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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.'"
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
It's been a few months since I read it but I remember the humans staying human all the way to the end.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
When stating the specifications of future computers, never, ever use real units such as "megabytes", because whatever number you use, it will be hopelessly wrong within a few years.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Perhaps I should read this again. On the first reading it was incredibly hard to make much sense of the story. It does though drip with atmosphere, but some parts of the story are just so damn bizarre.
Anyone know if the other two related stories are any good (Mono Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero)?
Sorry, I enjoyed Neuromancer as much as anyone. However, you can't talk about what Gibson got right without talking about what he missed... most interestingly he missed the invention of mobile phones and so pay phones make an appearance in the book.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I simply didn't find the book as compelling as the hype. I don't think it was predictive. It certainly pre-dated fiction like the Matrix, but the terminology, and the feel of how things work feel very much rooted in a sooped-up virtual reality extension of the technology that was around back then.
It's a while since I read it, and I'm not inclined to revisit it. Perhaps its just me *shrug*
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Murray Leinster predicted the future of computer technology better in the '50s than Gibson did in the '90s.
This is the man who coined the term "cyberspace"--first in "Johnny Mnemonic" in his 1982 Burning Chrome collection and popularized in Neuromancer--and imagined the representation of information as virtual/geographic landscapes. All of it pounded out using a manual typewriter. This 15-year-old interview may give you some sense of why Gibson's novel will probably matter more than any cultural artifact you or I will ever create.
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One of the funny bits in the book for me, is how they fly around from city to city to talk/meet with people, and fix things up. And at the same time they have a worldwide computer network... :)
-- we're here you're not
I read just about all of Gibson's novels the week they came out, and they were super cool... but they have had about zero predictive power.
The word "cyberspace" almost always means that the person using it has no idea what they're talking about. Oh, there are exceptions, but the people who are most taken by Gibson's vision are sorely lacking in insight.
The representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.
Not believing in the predictive power of Gibson's novels doesn't mean I don't consider them important, it just means I'm aware that they're fiction.
Lord of the Rings is a great cultural artifact without having people yammering on about Ringwraiths being real.
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!
I don't think he as trying to predict anything. He was trying to write a good story in a new way and he did both of those things.
Absolutely agree. I'm not saying he didn't write a good yarn or three.
First line, oft quoted: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" When Billy wrote that that would have been grey, but today it's bright blue.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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!
Don't do that!!!
This guy's the limit!
Weirdly, this article about saline face modification in Bizarre magazine. Makes me want to reread Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic (but definitely not watch the movie again)
Gibson winces at the term "information superhighway" ("a nasty piece of buzzword engineering"), but has good things to say about the Internet: "I'm not a user, but I'm a big fan. I like the idea that it's extra-national, and no one particularly owns it. My concern now is whether it can be dismantled by corporate interests who want something more structured so they can sell us stuff - or whether there's some innate urge toward freedom inherent in the technology that will keep it evolving."
Seems a bit like the current "quest for control and censorship" we hear about every week here, as well as the net neutrality controversy.
What I liked most in Neuromancer, is the use of figures, such as ice as a firewall, and the hero hacking and melting through it to access the protected part. I could easily imagine this in a movie ...
Great sci-fi is rarely about the technology. Neuromancer was first and foremost a great cyberpunk story. The technology that the main character Case used was secondary to who Case was - a guy from the underbelly of society who lived by his own brand of ethics and was being manipulated by evil-doers. The technoworld in which he lived is simply an interesting setting - like Sam Spade's San Francisco.
But... where does Al Gore fit in this!?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
FTA:
Maybe a board or committee should be formed to establish a standardized interface for 'jacking-in'. IEEE? AMA? LSD?
It's true that he doesn't have any mobile phones and seems to prefer implants, but he had a lot of those that do similar functions to a phone. E.g., Molly has some sort of implant that gives the time, and radio functions and then Case monitors her position through his cyberspace rig (more than just her position, her whole sensory apparatus), of which a video conferencing phone might be considered a clumsy version. Also, throughout the book, one sees people who insert some sort of chip called a "microsoft" into a jack behind their ear that give them some extra knowledge, or some enhancement. When those Bluetooth headsets became popular and people just started wearing them around like they were an item of clothing, it reminded me precisely of those "microsofts" in Neuromancer, or whatever they were called.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Others have rightly called BS on TFA already for the grossly inflated copies-sold figure. If the movie comes out as planned http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1037220/ his total readership + moviegoers + game players for all his works and derivations might total something like the 160 million figure, but only if that's not constrained to sales of those.
