On "Neuromancer" and cyberpunk
Reading William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (1984) for the first time as an aging hacker
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Science Fiction: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Literary: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Vibe: ★★★★★ (5 out of 5)
So far on this journey, I’ve reviewed books from the
'50s [Foundation (1951)]
'60s [Dune (1965)]
'70s [The Dispossessed (1974), Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976)]
'90s [Diaspora (1997)]
'00s [Glasshouse (2006), The Three Body Problem (2008)]
'10s [The Fifth Season (2015), Children of Time (2015), Infomocracy (2016), Autonomous (2017), And Shall Machines Surrender (2019)]
'20s [Light From Uncommon Stars (2021), The Revelations (2020)]
William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) was able to fill two deficits — a book from the 1980s, and a lauded classic that I'd never gotten around to reading. I’m glad I did.
The fact that the novel Neuromancer is recognized as creating the cyberpunk aesthetic alongside a film like Blade Runner (1982) — visual media — is probably due to Gibson’s staggering descriptive power. I almost didn’t care about the plot or the characters; of course, those elements are present — further elevating the novel. I could see a graphic novel unfolding in my head and it’s a shame that only part of the story has been so adapted.
I probably didn’t read Neuromancer because, by the time I was old enough, I was reading related nonfiction like The Cuckoo’s Egg (1989) and The Anarchist’s Cookbook (1971) (printed from a BBS on old feed printer paper1). I had my first computer in 1983 (a TI-99/4a2), and, knowing how obnoxious I was as a child, probably would have thought fiction from a writer who didn’t know anything about computers or electronics3 was useless. My loss — I probably would have liked it if I’d tried.
I don’t think there’s much I can add about the book — it’s a classic and deservedly so. I do want to talk about one of this book’s lasting contributions: cyberpunk. I watched a video essay several weeks ago about whether cyberpunk can or does exist today. I won’t go into that essay here except to say that the central thesis is the difference between the technological fears of 1984 and 2018 have changed. One specific change is the perception of the large billboard-like advertising projected onto buildings of Blade Runner (1982) and Altered Carbon (2018). In the former, it’s supposed to be bleak capitalism taking over public space; in the latter, it’s part of the allure of a cyberpunk world. Much like the anti-capitalist DIY4 punk rock style of the 70s arising out of unemployment being transformed into a costume5 built from a much more limited palette that you can purchase from Hot Topic, the modern cyberpunk of, say, Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) or Altered Carbon (2018) is often just a veneer.
There is a definite Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote aspect to the subgenre — a rote cyberpunk work today is going to be much richer in allusion compared to Neuromancer if only because of the events that occurred between 1984 and today6. However, a new cyberpunk novel would have to take a close look at the fears, trends, and possibilities of technology7 today alongside the anti-capitalist DIY ethos that makes punk punk. Two books I’ve reviewed here8 that evoke this feeling are Infomocracy (2016) and Autonomous (2017) — people act as independent operators9 in a hyper-capitalist world of cyber-politics (Infomocracy) or cyber-medicine (Autonomous). Much like the real embodiment of punk today, the real encapsulation of cyberpunk doesn’t look like it did at its genesis. We still have capitalism; we still have inequality; we still have intractable political conflict. However, it seems less and less like the “virtual reality” paradigm people suggested in the 80s and 90s (and companies like Facebook exhaustingly continue to suggest) will be anything but a niche use. It seems more and more like “cyberspace” is and will be a place for memes and trolls — continuously defying attempts to reliably co-opt or monetize it. Some might say just like punk itself.
We can compare the cyberpunk world imagined by Neuromancer to the one it became: social media, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and increasingly a walled garden of paid sites as the free flow of information envisioned by some of the pioneers of the internet10 falls away into unmoderated disinformation11. We all carry computers with us thousands of times more powerful than the ones in the 1980s12, and we can be reached anywhere in seconds. We can be geolocated to within 10s of meters13. However, we still can’t build an artificial intelligence like Wintermute14 — at least one that isn’t bullshitting us. There was no nuclear war (yet), but the environment is being destroyed — not by a single event, but rather the combined effect of millions of individual choices. One of the poles of the world order did shift to China, but the US is basically as powerful as ever. Japan loomed large in the 80s, poised to take over the world economically; in the 90s it faded into a vision of what our zero-growth future might look like. Like in Neuromancer, capitalism has only grown in strength since the 80s — but unlike Neuromancer, it has no real foil as today’s “console cowboys” mostly present a nuisance, a business loss, a write off.
This is all to emphasize that while Neuromancer (1984) was one of the founding works of a new genre of cyberpunk, modern cyberpunk has to change with its times. It will be more like the aforementioned Autonomous (2017) or Infomocracy (2016), and less like Blade Runner (1982) or The Matrix (1999). It will always be a moving target.
This form factor reminded me that decades ago a friend of my parents’ gave me a copy of someone’s unpublished sci fi novel they were editing to read and provide feedback. I do not remember the book at all, but if it was ever published it would have been from an author living near Houston (at the time) sometime after 1993.
And it really was effectively mine — my siblings were too young, and my mother and father didn’t have much time outside of work and taking care of us to learn BASIC or play video games. It spent only a few months in a common area before moving up to my room.
Gibson does misappropriate the concept of the flip-flop (a binary data latching circuit) for something that is more like a KVM switch. You could build something that performs a switching operation that incorporates a flip-flop, but the primary functionality is basically just a switch.
One of the reasons I always laugh at billionaire capitalists, right wing free market conservatives, and anarcho-capitalist libertarians attempting to claim “punk” is that anti-capitalism is one of its defining qualities. Politically, punk runs from socialism to anarchism, but can be consistent with representative democracy. It requires you to punch fascists.
“What do you think this is — a costume? It’s a way of life.” Mark Venturini as “Suicide” referencing his black leather outfit in Return of the Living Dead (1985). This is already a joke about how punk rockers went from making their own clothes out of both poverty and anti-consumer culture to being just another outfit you can buy at the mall.
I do not appreciate the return of fascism or that the respite of a negligible probability of nuclear annihilation was so brief.
There is also an element of dealing with the loss of an unmapped world. Cyberspace creates a new world to explore in Neuromancer. In my copy there was an afterward by author Jack Womack titled “Some Dark Holler” where he references the fact that he and Gibson grew up on opposite sides of the Appalachian mountains in proximity to the dark woods, small ravines, and hollows (hollers). This reminded me of another book in my review series set in that region (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang) that deals with the mapping of the world differently — by removing civilization. In both Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and Neuromancer, humans survive nuclear annihilation; however the two books have different takes on the aftermath.
A negative example would be Diaspora (1997) which is about a possible future of technology and humanity, but fails to be punk. For one, there’s no hyper-capitalism or inequality. The characters also pursue their objectives out of a more intellectual drive — as the best of Star Trek could sometimes do.
“… doing it all with a kind of gutsy disregard for convention that we describe today as ‘criminal’.” — James Burke talking about Drake and Raleigh during the reign of Elizabeth I in the series Connections (1978).
It’s useful to remember that the development of the internet was driven by the US military’s desire for a resilient communications system in the event of a nuclear war.
In the Inner Horizon universe, the internet fades into a derelict underworld as the final nail — the ability to break any digital encryption — comes in the form of ubiquitous quantum computation.
A development spurred by the US military’s need for fast flight computers for nuclear guidance systems.
Much like the internet and microchips, another the desire of the US military.
I did appreciate that Wintermute wasn’t written in all caps like many of the programming languages of the day. I could just see a cheesy modern version referencing winterMute().