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

160 million copies!?

[trawg]

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.

Re:160 million copies!?

[julesh]

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.