Before taking the article to task for other details, it's worth noting that it's not very original. At the 20 year mark the Neuromancer was reviewed by Velvet Delorey http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/pages/media/delorey.htm for the Canadian SF web site Made In Canada http://www.geocities.com/canadian_sf/index.html (1998-2008, RIP). Rather than focusing on the tech itself, she made the observation that "Whatever aspects of the Eighties Neuromancer may have extrapolated from, however, much of the Eighties influences, both -punk and cyber-, seem to have taken their cues from Neuromancer, instead of the other way around," suggesting the influences were bidirectional, and social in nature. That appears closer to Gibson's own views, which although may carry some bias of their own, should be taken as closer to the truth than other viewpoints. This provides its own segue to criticism of TFA for focusing on science-fictionary special effects and giving them primacy, to the neglect of the reason for their creation.
William Gibson himself holds that where he created technology, it was to further the interaction of the characters and carry the plot, and was never meant to be prophetic in any sense. Furthermore he claims that when it has proven prophetic it was actually because it was instead descriptive of possibilities, and techies who were already engaged in development of things along the same lines read the book, then used it as a clearer description than they were capable of elucidating for what they were trying to develop. In a 2007 interview with The AV Club focusing on his then upcoming "Spook Country", http://www.avclub.com/articles/william-gibson,14143/ he says "There was a time in the late '80s, early '90s, when every government in the world decided to have a huge, lavishly funded virtual-reality conference, and I got invited to all of them. So I met lots and lots of the players in the goggles-and-gloves school of virtual reality. None of them actually became the man who invented television, which is what I think all of them expected to become. But to a man or woman, they all allowed as how I had really helped them out. They had this idea, but they'd never been able to explain to anybody what it was. Once they had Neuromancer, they could just go around with a suitcase full of copies, and when people said, "I just can't fathom what you're talking about," they'd say, "Read this. It's sort of like this." [Laughs.] I don't think they were just flattering me; I think they were actually doing that." So, Gibson didn't get any of the tech right or wrong. He just got some story points on paper. The tech, and the rights or wrongs about it, belong to the techies who tried to develop it (with or without Gibson's influence) and succeeded or failed.
As an aside, I'm writing this in a small Appalachian town known as the home of Mountain Dew and very little else. I'm 25 miles from Gibson's boyhood home. Despite the big green signs along Interstate 81 announcing that this is "Virginia's Technology Corridor" (thanks to the proximity to Virginia Tech, and no mention of William Gibson in sight) both can well be said to be "a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted", as was Gibson's account of his home town of 40 years ago. The future obviously arrives at different rates in different places, this place among the slowest. Luckily for some, when confronted with this fact in places like this, they construct that reluctant future in their heads. Luckily for the rest of us, some of them share it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
[[NOTICE: THIS IS NOT FLAMEBAIT--at least it isn't meant to be]]
Actually, about all I remember about this novel other than the space station is that it was incredibly boring all the way to the even more boring space station sequence at the end: Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides. Yes, it may have been prescient. But could it not have been readable too? Sorry, but I grew up reading Asimov, and enjoyed it, though he wasn't half as prescient. SF is escapist fiction with a little futuristic science thrown in. It's not supposed to be Scientific American Time Travel Edition. Oh well, mod me down if you wish.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
You know, I agree with you. For all the cool stuff he came up with, Neuromancer just isn't that good of a book. Its important for what it started, but there are better later examples of the cyberpunk motif.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
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Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides.
Hmm. I always enjoyed the descriptions of the hellrides. What I always found myself skimming was the blow-by-blow descriptions over several pages of hand-to-hand combat. (Sword fights, too, although those tended to be quicker and more interesting. It's the long wrestling matches I couldn't stay awake through...)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You do realize that Neuromancer has been published in French too right? Not saying the number's accurate, but you can't just assume that no Quebec Francophone has ever read the book just because it was originally written in English.
