The Technology of Neuromancer After 25 Years

William Gibson's Neuromancer was first published 25 years ago. Dr_Ken writes with an excerpt from an article at MacWorld that delves into the current state of some of the technology that drives the book: "'Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power. Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails. The book eventually sold more than 160 million copies, but bringing the book to popular attention took a long time and a lot of word-of-mouth. The sci-fi community, however, was acutely aware of the novel's importance when it came out: Neuromancer ran the table on sci-fi's big three awards in 1984, winning the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award.'"

Comments

Re:160 million copies!?

[JackSpratts]

it sold 160 million copies, by the year 6010. it was in the footnotes.

Re:Amazon, here I come!

[mihalis]

This looks like something I ought to buy.

If you want to follow the spirit of the book, find a copy of the text illegally on-line and download it to your phone!

Also, this is my first first post ever!

Welcome!

Re:Might read this again

[Junior J. Junior III]

Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?

As an open implementation of .NET Lisa Overdrive, I thought it was a pretty good attempt, although, as usual, it's a slavish imitation of a paradigm invented by others and released in closed-source format long ago. What's especially weird in this case, though, is that the Lisa, which stole shamelessly from XEROX PARC, had to be overclocked in order to be able to run the bloated .NET Framework, which itself, erm, "borrowed" many toolkit widgets that came out of over nearly decades of Macintosh development, which itself obsoleted the original Lisa project --- only to be being re-implemented in the opensource Mono project so that it could be run on a non-Windows OS stack. Talk about chasing your own tail. Especially since OS X has been out for about a decade, and XCode makes everything else pale by comparison.

Re:Never forget the lesson of Neuromancer

[SirLurksAlot]

What, you're telling me I can't get rich from fencing 4MB of memory on the street? Way to shatter my dreams of being a hot interface cowboy!

Re:I didn't think it was that good

[Kidbro]

In my opinion, Neal Stephenson writes more approachable. I feel more involved. His writing seems to me less constructed and more flowing. But to me it also seems his down-side: The plot seems a bit unplanned, getting out of hand, the ending somewhat hurried.

Some slashdotter, in some previous thread about Stephenson uttered the excellent words "Neal Stephenson doesn't do endings. At some point, he just declares victory and stops writing." (admittedly, I'm not sure I got the quote entirely right - it's been several years). It was so spot on that the words "declare victory and stop..." has become a catch phrase at my work for whenever we think a task won't benefit much from having more hours assigned to it. I think it describes most of his books quite well.
That said, his books are (apart from lack of endings) generally very good, and he might very well be my favorite author...

Re:Pay Phones

[QuantumG]

And which is why I find his work so incredibly boring. If I wanted to read about a shanty town, I'd go buy a book called "poor people".

Re:Might read this again

[CmdrGravy]

He said he hates the American version of writing where the author has to explain everything 3 times so the audience can understand it.