NZ political life continues to be ridiculous (media training protip for Hone Harawira: when you are giving an apology, do not issue the opinion that another politician should be shot), global climate change progress continues to flounder in a commons dilemma, the US right wing continues to devour itself, and the Breakers continue to suffer without Kirk Penney. So I don’t have much to say about any of that.
Instead, I get to write a 25-year-anniversary reconsideration of Neuromancer, because I read it by the pool in Thailand. Here’s the review:
Yep, still good, and I understand it much better now.
Not that I read it when it first came out, of course, I was only eight. Neuromancer is about a dude who wants to live in cyberspace, but he got kicked out because he screwed over the wrong person. The first chunk of the book is straight-up Noir, then it switches seamlessly into a Caper story. It seems an odd sort of book to have changed the world; coming back to it, its narrative seems more contained than ever, smaller and more of an inward spiral. But its a smart and pleasing read. It’ll still be in circulation in a hundred years, and William Gibson will no doubt be bemused by that, but why not?
The two 25-anniversary articles to read are these:
Mark Sullivan writes about what it got right (e.g. the web), what it got wrong (e.g. AIs).
Joe McNeilly at GamesRadar gives an interesting overview of the book in its context and its legacy.
And this site is a good hub for more info.
5 thoughts on “Neuromancer – 25 years on”
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Ah, so I have Neuromancer to thank for all of the Doctor Who New Adventures that revolved around “Cyberspace”…
Bartok: yup. They did go back to that well a whole lot of times, didn’t they? Ah, the New Adventures. I remember reading Genesis not long after its release, and the sensation of deep wrongness that rippled through me when Dr McCoy and Ace removed all their clothes to fit in with the locals…
Yes, I was going to add that the 1/2 of the novels that didn’t involve Cyberspace tended to devote entire chapters to Ace’s sex-life.
Still, fond memories.
re-reading at the mo, bro. and you are right about it being a tiny story, probably why i like it so much. neuromancer is still like going home.
He did forsee the growing influence of proprietry market influence in cyberspace, as well as digital media’s formative influence on interiority through attempts to externalise subjectivity in order to control it.
Gibson’s always been interested in widgets and tech but in my view has been most successful in suggesting its influence psychologically rather than engineering it technically. Probably the source of those otherwise tenuous Philip K. Dick comparisions.