I don't care how you knock this article, but Neuromancer is one of the coolest sci fi books I've ever read- And I've knocked out Asimov's entire works. Not to mention that we are getting closer and closer to the society Gibson wrote about- cash is being discouraged over digital transactions, more and more technology is being created to assist mankind... exoskeletons, mind link computers for the paralyzed, "sixth sense" devices for glasses (no really, there's even a slashdot article about it). Are we really so far away from being able to buying a pair of Zeiss-Nikon eyes?
Everybody keeps neglecting his use of derms to deliver drugs. Yet, the first "patch" I saw widely in use was the anti-smoking patches in the mid-90's. I'd bet he didn't invent them, but he did envision they would be widely used. Derms even got mentioned in a recent computer-animated flick where a lady peels her sleeve up and shows us about 15 "coffee derms."
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.
In the old days, if you went to a channel that had no broadcast signal, you would see gray black and white snow from you TV set.
Modern TVs, even before going all digital, have a internal circuit that just shows a 'blanking' signal when no broadcast signal is detected: a color, usually blue or black.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It's funny you threw in the comment about Asimov, though I'm not sure how to take it. I've always greatly admired Asimov, both as a writer and a human being. I've really liked his ideas and recognize the huge impact he's had on the genre of sf.
But his writing style - meh. Not since being a teenager with limited titles available at the library have I willingly read much of his fiction. In reading comments over the year, I find that I'm not alone and this seems to be a general consensus.
There are some authors who I still read even with bad writing styles, simply for the fantastic ideas. I will never make the mistake of reading another Robert L. Forward title again, though. I never thought I could be so bored and interested at the same time.
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Speaking of pay phones / cell phones influencing story lines... If you go back and watch TV shows from the 70s and 80s, you'll see that a bunch of the stories just won't work today. Many of the plots turn on character X having to jump in a car and race to point Y to warn character Z about threat G. If these shows were re-shot to be set in modern times, the writers would have to perpetually make characters forget to charge their cell phones or put them in areas with spotty coverage.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I have an admission to make. Whenever I was sent to work for a few months or more in a foreign country, I would always seek out the local translation of Neuromancer. I already knew the English original down pat, so it was an easy way to get a feel for a new language.
So far, this has worked incredibly well in German and in French, both of which have translations. I have not been so successful in Dutch: Is there a Dutch translation? I have the sinking feeling that the Dutch (with their excellent language skills) just read it in the original.
I read Neuromancer as an impressionable teen. I have to admit that it has been one of the two best books to prepare me for the world of today. Computers, AI, biotechnology, governments, multinationals, political disenfranchisement, reproductive technology, networking, drugs, poverty, wealth, history, and the human condition all spring to mind. I would be a very different person if I had not read this book (again and again) and not one for the better. Thank you William Gibson.
Yes, the reference to memory size in Neuromancer is horribly dated. But I can't think of another case where the book still doesn't seem fresh.
The BBC radio play is really a hack job. Entire places and people that are pivotal to the book are removed, and of what remains, the people in the story have different motivations for their actions. It was like a bad 15th-generation copy of something brilliant: You could still make it out from under the smudges and corruption, but it was no longer the same thing at all.
I was just finishing my bike-camping trip when I saw a street-sign called: Wintermute Ave. I giggled and took a picture.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Yes, I did read him in High School and upon attempting to reread him years later, he was virtually unreadable. But then I'm not sure I'd like the Three Musketeers today either, or the Bounty trilogy. I'm not sure it's about style, just worldview, I think. I pretty much stopped reading SF a good while again, though that had more to do with the availability of pretty much nothing other than swords and sorcery on the one hand and Dystopian cyberpunk on the other. But then, has there been anything in science lately that warrants any kind of gee-whiz fiction based on it?
