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.
