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!?

[JackSpratts]

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

Re:160 million copies!?

[charlie]

Terry Pratchett's total career sales track is around 66 million books. Steven King sold somewhere upwards of 100 million, total. J. K. Rowling is around the 70-120 million mark, worldwide. I call bullshit, by at least one (and probably two) orders of magnitude.

Re:160 million copies!?

[charlie]

Note that any sales figure a major English language publishing house discloses will be inflated by between 50% and 300%. This is standard practice -- everybody does it, so if you don't do it, everybody will assume that you're exaggerating your sales anyway and discount the figure accordingly. Stupid, but that's the way the business works. Even if you assume the 6.5 million worldwide sales figures is exaggerated by a factor of three, that's hugely impressive -- an SF novel that sells 10,000 hardcover and 50,000 paperback in the US is doing really well (and you can triple that figure to get an estimate of the worldwide sales).

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.

Re:160 million copies!?

[g253]

You're absolutely right, a particular 1946 short story worth mentioning (and reading!) is Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe

Re:160 million copies!?

[bcrowell]

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.

I think you're incorrect about Heinlein. If you look at his books, the closest I think he comes is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966. A big central computer on the moon becomes self-aware, and he can project a synthesized voice and image over a video phone network. He's also networked to a lot of stuff, and can, e.g., make toilets run backwards. However, it's really not depicted as anything at all resembling the internet. All he really did was take existing time-sharing systems (the Dartmouth time-sharing system started in 1964) and extrapolate to the case where the central computer was self-aware, and the network spread across the whole moon. The way humans use the network in the story is always as nothing more than a video phone network. There is only one computer, and nobody ever transfers any digital data other than video telephony. It's true that the network is described as global (meaning global on the moon), but it's really only depicted as a telephone network, and a global telephone network already existed in 1966. A global network of computers would have been an innovation, but Heinlein doesn't depict the existence of any other computers on the network.

Probably "A Logic Named Joe," by Murray Leinster, is the most relevant example that predates the actual internet.

Re:160 million copies!?

[mvdwege]

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

Never forget the lesson of Neuromancer

[FourthAge]

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.

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!

Pay Phones

[bhima]

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.

Re:Pay Phones

[Dmala]

Yeah, there are definitely parts of Neuromancer that are hilariously dated. The one that always sticks out for me is the part where Case has 3MB of stolen RAM that he's trying to move. It sounded impressively futuristic in 1985. Today, not so much.

Re:Pay Phones

[SpectreBlofeld]

Everybody likes to focus on the technology when discussing William Gibson, but the real focus of his stories have always been about the psychology/sociology/culture of the people in his books.

Take the Bridge Trilogy. The virtual glasses which (in part) drive the stories are simply plot macguffins. The real focus of the stories is the San Francisco-Oakland bridge and the people on it, which is decidedly low-tech - an interstitial, lawless zone, where, due to the class divide, the city's poor and homeless have taken residency, living in makeshift cabins strapped to the suspension cables. A metalsmith on the bridge forges knife blades, hammered out of motorcycle chains, giving them a damascus-like blade, while a vendor sells soup from a pot that is never emptied, rather continuously adding new ingredients... the 'wild folk' living on the bridge are feared by those living on land, but on the bridge itself, there is a sense of cooperation and fellowship.

Compare to the real-life (and now demolished) city of Kowloon.

Anyway, if you focus too much on the tech, you're missing the point.

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".

Can the attitude and pay your respect, boy.

[MisterSquid]

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.

Re:Might read this again

[Opportunist]

Gibson is no easy read because he doesn't explain things. He writes as if he wrote a story for someone who lives in that time and needs no explanation of terms and technology. It makes it hard to read, but it also adds a lot to the atmosphere once you got into the mindset.

I don't like stories that explain everything in detail to make it easier for you to read. They take away from the experience IMO.

Who are you calling "boy", kid?

[argent]

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.

Re:Who are you calling "boy", kid?

[MisterSquid]

Excellent points taken.

Regarding "the representation of information as landscapes" as "a repeated dead end," I agree it has been done to death and the idea may not have any meaning as such. However, considered as a metaphor, the idea that networked information and the traversal of these domains would/could serve as a replacement for physical/real/actual landscapes is, to my mind, prescient.

Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee, Marshall McLuhan, Jaron Lanier, Sherry Turkle, and many other theorists and creators of human-machine interfaces have helped produce what we recognize as contemporary information systems and, in my opinion, Gibson's fictional vision to some degree shaped what has been created (e.g. Second Life) and what we imagine possible (e.g. real-time augmented reality). I think you too quickly dismiss Gibson's influence when you claim Gibson's work has no predictive power.

Gibson may not have predicted anything, but his vision indisputably reflects and affects some of the very real technologies that have since come to pass.

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:Might read this again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You have missed the point

[billybob_jcv]

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.

bluetooth headsets

[je ne sais quoi]

most interestingly he missed the invention of mobile phones and so pay phones make an appearance in the book.

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.

Re:The Theme

[Yokaze]

I have a quite contrary view on that. They were all human, and to some degree even the AIs (to an increasing degree over the series of books). They weren't monsters, merely products of their culture.
On the matter of distopia, let see what Gibson has to say on that himself:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl. [...]

I think, you can safely say this over the characters, too. Their behaviour and personality simply reflect the situation they live in. Being a drug dealer and -(ab)users, asocial and delusional is hardly desirable but far from seldom among human, as can be observed in the slums of the large cities around the world.

Re:I didn't think it was that good

[Yokaze]

> That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little.
> You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work [...]

Not so much. While they work with similar themes, I think their writing style is quite different.

William Gibson is much more terse and relies on cultural references ('name-dropping') for setting the scene. The story evolves more around such scene descriptions, than a particular sequence of actions.
As you seem to find those scene descriptions rather pretentious, it is hardly surprising, that you dislike his works. But quite frankly, I like sentences with such references like:

Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she's had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of Solaris here, using the expressway as found Future City.
Now it's been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. (from Pattern Recognition)

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.

Re: Amazon, here I come!

[Nefarious Wheel]

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.