As for Zelazny, he wrote some pretty good stuff other than the 2 Avalon series, the first of which was bearable, the second, not. He did some really good novels based on eastern religions in a future world. But Avalon brought in the bucks, which is almost always a writer's major concern.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
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
For you, maybe. But thankfully for the rest of us who enjoy Neuromancer you don't get to decide what science fiction is supposed to be :)
I would say the exact same thing about J.R.R. Tolkien... but they opened doors that are breath-taking. Just because Columbus arrived in America first doesn't mean he was the best sailor.
d
p.s. The Columbus comment was just to make a point and doesn't need to be deconstructed for historical accuracy
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
I read Gibson's work first and really liked it. When I tried Stephenson I found him boring and just derivative -- it felt like bad Gibson with no new ideas. Even the characters seemed to be copied (come on, really, Y.T. vs. Molly?).
Maybe Stephenson's tech is more realistic (although spoilt by the Sumerian crap in Snow Crash). But Gibson's writing is so much better and his ideas were fresh at the time. I strongly recommend reading Gibson, skipping Stephenson and going on to Iain M. Banks or Gridlinked by Neal Asher.
Obviously tastes differ.
I agree on all fronts, but still feel Neuromancer is worth reading, once. Many of the other books he wrote that share some of the same characters are easier to read (in terms of being less boring), but don't handle the themes of human-machine integration quite as well. Overall, I'm not a particularly big fan of his writing, though I've read most of his books, something about the style just doesn't mesh well with me, and it takes a very long time for me to get through one of his books. Neuromancer may well be the only one worth reading, and one of the hardest to get through, and overall his prescience must have been because of its popularity among computer users, because he is not very good with technological details (and his more recent work suffers because technology is catching up with some of his ideas).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I just got into reading Zelazny after someone posted a link in another /. discussion to "For a Breath I Tarry". There is some author background in the first book his collected works. In it, it is detailed that a lot of the fight sequences are detailed and realistic because he was physically awkward growing up, so he spent time fencing and doing various martial arts (details are fuzzy, and I don't have the book on me at work). This lead to him giving a bit too much attention to detail on some fight sequences.
I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
You're talking about so-called Hard Science Fiction - sci-fi based on real science and theoretical possibilities, as opposed to soft sci-fi, which is often called Space Opera.
Cyberpunk didn't really fall into either hard sci-fi or space opera, which is probably why it got its own genre. The genre existed long before the term was coined, however - Blade Runner was filmed in 1981 and loosely based on a 1960s novel, but the term cyberpunk wasn't coined until 1983 (by Bruce Bethke).
In the 1980s almost every cyberpunk novel I read was derivative from Neuromancer, including Psychodrome (Hawke, focusing on simstim stars), Snow Crash (Stephenson, derivative in many ways), Islands in the Net (Sterling, cyberspace, setting in general). I think it wasn't until the mid-1990s where I read anything really original that still fell into the cyberpunk genre IMO (the excellent book the Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson - but this is often called postcyberpunk). Still, Neuromancer covered a lot of bases, so there was a lot of space for original material, even if it was generally derivative. I personally find Neuromancer as a so-so novel from a writing standpoint, but the vision at the time was so in-your-face to typical sci-fi (read Asimov and you'll understand) that it was a welcome and needed change.
Funny, but those bluetooth headsets reminded me more of what Spock had sticking out of his ear for half the episodes of Star Trek. Frankly, I find it humorous we're having this discussion, since Gene Rodenberry seemed more capable of predicting the future than William Gibson.
For everthing that Gibson got right, Rodenberry got it MORE right.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
" ymbnh"
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.
Yup. Gibson saw cyberspace as a spatial representation of different corporations' data. He talks quite specifically of jacking into the VR construct and navigating (via keyboard commands!) between the geometric data of different hosts, "great corporate hotcores" and below them used-car lots and tax accountants, and further out black zones of government agencies. That's just not remotely how the internet works and I doubt connecting to different IP addresses will ever be presented that way.
However, Gibson tosses out dozens of resonant ideas in the Sprawl series (some of which the article mentions), like Zeiss Ikon recording eye implants, simstim, holographic porn, cyber guard dogs, microlights in zero G, rogue AIs, artistic AIs, etc. Slotting slivers of microsoft to know stuff ("knowledge lit him like an arcade game"!), then the transition to biosoft making you nauseous with another's emotions is wonderful. Although Neal Stephenson gets the credit for avatars in cyberspace, Count Zero has an eerily prescient description of virtual worlds like PlayStation Home when it describes Jaylene Slide's pad in L.A. Lots of CZ quotations here and here.
=S