Today marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Neuromancer, William Gibson's groundbreaking novel about a post-Cold War era dominated by digital technology. The forward-thinking novel popularized the term "cyberspace" (coined by Gibson in an earlier work) and foreshadowed many elements of our modern world - from powerful, feudalistic multinational corporations to human-like AI to virtual reality, the Internet, and cyberwarfare. It would establish the cyberpunk genre and inspire the likes of Neal Stephenson. 30 years later, it remains relevant for its vision of life in a world of powerful digital technology that may not be fully within our control.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 01 2014, @08:16PM
Hmm well only 8 more years till snow crash, which I found much more interesting. I really liked the franchise operated quasinational entity .gov model.
Neuromancer suffered a bit from a too complicated plot. Could have made a whole series outta that beast. How many complete plot turns, like 1/4 turn per page? Also suffered from the "internet is magic" and the "internet is just a psychedelic drug trip" cultural meme that we couldn't get rid of till at least the 00s. About two decades ago I was getting really tired of "the internet is just a tab of acid, man..." BS and I still had to hear it for many more years.
If we must talk about Gibson novels, how about the Difference Engine and the foundation of steam punk 24 years ago... so next year will be the quarter century. I remember reading that when it was new, holy cow, mind blown. Awesome book.
So... in other news today is (roughly? or exactly?) the zeroth publication anniversary of Charlie Stross's "Rhesus Chart", so I know what I'll be reading this weekend, more laundry files.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @09:07PM
Difference Engine? That was the least interesting book I have ever read. And I need to read technical pdf's to get my job done.
People would randomly show up have nothing to do with the plot. It would start to get interesting then forget all that crap lets talk about something else.
Out of most of the people I know who read this (thinking it would be awesome) not one thought it was worth keeping and they sold them off.
The premise was seriously a cool idea. The execution was garbage.
It was nothing more than a poor cash in from two popular authors. It should have been good. Instead it has a tedious boring plot. I read the whole thing hoping something cool would happen. Instead nothing. At the end I set it down thinking 'why OH why did I pre-order it'.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 01 2014, @09:53PM
I think I can translate your dislike of the D.E. into a dislike of the plot where the appeal to me was similar to yours, what a cool setting and hard-ish sci fi ideas. The setting was fascinating compared to neuromancer which was still stuck in the "internet is like magic except its a drug trip except its like god but its also a computer" hippie smoked too much weed interpretation of "the road ahead". (remember that particular book? ugh)
The random appearance of characters was very LOTR "we're a fully developed universe, that means its really big, so you're not getting a "just so" story with all loose ends neatly tied up, intentionally". Sometimes the housekeeper is just the housekeeper, kinda a part of the scenery, sorta.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:17AM
Toadhead
http://www.knaster.com/2007/10/toadhead.html [knaster.com]
http://leftfield.org/ToadHead/abouttoad.html [leftfield.org]
is much better
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @03:29AM
Of course he's just a housekeeper. He's Angromath, son of Sadomath, from the House of Blargomath, whose lineage as housekeepers has continued down through the centuries in a line unbroken, since the days when the first Butlers of Westernbesst arrived upon the shores of Mansioniuin.
(Score: 4, Funny) by meisterister on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:01AM
>And I need to read technical pdf's to get my job done.
How could anyone not like technical manuals?
My favorite is "Using MS-DOS 6". I particularly enjoyed the cautionary tale of the fellow named "attrib". He was given the powers to change any file's attributes with no repercussions. One day, Attrib modified a vital system file and the User deleted it. Another of my favorites was that of the epic battle between the gallant hero MemMaker and the evil forces of the TSR to liberate the land of Conventional Memory. The only boring tale in the tome is that of Defrag, who has the compulsive need to neatly arrange everything.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 1) by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 02 2014, @03:06AM
(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday July 02 2014, @02:59AM
Well Neuromancer created those memes. It reminds me of people complaining that War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells had such a predictable plot (spoiler: alien invasion gets thwarted by microbes, bring anti-biotics next time, kay?) without realizing that War of the Worlds was the original story with that predictable plot twist and that they've been reading/watching recycling of that story their whole lives.
Well, if we're going to talk about the foundation of steampunk, there's Michael Moorcock's "A Nomad of the Time Stream" [wikipedia.org] series which predates Difference Engine by almost 20 years (first book, "The Warlord of the Air" was published in 1971). (And of course, those original 19th century sci fi stories which someone was inevitably going to revisit.)
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 02 2014, @11:46AM
My beef with that particular plot point was never that it was "unoriginal", more that it was improbable. I mean these vastly superior and ancient alien intelligences have been studying our world for millenia, they've mastered interplanetary travel and built an armada of indestructible death-ray mechas. At no point did any of them think to invest a few research points into microbiology? It's like the aliens from that fucking awful movie "signs": http://www.moviepunks.com/?id=43 [moviepunks.com]
Of course, since then I have learned to give H G Wells some slack - the state of the scientific art in 19-0-whatever wasn't what it is now, so what seems painfully apparent to us now was not necessarily obvious back then. Also, I love him as an author. One of my favourite books of all time: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/780 [gutenberg.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:31PM
"My beef with that particular plot point"
I see your point but I interpret it as the author was going for a "horror movie" moderation point. So the point was maybe they did do some microbio but they just had really bad luck, or really good luck from our point of view. This is right out of the trope for "exactly one pretty girl escapes the axe murderer just by pure dumb luck" slasher movie. Now that trope might suck as a literary device, but it does exist as an interpretation of the movie. The author knew it didn't make sense and was just luck and thats the effect he wanted. There are some echos (not exactly) in some Lovecraft-ian horror.
Also you're a little off with dates. War of the worlds and Dr Moreau's island and the time machine were all 18xx novels not 19xx. He none the less lived till after WWII and died in London so it must have been a hell of a trip to spend his latter years under V2 bombardment. An interesting generation, get to see the rise of industrialism, the US civil war happened about when he was born, crazy stuff around middle age in WWI and the like, peak of the British Empire, then toward the end get to chill in the great depression and get bombarded by V2 rockets. It was an interesting time to be alive.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:21PM
"Well Neuromancer created those memes."
No, man, with all due respect I saw Tron on an analog laserdisc (because I'm old) in 1982 and even way back then it was deeply immersed with "trippin" and psychedelic colors. I'm old enough to have read Neuromancer not too long after it came out and I felt kinda ripped off, like "computers as an acid trip" had just about enough legs to make a decent movie, but its all done now K Thx no need for a derivative book.
And WRT "computers, they iz magic, or maybe god, but we don't want omniscient God in our story so we'll just use a really smart computer" goes back into the oldest days of sci fi, as soon as computers made an appearance. If you'd like some 60s references we have Star Trek TOS, and who could forget "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". In fact in sci fi computers pretty much were search and replace God / Magik until the home computer era. HAL/9000 was no counterexample, he (it?) was a God, just a not the judeochristian nice old white guy god, HAL was more of a semi-jerk semi-tragic grecoroman god.
(Score: 1) by islisis on Tuesday July 01 2014, @09:15PM
A dense, academic essay I wrote many years ago, but to anyone interested in an open source reading of Neuromancer:
http://diamondsky.org/cultural/cyberpunkopensource.php [diamondsky.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @10:13PM
(Score: 2) by ticho on Tuesday July 01 2014, @10:20PM
I have a nice bookmarklet in my browser, and when I click it, any currently loaded page turns from crap colors to default black on white, with blue or purple links. It has served me well over the years.
That said, I fully agree that author needs to fix the colors - unless his website is sponsored by optometrists. :)
(Score: 1) by islisis on Tuesday July 01 2014, @11:37PM
for firefox >_https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/toggledocumentcolors-198916/
bind it to a shortcut key
to be honest, i set it to override pages by default...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:02AM
firefox/addon/toggledocumentcolors
Don't all browsers have the equivalent of View; Page Style; No Style ??
i set it to override pages by default
Now, that is a nice addition for those who go that way.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @10:44PM
Maybe I'll re-read it.
(Score: 1) by einar on Wednesday July 02 2014, @05:57PM
We do not have to discuss Gibson's writing style. He himself explained in an interview that he was just using the drug dealer slang from Toronto to sound cool. And it seems he was awfully afraid that his first novel might flop. Yet, the ideas merged into the story felt original and hinted towards something new and revolutionary. With a few sloppy lines a picture of the world of tomorrow was sketched. And during the thirty years, we could see more and more ideas becoming mainstream or even materialize.
This is what science fiction is supposed to be!