the mark on some of the tech.
Snow Crash is funny and short. I didn't like it at first but after forcing through the first 30 pages the anarcho-libertarianism ad absurdum took hold and I was laughing my socks off. I have yet to read another Stephenson novel. Neuromancer is more intense and some of the passages are hard to follow, but I enjoyed it pretty much from the get-go. Different books. I wish there was less apparent competition between them.
Also I wish the sense of humor of Snow Crash was better understood. It really is a laugh-out-loud read and otherwise reads like a comic book (in a good way). I think some of the Americanisms irk British and Euro readers. I'm not usually one for audio books but I have heard the Snow Crash audio book carries the tone perfectly.
Funny, I read it and then studied it at an alternative high school in the early 90's, and see Neuromancer as just a presumed part of my culture. I read this post as a bit like someone saying when we talk about poverty in rich western countries as "Dickensian," there was a real person named Dickens who actually wrote stories of some renown about those themes.
However, what fiction, art and comics were to us in a time before we could see pictures on the internet of literally everything, travel everywhere, and read the thoughts of random strangers on every conciavable topic, is what cyberpunk signifies now.
Gibson seemed to escape the category of genre and get treated "seriously," as "literary," fiction that is usually character driven, (vs plot driven and didactic fantasy sci-fi) but in Neuromancer's case the technology was so alive it became a character, or so the conversation at the time was about the book.
Literary fiction was a way to extend your experience by developing an empathy for complex characters and exercise it in a way that could be applied to relationships with real people. You could tell when someone had read Catcher and the Rye because it was like they had adopted the mannerisms of another friend you hadn't met. The idea and aesthetic of being or becoming cyberpunk - an anti-hero with super power competence at manipulating the tech substrate of your environment and system you both existed in and were against - was what a generation of young hackers adopted from Neromancer the way boomers read 'Catcher'.
At the time, Neuromancer's Case, Artimage, and Molly replaced the Holden Caulfields, Sebastian Flytes, and Larry Darell (characters from different famous literary novels) as character archetypes a lot of young readers oriented their aspirations and identities around, where relationships with these characters often set them on a real life trajectory. If you read Neuromancer and became a hacker, it's a lot like reading Brideshead Revisited and accepting your sexuality, or reading Razor's Edge and dropping out and living in an ashram.
Fiction before the internet did that, where it was personal experience of a relationship with characters and it had downstream effects on the culture. Post-internet on instagram or a blog someone follows, the characters are literally more real because these are people sharing their lives, but also less complex because the text and images are still representations created by people who aren't deeply thoughtful and practiced writers, and by being real, they don't provide ideals or open aesthetics. Internet people/characters don't provoke and leverage imagination that lets the reader create new and beautiful things, rather, they create concrete symbols to imitate and compare with directly.
When I read the article I was nostalgic, but thought it's not so much cyberpunk that is the artifact of the past, it's that the aesthetics and experience of fiction as a perfect, distant, and open ended ideal that draws out the readers imagination to create something new themselves that feels gone. As in I don't miss cyberpunk so much as I miss fiction being meaningfully upstream of culture the way it seemed to be before the internet. Anyway, piqued.
A great and terrible book, Gibson repeatedly throwing you in to mountains of not yet explained language and concepts before dragging you out of confusion a chapter later is frustrating and tiresome, however I could not help coming back for more. I regret nothing.
I have to read his books twice. The first time I just plow through, confused the entire time. The second pass is where I can enjoy it, but there are still a lot of times where I read a sentence and struggle with parsing it.
Gibson's works definitely demand multiple reads, IMO. I have read Neuromancer around 5 times now, and I'd say I "get it" a little bit more each time I read it. Even now, 30+ years after I read it the first time, it still fascinates on a re-read.
“Please, he prayed, now—
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now—
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”