I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek).
In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.
I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.
That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.
At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.
To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.
P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
Fascinating story :-).Neuromancer is a book I reread often - like Dune, it has a rich tapestry of background world building. There is nothing surprising about plot anymore, but it is like a place I like to return to.
Wow. What a great story. An in translation, no less. The Greek translator must have been very talented.
(Kind of curious now ... were the other translated editions in non-English languages as powerful? Do readers of science fiction in other languages seek out works by specific translators or publishers known to have great translations?)
"translated by GPT"
I believe parent was talking about translated book, not about the comment.
This is a lovely story. Thanks for sharing.
I read it in 1996. and it was a t-file from a bbs. I had to sit in front of my 386sx everyday to read the text in dos edit. it took weeks. because it was in english and I was learning english at the same time. you gave me the urge to reread it now :)
Nice!
Did you read the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy too? What do you think of the other books?
One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)
Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point.
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
Really interesting, because his writing kinda gives you that wide-T sense, it's like the way Wu Tang rapped -- especially Raekwon, and to a lesser extend Ghostface -- where they avalanche you with all of these richly visualized and highly contrasted scenarios of this that and the other without ever go too deeply into any of them. Really does leave you awash in a lot of flavorful vibes and in 1991/1992 when I wasn't doing too much computering at all it gave me such a strong sense that sooner than later I'd be doing a lot of it
I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.
For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense.
It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
I always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick / Dick is the American Ballard.
The heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.
A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point.
It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!
Totally disagree. He has the deepest understanding of all, of humans, aesthetic, culture, and art. Much more important than specifics about technology which is almost always completely irrelevant.
I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people.
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...
EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
I hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years.
The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.
Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
There's this quote I heard that said something along the lines of "Good sci-fi uses fictional technology to show us something about human beings that would be difficult to express otherwise".
I first read this as a foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness and it has completely changed how I read. It’s important to understand that there is an agenda behind every book, not as a bad thing, but as a way to understand and explore how the author thinks and how they have been shaped by the real world that they live in and build from to create.
Yes. Neuromancer is actually about drug addiction in the same way as PKD's work is, with the cyberspace being a psychedelic non physical drug. It is also about cybernetics as systems of control; you can trace the machinery of each character being driven by and struggling against external forces of control. Case, Molly, Armitage, and ultimately the AI.
Cyberspace in Neuromancer is certainly not not psychedelic, but it’s also clearly to a large extent based on Tron .
To the best of my knowledge Gibson has never talked about Tron being an influence. He'd already described cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome before Tron came out.
He has sometimes talked about Blade Runner and worrying when it came out that people would think his stuff was derivative of it (it wasn't), and then said he eventually got to talk with Ridley Scott about it, and it turns out both of them had similar inspirations, namely Metal Hurlant.
You're right; also, apparently, Gibson said he hadn't seen Tron as late as March 1983, and he finished a draft of Neuromancer before that August https://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/free-article/neuromancer-t... . (Though this also confirms that he had seen Tron stills in mid-1982, though that's still well after both "Burning Chrome" and the Jacked In outline (both 1981)). OTOH the similarities to Blade Runner have never really been hard to explain: if you cross film noir and hard-boiled with New Hollywood and '70s malaise fiction then it's natural to end up with something a bit like Blade Runner and so also Neuromancer, while on the other hand there are of course huge differences between the two as well.
>Cybernetics as systems of control;
Now you are being redundant :D
Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)
Most of the culture novels are around a Special Circumstances situation. The minds and other science fiction elements are largely (albeit quite richly detailed) backdrop to a human protagonist’s actions.
Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.
That’s also about people. And communism.
Only some of the people in the series are space ships.
> Sci fi is always about people.
I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
I cant find the quote either but I think it was Asimov
I enjoyed the world of Tron a lot more when I understood that it was more about how people saw computers at the time than how they actually were, too. The result was something arguably more unique than a "realistic" view would have been, too.
Similar situation with Abbott's Flatland fiction from the 1800's. No math/physics background, but a very interesting perspective on different dimensions from a humanistic point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts in ways that at the time many felt impossible.
Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi:
The indie documentary https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
The trick is to invent future tech that feels organic, cohesive, and believable, and not just whatever happens to be needed for the story you’re trying to tell.
Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
go back a bit further though and you'll get to Arthur c Clarke who accurately predicted geostationary communication satellites
Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows:
>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.
>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.
And also a human mission to Jupiter aided by a sentient computer in the year 2001.
As I recall, his communication satellite depiction included humans living on it full time to keep it running. Also not quite how it turned out.
I have the utmost respect for him, but he was not immune to getting the future wrong like other science fiction authors.
Yes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge.
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss.
Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.
Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.
Māyā.
Precisely
Just goes to show, if you want to write romantically about something, it’s best to have little or no idea what you’re talking about, so that your imagination can take over. Shouldn’t be too hard for some people on hackernews, they do it everyday!
Zing!
fascinating
Overall an interesting read.
To go straight to the nitpicks:
> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.
Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.
1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.
I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.
What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
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> Grand Theft Auto, ... Andor
Those were made in Britain by British creators.
The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US companies with US culture in them.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
So… your argument is that it’s not counterculture unless it’s mainstream culture? And that one should only credit derivative works once they become mainstream, rather than the original inspiring works because they were too obscure?
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.
I think it is actually pretty difficult to look at countries and say which ones have successful countercultures. I mean to some extent if a counterculture is successful it becomes not a counterculture, just part of the mainstream culture. On the other hand, a maximally out-of-mainstream counterculture is a totally unknown thing that we’ve never heard of as outsiders.
Counterculture is a culture that is counter to the mainstream culture. If a culture is happy on its own, it is more of just a subculture. Cyberpunk itself features counterculture not just subculture, but is also inspired by the counterculture at the time.
Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations, harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just like it could never be that influential in music.
Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (and some video games) have been influential and are frequently credited for that, but that is about it. Everything else including similar media before and at the same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0]. Just like in music.
Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyberpunk_works
tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in cyberpunk despite having had influence.
> The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC
Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
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Tony Gilroy isn't British.
Fascinating how people can make "counterculture" into a contest between nation-states.
>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
> used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S
to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly maligned) sequels
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> Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
Ah..
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
GTA "equivalent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)
I really don't think Yakuza games are anything like GTA besides "being in a city". Yakuza has none of the sandbox elements like GTA, the city is more like an elaborate menu to go from mission to mission/side quest/activity.
You can't even drive in most Yakuza games! They made a bad comparison.
Why would one want to ask an LLM and risk maybe being led in entirely the wrong direction?
Do you know how the Japanese think of and/or talk about "Japanese Cyberpunk"; e.g. Tetsuo: The Iron Man? It's interesting to me that there is "Japanese cyberpunk" and then there is regular cyberpunk made by Japanese artists (e.g. Ghost in the Shell). Do the Japanese consider these completely separate genres? Variants of the same genre? Are most fans even aware that Westerners make the distinction?
The way I see it, works like Tetsuo is Japanese extreme cyberpunk - niche-whithin-a-niche kind of thing.
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My favourite lesser known post-Neuromancer works:
George Alec Effinger "When Gravity Fails" (1987) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Gravity_Fails
Walter John Williams "Aristoi" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristoi_(novel)
And just pre-Gibson: Michael Berlyn "The Integrated Man" (1980) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144056.The_Integrated_M...
Bruce Sterling "The Artificial Kid" (1980) This is not a hacker novel, but eerily presages Instagram/Snapchat and viral stardom, the need for creators to create content, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artificial_Kid
Thank you so much! Neuromancer had such a profound impact on my career and my life. I've been searching for similar works for years and by this point, I've read all the obvious ones twice over.
I'll add Pat Cadigan's Synners to the list.
nice, anyone who provides links with their recs is top-notch!
Interesting article. As somebody who is an unapologetic, raging Neuromancer fan, it's always fun to read about someone experiencing the book for the first time.
The one nitpick I have about the article is just this:
But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981
OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.
I'd take that a step further. I don't know how anyone who read it back at that timepoints would not have immediately pictured the static associated with not getting a signal.
The only thing to be confused about is that the sky never looks anything like TV static (other than maybe in a snow storm, but even then not really).
> But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980
My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the cable tuner was too primitive to maintain an active list or you miskeyed a number on a remote.
And game consoles, home computers or VCRs provided ample opportunities to experience this during setup when using the RF connector. Also, the successful 1982 Poltergeist movie had some very prominent scenes involving TV static.
Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
Totally agree. "Stand on Zanzibar" has a modern-world feel to it although some parts have been visited by the Suck Fairy. "Shockwave Rider" is also interesting - IIRC characters use their landline phones to access large computer systems. Because Brunner never really goes into too many techy details - it's just phones and computers - it's less jarring to read now than books where technology-heavy authors such as Arthur C Clarke tried to describe in detail what future computing devices might look like.
Zanzibar holds up as well or better than Neuromancer. I recently reread both and Molly having a clock in her eye inserts really dates that one bit in Neuromancer, the chyron like news updates in Zanzibar call to mind todays social media sound/video bites.
It has been a million years since I read Stand on Zanzibar, but that technique of giving a set of cultural snippets to paint a picture really stuck with me. These days I'll be reading news headlines or Reddit's front page and be struck by how easily I could compose one of those that would be perfect for a novel imagining our era.
And it turns out a lot of people apparently have these "curtains for Zoosha" moments:
Agree. Same experience. Zanzibar (1968) is almost eerie sometimes.
If you're interested in reading about cyberpunk and why today it feels "dated" - or at least to me, how it didn't manage to reinvent itself and remains crystallized in time -, there's a wonderful article here: https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-was-cyberpunk-in-memo...
Be advised it's quite long
Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive.
Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
> Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.
Sadly, the minorities (in the Anglosphere at least) don't deliver at either "think" or "independently". Their counterculture is as countercultural as joining a church. Just another way to fit in. Be be slightly different and they'll chastise you - a high-profile example of this mechanism has just happened again https://archive.is/qeDfU. Unless that's what it's always been.
Hooligan-like countercultures are also excluded as far as "think" or "independently" goes for an obvious reason.
Thus, the only independent thinkers I've encountered are individuals who don't aim to have all the answers, who can accept disagreements, who attempt to know themselves - but those are individuals, not countercultures.
I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.
Which is one reason I think novels like Neuromancer and count zero and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, feel so dated today, is that they are so decidedly not-queer in their sexual dynamics.
Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you can see the real thing effortlessly.
The other factor both of you are failing to see is that the majority of males are hetero normative and don't like watching sword fighting. This is not an outdated take but factual reality. There is nothing wrong with the alternative, but depicting only "hetero-normative" stuff is the statistical norm back then and even now.
It's absolutely the right thing to do to legitimize "non-hetero-normative" in the same way left-handedness is legitimate but saying any of it is "normal" and declaring anything not involving it as "dated" is absolutely out of touch with reality.
Perhaps publications like Mondo 2000 and WIRED (and Boing Boing) killed Cyberpunk the way The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis stuck a knife in the beatniks of the 1960's. Not that they made fun of Cyberpunk, but rather they so overly-embraced it that they kind of unintentionally made a mockery of it (so perhaps not so much like Dobie Gillis?). That was the way I saw it in the 90's anyway.
Good point. Over-enthusiasm is definitely a way to make a cool thing uncool. There are a few contemporary writers who seem to labels themselves as involved with cyberpunk, but whom really make it all a bit juvenile and silly.
In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in". I am of that age and I remember General Motors was a great place to work at that time. My friend "got in" after high school because his father was a union boss. For me, "getting in" to General Motors was literally impossible because I had no connections.
