Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Technology of Neuromancer After 25 Years

Posted by timothy on from the where-were-you-when-it-came-out dept.

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.'"

13 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. 160 million copies!? by trawg · · Score: 4, Informative

    160 million sounds like.... a lot.

    BBC tells me Da Vinci code sold 30 million (back in 2006). Wikipedia refers me to this article from 2006 which says Neuromancer sold around 6.5 million copies - which seems a bit more believable.

    1. Re:160 million copies!? by downix · · Score: 2, Informative

      You do realize that is 6.5 million copies... in Canada, right?

      --
      Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
    2. Re:160 million copies!? by LS · · Score: 1, Informative

      you realize there are only 33 million people in canada right? If 6.5 million copies were sold in canada, that means 1 out of 5 people read neuromancer. Does that sound right?

      --
      There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
    3. Re:160 million copies!? by julesh · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, to be honest, a lot of this article is basically bullshit.

      What Gibson introduced was the idea of a global network of millions of computers, which he described in astonishing detail--though the World Wide Web, as we know it today, was still more than a decade away

      Such global networks featured in the fiction of Heinlein, Asimov and plenty of others before Neuromancer was published. Plenty of authors predicted the growth and utility of world wide computer networks, although none (including Gibson) grasped the full implications of this. And basically, everyone here was copying the ideas of Vannevar Bush, anyway.

      But Gibson took the World Wide Web much further. By introducing the concept of cyberspace, he made the Web a habitable place, with all the world's data stores represented as visual, even palpable, structures arranged in an endless matrix.

      Gibson didn't "introduce the concept of cyberspace". He may have invented the name that eventually became associated with it, but the idea of a visual 3D interface to computer networks was old by the time Neuromancer was published. Hell, the film Tron was highly popular 6 years beforehand, and basically involved almost exactly the same concepts: a three dimensional world in which a person can interact on a physical level with the virtual components of a software system. Sure, the way the world is presented is different, but the idea is basically the same. And Bruce Sterling was writing stuff _extremely_ similar to Gibson's work a few years ahead of him.

      This article is basically placing Neuromancer in a historical context that it does not warrant: it did not innovate these ideas.

    4. Re:160 million copies!? by mvdwege · · Score: 3, Informative

      Meh. Friday is from 1982. How about 'The Shockwave Rider' by John Brunner? Written in 1975, with a global communications network as a central plot point, and the first literary description of the concept of a computer worm.

      Really, here on Slashdot I'd expect people to know their classics.

      Mart

      --
      "I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
    5. Re:160 million copies!? by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 2, Informative

      Don't forget Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (1967), or Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" (1956). It's a much older concept than Neuromancer.

      --
      Not a sentence!
    6. Re:160 million copies!? by HarryCaul · · Score: 2, Informative

      Your Rowling figure is off by a considerable amount. Last estimate was 400+ million copies.

    7. Re:160 million copies!? by Abcd1234 · · Score: 2, Informative

      And don't forget Philp K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where people communed with animal spirits in a virtual world

      Uhh... I must've missed that part. Last time I read it, it was about a real, entirely non-virtual, post-apocalyptic world in which humans where confined to dreary cities and took care of the few remaining animals, the possession of which was an outward expression of both social status and inherent humanity (people believe that compassion and empathy are uniquely human traits, thus taking care of animals is an outward expression of that trait). Meanwhile, for those without the money to afford a real animal, mechanical substitutes would be used.

  2. Re:Might read this again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's called "immersion". A good writer will make it easy by slowly introducing the words and concepts to you so that you have a good idea of the environment by the time the story really starts moving. Anathem was excellent in this way. Even though it had a lot of made-up words and a totally different society, the concepts were introduced so that you could easily follow them. Now if only the story had been a bit better...

    Of course, some authors prefer to just dunk you into the midst of everything.

  3. Re:Might read this again by Goaway · · Score: 2, Informative

    The later two are pretty tightly intervowen, but Neuromancer really is more of a stand-alone work that the later books only vaguely reference. All three are definitely not a single work.

  4. Re:Amazon, here I come! by pjt33 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try reading it in poor translation. I just finished reading it in Spanish, and at some points I had to translate the Spanish to English, word for word, to work out what it meant.

  5. Re:Well he sure predicted the color of the sky by RDW · · Score: 2, Informative

    'The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel' - Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (yes, of course it's deliberate).

  6. Re: Amazon, here I come! by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 3, Informative

    But then, has there been anything in science lately that warrants any kind of gee-whiz fiction based on it?

    I might suggest you have a look at pretty much anything written by Greg Bear (Blood Music, Darwin's Radio, Eon et.al - see Wikipedia on Greg Bear). I'm not sure if 10 or so year old stuff fits your criteria for "new", but there is no question that this is real science fiction, based on extrapolations of scientific discoveries - not D&D with ray guns (not that there's anything wrong with that). From your post I think you might like him.

    --
    Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear