Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

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.

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.

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...

Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)

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 very human point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts and ways that at the time many felt impossible.

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Zing!

> 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)

> Grand Theft Auto, ... Andor

Those were made in Britain by British creators.

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_Sell

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)

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:

https://infosec.exchange/@tychotithonus/114819416384262242

https://infosec.exchange/@cjust/114820379745453988

Agree. Same experience. Zanzibar (1968) is almost eerie sometimes.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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

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…

Another reading is that there is no more counterculture because it won and became the culture.

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.

[dead]

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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 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?

- https://www.orionsarm.com/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion's_Arm