I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.
The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.
Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.
I don’t think that’s an accurate view of what the job market was like in the 70s and 80s.
My point was more that I think there was more of a feeling of security, in the sense that regular people felt a little more optimistic about the future and their personal finances. People started low on the totem pole but felt confident about moving upwards slowly. That feeling doesn’t really exist anymore.
> In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in"
(UK here). My first job in 1987 was in computing for an engineering company and my father had exactly zero influence on me getting that job.
>In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in"
Perhaps this may have been true for those who didn't have a university degree. Otherwise, this experience doesn't line up with anyone in my family.
What makes life so much more interesting today as compared to 50 years ago?
When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an endless scroll one phone tap away.
I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s.
I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content.
I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of boredom, I don't think I'm an isolated incident.
Not being bored doesn’t mean you’re leading an interesting life.
When's the last time you were bored? When's the last time you did something interesting?
Being bored is good for you my dude. Google for it.
Seems you missed the part of my comment where I say I'm explicitly trying to cut down on stimulation. I'm aware.
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I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk" appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea that all technology is socially transformative, just not in the ways we hope it will be.
Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.
Computers, the internet, it is all mainstream now, the opposite of a counterculture.
If you want a counterculture, look the other way. "digital detox", permaculture, degrowth, etc... In the tech world you have the "small web".
"Maker" movements, repair/reuse/recycling, etc... used to be countercultures but they have gone towards mainstream in the last few years (and I think it is a good thing).
Not all countercultures are "good". For instance what we now call "wokism" used to be a counterculture, it is now mostly mainstream. The opposite is now a counterculture, including incels, red pill, etc...
Countercultures change and go. Very few countercultures of the past still remain, they either integrate in mainstream culture, or become so niche that they effectively disappear.
I partially disagree, there are still some cyberpunk medias that feel fresh for today. But yes, they're definitely not as famous as the previous ones.
Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.
Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.
I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any
Well, I’m talking more about the culture environment of society at large, but even then – mirrors edge came out almost twenty years ago. While it might be considered “Post-cyberpunk,” (and I do enjoy that genre) it really doesn’t have much to do with the original genre in the countercultural sense. It’s more like an exploration into other aspects of a fictional cyberpunk-esque world.
Cloudpunk is the same thing as the recent Cyberpunk game: fun, but operating on stale tropes and aesthetics that haven’t changed in 40 years. This is a problem that pretty much every piece of cyberpunk media has.
Counterculture moved underground.
Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…
where though?
Another reading is that there is no more counterculture because it won and became the culture.
I get where you are coming from but in my mind, when mutating into the dominant culture it loses vital, essential characteristics.
Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within existing systems, is no longer a counterculture.
My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or was it subsumed and perverted?
"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson
Over the past ten-ish years I've often wondered what HST would make of our current society... not much good, I'm afraid.
It was already a libertarian/neoliberal fantasy - one where everything is corrupt, everyone is competing with everyone else, and the point of the game is to grab as much as you can for yourself while selling your services to the highest bidder.
There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.
Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.
fascinating insight
It's because punk died, which is half of cyberpunk. All the cyber is corporate now. We live in cyber corp. We live in the part that Gibson found, rightfully, totally uninteresting to write about.
I don't know about that. There are very powerful corporations in Neuromancer, more like governments than corporations. They (or powerful people inside / owning them) largely drive the action in Neuromancer.
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An example of cyberpunk that is not dated - Hyperion Cantos[1]. It might not look like cyberpunk at the first sight but it definitely is.
I'd say parts of the universe and one and a half of the pilgrim's tales are cyberpunk, but a lot of it isn't tonally so.
Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses the mark. Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot. That's the common thread; writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse.
Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"
Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:
-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)
-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.
-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.
Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.
What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
I think you might be missing the mark. The "cyberpunks", the original authors who started the genre, raised eyebrows because in their stories technology wasn't described as something that invariably had a positive impact on people's lives, quite the contrary. That is was what set them apart from the techno optimistic utopianism that dominated science fiction at the time. The authors were called punks because they were going against the grain and, like punk, did a sort of reset of science fiction.
Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology.
The caper plots are just a coincidence.
If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.
Gibson isn’t the only person writing cyberpunk although he definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from words like
>> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer
Or
>> There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process. ~ idoru
I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer.
I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.
Why not read both PKD and Gibson? Better use of your time than the average TV series.
It's not my article and I don't 100% agree with it. But I think it's interesting to read. I think the article spends some time making your points about the esthetic over the contents
> Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot.
I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.
Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades
I don't remember exactly, but I think most of these short stories aren't crime fiction. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" definitely isn't.
Hey, everyone gets older…
Glad I'm not the only one just getting around to reading Neuromancer in 2025! The shocking thing about the story is how very few screens there are in the world, and how ungrounded "cyberspace" is in physics. Cyberspace's mechanics are vague, and in fact are inconsistent with the other extent communication technologies. e.g. Case never seems to worry about getting a signal for his deck, and yet does worry about getting signals for, e.g. fax machines on space ships. It feels like the fabric of cyberspace must be ESP or telepathy (which is consistent with its description as a "shared hallucination". Gibson seems to be wrestling with new technology in a similar way to the authors of "Wierd Science" - where basically computers are magic. (And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL).
The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out.
If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.
> And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL
No, he famously didn't own a computer when he wrote Neuromancer.
“I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, ‘This changes everything!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Automation—it automates the process of writing!’ I’ve never gone back.” [1]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
You've perfectly articulated the central challenge that inspired my own work. The 'magical', ungrounded reality of early cyberpunk cyberspace is precisely the gap we're trying to bridge with formalized realism.
Instead of telepathic magic, what if the 'deck' ran on a verifiable, computationally intensive process rooted in a concrete theory of consciousness? We've been archiving our attempt to build just that—the theory, the code, and the narrative simulation. Perhaps a less optimistic, but more grounded future.
You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive
> You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive
It sounds like you're trying to build the Cyberpunk equivalent of the shared semi-hard-SF Orion's Arm universe / world building project?
I prefer to call it, the sociology unit test.
https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15676304
https://github.com/dmf-archive/Tiny-ONN
Let's make sci-fi into reality.
Ah. Now the crank alarm is ringing.
> It feels like the fabric of cyberspace must be ESP or telepathy
Maybe they're using the Ansible
> Cyberspace's mechanics are vague [...] basically computers are magic.
It was already so at the time - anyone working with real computers knew how thin the veil over the magic tech was. Gibson was doing a good Chandler iteration - "When in doubt, have a man come through shining a laser.”
It must be said that SF always had a lot of magic (ahem, "sufficiently advanced technology") going on, and in the 1980s it translated to shiny zigzagging light paths such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron and implausible "lightsabers"
“The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified.”
This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.
Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
Great read - it's nice to see something I take for granted with fresh eyes (I think I've read all the Gibson). The fact that it's someone steeped in the genre humble enough to go back to a foundational text is a great device for explaining it.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the Apple adaptation. I think they did as good a job as The Peripheral deserved (although it did end on a really dumb note). Although Gibson's writing has gotten less strong as he's aged, his world-building is still top-notch and some good writers of narrative taking a pass at it was I think mostly successful.
The Sprawl Trilogy is great front to back, each book has its charms. And of course the world is so rich, beyond Neuromancer. So if they do it right they could set themselves up for a compelling multi-season series.
The question with Neuromancer that took until now to start realizing was - how do you do it and not look like a fool by mangling a classic? I think that its world has advanced sufficiently (as the author of this piece highlights) that a lot of the kinks have been worked out by reality. Now, a central conceit of an ultra technological society without cell phones is going to be interesting in and of itself! I'll stop now, but excited to see this continue.
> I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences.
This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally.
Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.
It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.
Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson:
"It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."
I like his books, but I have to read them at least twice to understand what's going on. Sometimes I'll read the plot summary on Wikipedia and realize I missed a lot. I think I've read everything he's written though because I enjoy the prose even when I'm not really following along.
I'm pretty sure the stuff that confuses me was probably intended to be space for mystery. I'm not a sophisticated reader though...
I read it in the 90s and found the opposite experience: it's evocative. It doesn't describe things, instead it gives hints and lets your imagination build its own answers.
I struggled with Neuromancer and never finished it (as far as I recall), and I've later discovered I have aphantasia.
I haven't tried reading it again since but I can't help but feel it's related, as I really struggled to get into it, despite reading and enjoying a lot of various sci-fi.
Exactly. If anything, Gibson's evocative style reminded me of the Strugatsky brothers; while the story is different, you get this sense of looming despair all through the book.
Comparing anyone to Tolkien is massively unfair. Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LotR for about a decade. It is going to be extremely hard to match these expectations for other authors.
> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade
This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.
Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly, some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists and (mostly) wrote very quickly.
You're suggesting their arent any other authors who have taken over a decade to write a book? Prousts' In Search of Lost Time took 13 for example.
You are ignoring the part about being a linguist, though. Spending 10 years writing a book is also not quite rare.
tbh I don't think "researches language structure" has much at all of a correlation with "uses language in a pheasant manner".
it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.
Far too late to edit now, but I got a laugh out of the autocorrect "pheasant" at least
I've been comparing Iliad translations. Some of best classicists, who best understand Greek and the original text, are lousy poets.
Sylvain Neuvel is also a linguist. But I’m sure this will also be disqualified because he’s in a different genre.
Yeah, my thought reading Neuromancer too. I'm fine with Clockwork-Orange-esque jargon in prose, but even removing that, Gibson's text still didn't flow in a story-telling (conversational?) way for me. It was too stilted or something.
I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.
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Neuromancer was a much easier read to me than "A scanner darkly" I had the same trouble physically reading it as I did with a picture of dorian gray. (top tip, audiobooks totally made them easy and enjoyable to "read")
I'm not a natural scifi-cyberpunk literature person. I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
One thing that did stand out was this: Everywhere had memory foam mattresses.
Some horrid bedsit: Memoryfoam matress
Uber fancy sky hotel: memoryfoam.
I'm by no means a quick reader and I devoured Neuromancer. I really had zero problem parsing the introduced words. Easier even than A Clockwork Orange.
My experience reading A Scanner Darkly was super painful. Switched to audiobook and quit quickly even then.
> I want a good story, not spectacle. Neuromancer was a spanking good story.
Agreed, but the prose are also so beautiful. This is not some garden variety pulp (not that there is anything wrong with pulp)
The prose immediately made me think of a clockwork orange when I read it way back. Two of my favorites and that is a big reason. Not easy to pull off.
Cyberpunk got the future exactly wrong. In the 1980s, being into computer technology meant being into hardware. You could scrounge it and tinker with it, and had to be clever and highly motivated to do that. Cyberpunk took the computer geek themes of cleverness, effort, and hardware and added heavy antiestablishmentism.
I've been in education all through the rise of digital culture and am now dealing with the first ChatGPT generation. What I see is the inverse of cyberpunk culture. Computers are ubiquitous and dead simple to use. Kids spend their time doomscrolling and let ChatGPT do their thinking for them.
On the other hand, I could see this causing a resurgence of exactly that same aesthetic. Software will be eaten by LLMs and computers will remain ubiquitous, but hardware for now remains where it was. Specialized, niche, and able to be combined into something cool only by someone knowledgeable.
Having to solder or breadboard something together is approximately the same experience it was in the 80s. And the sorts of results you can expect are similarly rare and exotic. An at home automated solution for soldering is not coming any time soon.
In the 1980s, many kids had new computers, but most were just playing games rather than programming, despite having to type a few commands to load and run them.
Today, the cybersecurity scene feels more comparable in terms of power it can provide. The "classic hacker" archetype seems less central now, overshadowed by state sponsored actors and the rise of cryptocurrency related crimes.
I want to recommend Vernor Vinge's books to anyone looking for some new sci-fi... I've read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire upon the Deep. They were exemplary to the kind of logical structure of SciFi and made some relevant predictions which I won't spoil. The guy was a professor of computer science (RIP)
His Realtime series (The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime) is also pretty good, in terms of “what if”.
Deepness in the Sky is one of my favorite books of all time! Fire Upon the Deep is a serious let-down by comparison, but the wolves are a cool concept.
As I've gotten older I've realized that I have very little in common with Vinge philosophically. But he was a person who thought very deeply, and it shows.
(ok mild spoilers ahead) Really why! I enjoyed them both and I read Deepness in the Sky first. It was a bit of a shock about FTL for me but I kind of granted narrative license so he could explore the range of consequences there, like with FTLness being distributed over a field of sorts. But yeah the dogs were dope, their packs, the interaction of the technological bootstrapping with them. Yadda yadda. I can't say I am familiar with his philosophy either
I'm a big fan of the aspects of the Sprawl world that weren't personally copied as much - the fuller domes over NYC and (this is surprisingly prominent in the book and a significant plot point) all the personal hologram tech.
It's personally very boring to read about how the book and technology is dated blah blah. The vibes still feel incredibly fresh to me and that's much more important. A lot of modern books (especially written during covid) won't nearly hold up as well
Agreed, I re-read the book probably once a year and almost inevitably stop after the first hundred pages or so. The vibes of the future Chiba / Sprawl are what really appeal to me, not so much the VR world or the space station sci-fi stuff.
Chiba feels a little cliche now in some regards but the Sprawl section rules and is probably my favorite but. But the space station is also pretty neat and and I'm a big fan of the matrix/VR stuff AS LONG AS you recognize that it's basically a tech induced-hallucination/drug trip where you enter some shared alternative reality that only has a very tentative relationship with 1s and 0s, NOT some sort of VR headset thing.
I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best cyberpunk manga after Akira.
It's a masterpiece. Surprised it hasn't been adapted as a film or series.
Man, I loved Neuromancer when I read it as a kid. Yes, it's a tough book to read, especially today where there are too many distractions as well as too many works of art built on the sci-fi ideas of that era.
Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans.
Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions, ideas, concepts from Scifi stories, without all the plot and character stuff?
Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.
These ideas are not supposed to be predictions about the future. They're cool changes to introduce to the fictional world to make the stories more fun. (Almost) nobody thinks that they are the actual future
Ender's Game (1985) has a ton of spot on predictions of the future, if you haven't read that you might enjoy it (and the story and later universe are fascinating as well, with twists and turns, and the "two threads" storylines, where you can read the same events from two different characters in the plurilogies of books)
Some predictions in the first book:
- touch-screens in general and tablets in particular
- use of AI to adapt difficulty levels in games
- use of AI and virtual simulations for military training
- the Internet, and more specifically:
- the wide usage of forums, blogs, etc. (lots of references that kinda seem like social media, with propaganda spread, message control, etc.)
- the usage of sock-puppet accounts to influence elections and general political discourse (and the creation of "influencers" out of ... thin air)
Later in the series we also get:
- Cryptocurrencies
- AIs in control of financial systems
This is akin to asking someone explain Tolkien's works, but without all the world-building. The set and setting matter, they're a part of the message, if not even the main message.
That's why I don't read Fantasy in the first place, but Scifi often has technological concepts and ideas that are interesting by itself. I don't give a damn about mountains, whether people have green or pink skin or the stupid songs they enjoy to sing though.
> The difference between science fiction and fantasy…is simply this, science fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.
-- Orson Scott Card
There is hard and soft types that muddy the quote, but it largely stands.
Another definition that almost works is the distinction between Not-Yet-Possible and Never-Possible - although this may fail when things like Faster-Than-Light drives are considered.
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The US government used to consult sci-fi authors, especially when they were writing stories somewhat based on extrapolations of current advancements of technology or science. I'm not sure any of the notes from those meetings are available online, but I'd love to read them and compare.
> Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions, ideas, concepts from Scifi stories
For concepts yes:
This is really great, thanks! Looks like it's also possible to group them by book, e.g. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/AuthorSpecAlphaList.asp?BkNum=...
Necromancer was cool. Never managed to get through the other cyberpunk classic Snowcrash though. Did I get the right book? Pizza delivery?
Just my opinion, but neither were .. revelatory for me. They were both just okay. I'm not really an avid reader though.
If you read Snow Crash before the age of 25 it's revelatory.
If you read it after 25 it's laughably on-the-nose.
In highschool it was the greatest book I ever read.
Some books require the reader to be in a particular place in their lives.
I mean idk when you read it, but like the author said I've seen this language be absorbed so I can't take it in as fresh innovative stuff. I was born after the novel came out so obviously was decades old when I read it.
I did read both when they came out (in paperback anyway). But I know what you mean. Friends who had not read The Lord of the Rings but saw the films can be excused for thinking the story was "derivative".
There is a huge difference between both.
Snow Crash would be a hollow joke without Gibson etc.
It is now just a joke with some encyclopedia mixed in.
Terrible ending. As always with the author btw.
Of all the cyberpunk authors, Gibson, while one of the first, is probably the least interesting. Stephenson and Sterling are better writers and explore more complex ideas. Gibson has the occasional shadow of an idea that he explores with a few one dimensional characters. That said, I liked "Virtual Light".
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted.
I've not read any of the authors listed, but "downvote" on HN is not an "I don't like your opinion." button, it's a "What you've said contributes nothing, and/or is unsubstantiated or inflammatory."
Downvoting is for mere disagreement as well, and has always been: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674260
Give Stephenson a try. "Snow Crash" in particular.
While some focus on the missed predictions like pocket supercomputers, I find Gibson's true genius lies in anticipating the conceptual shifts – how our very sense of self, reality, and freedom would become inextricably linked to, and perhaps even defined by, digital networks.
The real 'matrix' isn't just a virtual space we plug into; it's the increasingly complex, often invisible, interplay between our biological cognition and the predictive models that mediate our perception. We're already seeing early signs of 'cognitive debt' and the subtle erosion of our internal models as we offload more mental tasks to external systems. The challenge isn't just building smarter machines, but building anchors for consciousness in an increasingly fluid, data-driven existence.
https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...
> People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50 years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next two.
I like that we now also have "Amara's Law" [1] that makes the exact opposite point:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
So either that "futurist" was an idiot, or this shows that with respect to future developments, really no one has any idea what they are talking about.
This jumped out at me as well. I think it's fair to say that if you aggregate all predictions, there will be those who vastly over- and under-estimate progress on any given time frame, so depending on who the authors were paying attention to, both could be correct. The interesting question is whether there is, in aggregate, a tendency to over- or under-estimate on a given time frame. My money is on Amara's Law for that.
I think there's a slight difference. Amara's law is about "a technology" - just one - and its initial impact vs second-order effects.
e.g. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, and it had impact in that area. But the real impact on people of this kind of fast social media came about from it's longer term use in shaping public discourse, and how that role is weaponised.
See also the saying "We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us"
As for the other quote, I don't know if it's true that "we massively underestimate what will happen in the next two years" but it seems to be a statement about the volume of change, the number of new things, rather than the continued impact of one.
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I still haven't read Neuromancer but just watched a video interview with Gibson on writing it. Entertaining if you haven't seen it https://youtu.be/x6QH5ixsEEU
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I don't understand the success of "a scanner darkly", I had hard time to finish it so boring it was. There is almost not a story in it. Maybe the initial setup in interesting, but then it is like a boring action less long blabla about it.
The sequels got really strange and focused on voodoo god personas sort of running things. I probably read Neuromancer once a year just to revisit the place and always try to give the sequels another go but they just don’t grab me like the original did.
Most interesting news: https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2024/02/apple-tv-announces-...
There's a podcast, "Shelved by Genre" that did a section on Gibson the year, reading Burning Chrome (short story collection, "world prequel" to Neuromancer) and the Neuromancer Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
During the reading the touch on origins and culture of Cyberpunk. The hosts are (I think) reasonably intelligent and well spoken and they tend to get a bit deeper into things around the books than other book podcasts I've listened too -- which seem to mostly just recount the plot.
I had read Neuromancer as a kid but not the other books, I think if you're a Cyberpunk fan you should at least give Burning Chrome a read. It's quite short and digestible seeing as its all short stories.
They also did the entire Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe and some Le Guin (the Earthsea series, not any science-fiction).
Maybe I should read the book again making notes like the author did. I finished it understanding how novel this would have been when it was released and impressed with how much worldbuilding was fit into a relatively short book, but ultimately pretty disappointed by the plot itself. Without giving away too much, I feel that there were a few segments that fell pretty flat for me (to be specific, with minor spoilers: the new recruit around the middle of the book and the hacking subplot towards the end).
Neuromancer makes more sense after reading remaining two books in the trilogy: Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They are not as good as the first one, especially the last one, but make the story complete and more nuanced.
I got Neuromancer as a birthday gift earlier this year. I found it simultaneously very captivating but requiring a lot of effort to read through the dense terminology and try to accurately form a picture of what Gibson was trying to convey. Sadly I couldn't finish it since its the type of book that, if you stop reading for a week or longer, you'll have to start from the beginning.
This post gave me more appreciation of Gibson's impact and a boost to pick it up somewhen later in the year.
“In an age of affordable beauty…” is the quote that keeps popping in my mind
I first read Neuromancer in 1998 while I was at university, something like 6 months before I got my first mobile phone. My 2nd year group project was building a lounge/session discovery application for our University’s VR meeting software. (Using Java AWT!)
So Neuromancer felt like it was on a pretty accurate trajectory to me. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bother to phrase things in a way that is digestible for people from the past.
I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
Ada Palmer makes this point. She teaches Renaissance history and tries to write her sci-fi as if she was trying to describe today to someone from the 15th century. Stanislaw Lem was also brilliant in describing his future worlds in ways that were hard to understand, as alien as he guessed they would actually be.
Exactly. I imagine something like “he glanced at his phone and saw he didn’t even have LTE”. The author wouldn’t be trying to make you think about the details of modern communication systems. They’d want you to infer that the subject of the sentence was barely on the edge of communications.
My first thought when I read the review:
You are so lucky to have read the book for the first time in 2025.
You can't say he was prescient and use the future as justifications... 'he's prescient because virtual reality in his novel is just like how it's going to be in the future'. Also I don't think these (cybernetics, virtual reality) are uncommon enough predictions to be credited to him.
William Gibson seems so prescient at times.
Wonderful writing, I love Neuromancer & Count Zero is superb as well, like many others of his books.
An interesting aspect of Neuromancer again was how obviously perfunctory and mechanical the plot appears when you're not as absorbed by the mystery of what will happen next. It's easy to see that Case is almost entirely a passive observer, only stepping in with his hacker skills for a brief mission in cyberspace, then not doing anything except follow the gang as they travel to a new location to pick up another McGuffin that the mysterious man with unlimited financial resources needs. It's creaky, but works despite its McGuffin-chasing adventure caper aspect because it's so well written and Case becomes a proxy for the reader, allowing us to observe the plot from a relative outsider's POV, and enjoy all the fantastic sci-fi world building.
But then if you read more Gibson, you will come to realize every single Gibson plot is like that. It's always a mysterious man (always a man!) with apparently unlimited resources who needs to hire someone, usually a ragtag group of specialists, to obtain a McGuffin, usually under false pretenses. Sometimes the group is on the run, but the protagonists invariably end up passive observers in an Easter egg hunt (with the possible exception of Turner in Count Zero) and are generally being manipulated into doing what they do. I think the most egregious example of this is The Peripheral, where the heroine does absolutely nothing; it's a classic witness protection plot where the main character is just a pawn, moved around for safety or as bait, while observing as things happen to her. The sequel, Agency, has an ironic title given that the heroine does even less and appears to have no agency at all.
Once you realize the basic skeleton of a Gibson plot, you come to appreciate how well the world building hides it, but it's clear he ran out of ideas quickly after his first book. The two Neuromancer sequels had a bunch of action but were once again about McGuffins and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Bridge novels is another McGuffin hunt with lower stakes. The Blue Ant books even more so. With The Peripheral he seemed to be trying at something completely new, but ended up stuck in the same mold, parallel universes being used to uncover the identity of someone pulling McGuffins from behind the scenes once again. A not-terrible but old-fashioned sci-fi idea well executed, but little more than a potboiler. Agency was awful.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I've come to the conclusion that Neuromancer was Gibson's one good idea, and while his execution — world building and prose and so on — has been top notch throughout, every book has been weaker than the last. I had to look up his post-Bridge books on Wikipedia to even remember what they were really about. There are occasional glimmers (the Burning Chrome collection is fantastic), and none of his books are not enjoyable on some level. But when I look at the wonderful works of contemporaneous authors like Iain Banks, Gibson doesn't measure up. Banks is an apt comparison, I think, because like Gibson his books are also immensely plot-driven and McGuffin-based, and often lean on similar themes, but with very different results.
I do love Gibson's dense, beautiful prose, and will read anything he writes just for the pleasure of it, so there's still that.
I think this is a fair analysis, but for me the pleasure of reading Gibson has basically always been the use of language and jargon. Yes, Virtual Light is a stupid caper story but both Chevette and Berry are great characters, hard-luck protagonists trying to make it in a crapsack world. Berry's background is especially deftly told in a few telling vignettes.
That's why the Bigend books are such disappointments to me. Instead of outsiders looking in, or trying to strike it big, we have bougie insiders getting VC money. And Agency is a travesty.
Agreed. I find the books enjoyable because of the language and world-building, and Gibson can write good action set pieces and decently fleshed-out characters.
However, in retrospect, I can't rate most of them very highly because they don't work well as stories. I struggle to remember anything from the Blue Ant books except the mildly irritating forays into location-based art, which seemed dated even then. (Gibson frequently injects art into his books. I think his use of Joseph Cornell boxes in Count Zero was fun, and it serves a real plot point, as the boxes are a trap meant to ensnare a particular art buyer. But the use of objects or people as bait or pawns is a ridiculously overused gimmick in his books, to the point where I wonder if it's lack of creativity or actually something pathological...)
Come to think of it, Gibson's career shares some similarities with that of J. G. Ballard. Started out with sci-fi, amazing prose stylist, gradually moved more mainstream, but struggled to escape a certain plot mold (many variations on the idea of wealthy people seeking outlets for their base instincts). I think that like Gibson, Ballard is always super readable, but his best stuff is his earlier works.
As a creative writer, "plot" and "story" have always eluded me. There's something mechanical—pushing, pulling—I just can't seem to construct, but I know when it's missing in books.
Any suggestions for sci-fi books everyone should read in 2025?
When I talk about this book to other readers the first thing they bring up is the difficult prose. I think I only found a single other person like me who enjoys the writing style.
I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay, watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting.
I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.
Ursula K Leguin, 100%. The Dispossessed is about an anarchist society. Might also check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Kameron Hurley.
Though not 'overtly anarchist' you might like some of Cory Doctorow's novels https://craphound.com/shop/
Alan Moore identifies as an anarchist (and is friends with Moorcock iirc). Warren Ellis also comes to mind. Yes, both work primarily in comics, but of the highest order.
Interesting how many people mention that Gibson's prose is stilted.
I never read Neuromancer in English. I only read it in Czech, and I wonder if the translator changed the vibe/flow a bit. It was a bit staccato, but the language flowed quite naturally.
Achually the first Cyberpunk work ever was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheeps by Philip K. Dick
i love this trilogy. its so mind boggling. ppl slack off on the second 2 parts but the atmosphere totally captured me anyway.. I can also recommend his more recent book Agency. its amazing.
I was very much alive in the 1980s but for no particular reason I never read Neuromancer at the time. No specific reason I guess other than I never fetishized Japanese culture. I read it back in the 2010s and was... underwhelmed. I see this pattern a lot: a given work is seminal but it doesn't tend to age well. Much of the accolades are based on nostalgia.
Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently both xenophobic and Orientalist [1]. In the context of the 1980s (before 1987 when Japan's bubble popped), this makes perfect sense. There was a genuine fear of the Japanese taking over. Japanese tech companies were at their relative peak. So people both feared and fetishized Japanese culture and products.
Interestingly, I did read Snow Crash when it was published (1992 and that did have a big impact on me. I also think that book is solely responsible for a whole generation of people thinking VR was ever going to be a mainstream thing when in fact the metaverse is fundamentally flawed because of network latency.
To me, cyberpunk was pretty inaccurate. Technology for the longest time was rebellious and hopeful. It's only really in the last decade that tech has turned dystopic. I can actually see a techno-feudalistic future now but it's not at the hands of the Japanese (or, now, the Chinse).
What I guess is interesting is how white supremacy is so pervasive. It certainly underpins cyberpunk.
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/30/22255318/cyberpunk-2077-ge...
While I don't think you're wrong about the orientalist elements in Western cyberpunk, consider that Japan also produced two of the seminal and genre-defining works of cyberpunk (Akira and Ghost in the Shell).
> Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how eerily prescient Gibson was in so many ways—but also by what he didn’t anticipate.
It's the fate of all writers who create stories about the near future to eventually have time catch up with their imagination. It's sad, because many times their writing is often dismissed once their ideas don't seem so fantastic. Stories about upper class aristocrats in the 1800s still get movies made about them every year, but old science fiction novels lose their luster as time goes by.
Like the article said, the ideas from futurist authors are either incredibly prescient, or miss the mark in ways that make their predictions quaint in retrospect.
Jules Verne wrote about submarines and space travel. H.G. Wells wrote about lasers and military aircraft. Arthur C. Clarke predicted computer miniaturization and global telecommunications (including geosynchronous satellites). Douglas Adams predicted the smart phone and annoying Alexa responses. And on and on: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Huxley, Dick, Niven, and more.
And everyone has predicted the coming age of AGI. I think it's pretty exciting that I might get to see who called it correctly within my lifetime.
everything Gibson "Holly Fire" Sterling "Diamond Age" Stephenson both have dated passeges, but will then segue into lucid precience
Sterling's Heavy Weather haunts me to this day.
One thing that Gibson nailed is the story of Operation Screaming Fist, which eerily reminds me of what's going on in Ukraine. From the Neuromancer wiki:
"Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," which planned on infiltrating and disrupting Soviet computer systems from ultralight aircraft dropped over Russia. The Russian military had learned of the idea and installed defenses to render the attack impossible, but the military went ahead with Screaming Fist, with a new secret purpose of testing these Russian defenses. As the Operation team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their computers and flight systems, and Corto and his men were targeted by Soviet laser defenses."
The most fascinating detail here is that every piece of tech in Neuromancer is Japanese or German. Hitachi computers, Sanyo suits, Braun drones. Gibson was extrapolating from 1984 when Japan dominated consumer electronics and Germany led manufacturing. Fast forward 40 years and we're having the exact same conversations about Chinese tech dominance. TikTok, DJI drones, BYD cars. Today's "future tech" assumptions mirror Gibson's perfectly. Makes you wonder what we're getting wrong about the next 40 years.
Also wild that he nailed AI and VR but completely missed that everyone would carry a supercomputer in their pocket. The big paradigm shifts are always the ones nobody sees coming.
The more time moves along, the more impressed I am by his call in “Pattern Recognition” than “Neuromancer”.
The latter is still one of my favorite books of all time, though.
Pattern Recognition is the most accessible book of his that I have read, and it has such a great story. Neuromancer is incredible, but it's often hard to understand his prose.
Many things are obvious in retrospect. In this case, it seems few truly understood that all information will be made digital, and that print, audio, video etc are all just different kinds of information.
Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI, but isn't.
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It may be weird to you, but this was indeed cool at a point.
I wrote the same review over 20 years ago on amazon.com. It was never cool. That kid you went to school with that only wore black jeans was not one of the cool ones.
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It says more about your own perspective then about the actual coolness of those guys.
Never heard of it
Turn in your geek card on your way out.
It's a funny coincidence, I've never read Neuromancer, and talking with a friend of mine three days ago he said, "I thought we read Neuromancer at the same time and discussed it? You should really read it now!"
I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.
The prose is the art. In Blade Runner, the world is built with dense backdrops of an alien city, people walking around in strange clothes, etc. All that is imprinted on you without a single line of dialogue.
With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.
If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.
> The prose is the art
I get that, I'm just expressing my preference for ideas over writing style.
This. I recall an interview with Gibson where he said that he hung out in watering holes frequented by IT folks. He spent a lot of time picking up the atmosphere and cadence of the language, which he imitated in his works.
I was alive at that time and working in tech. That paragraph is not a good imitation of the atmosphere and cadence of the language. :-)
Yeah, I was alive but I wasn't yet working in this discipline. Still though I think Gibson's work is exactly the kind of thing Lem deplores about that period of US Science Fiction. The practitioners have no idea what they're talking about, so even if they are "What if?" stories - which is the whole point of SF - their answers to the question are no better than a random man on the street. Instead of the standard good SF "Automobile => Traffic Jam" or the extraordinary "Automobile => Teenage fumblings in your dad's borrowed car" you get nonsense like Johnny Mnemonic.
I strongly prefer very hard SF, so I was never Gibson's target audience anyway, but I find it just completely misses me, I might as well be reading a bodice ripper or special forces yarn.
i’m not a huge long form reader, but neuromancer was quick and terminology reused heavily. you will pick up the slang without too much difficulty. i wouldn’t let the sample paragraph color your view that heavily.
Honestly though that paragraph does have meaning to it. Simstim is a thing. Is it a quite adventurous description of it? You may not "fully" get the description at times. However I never read it and went "This is garbage."
In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.
I didn't say it doesn't have meaning. I'm saying that I prefer simple language around complex topics, rather than the other way around. As one example, the discussion of "quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- the language isn't difficult or opaque, but that's a concept that has stuck with me since I first read it in the '80s.
> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
> static-filled “dead channels.”
I don't think Gibson was referring to static (which is bland grey and not cyberpunk at all). I think he was referring to SMPTE on a "dead channel", which is a colorful skyline reminiscent of Blade Runner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars
I agree with the author of this article that Neuromancer is a precursor for modern sci-fi, and it serves as inspiration for so much popular culture. But it's a terrible book IMO. The characters are shallow and uninteresting (Cage), the plot is boring (Wintermute), expository dialogue is rattled off without any setup or motivation (the female character explaining her backstory), it's chock full of nonsequiters (shark-head, something about horses being extinct), and new concepts are introduced not because they're engaging but because they're "just so sci-fi bro" (Turning police).
“I actually composed that first image with black and white video static of my childhood in mind, sodium silvery and almost painful, a whopping anachronism right at the very start of my career,in the imaginary future, but an invisible one, interestingly. One that revels a particular grace shared by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future where we all must go.”
You misunderstood from the first sentence. The rest of your read is similarly flawed if not worse.