Let’s face it, science fiction books are not famous for their memorable opening lines. You might hear the person next to you on the subway remark: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” But how often do you run into someone muttering: “In the week before their departure to Arrakis, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul”? And yes we know, by now, that “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But how many of us have memorized: “His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before”?
Ah, William Gibson broke the rule with his 1984 classic Neuromancer. The particular ambiance of the book was captured in its oft-quoted opening line: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Of course, this was an old-school vacuum tube television, where the dead channels were much more poetic than the prosaic blankness of my current big-screen, satellite contraption. No, the technology was not always futuristic in this book. Everybody has the raddest gear in Neuromancer, yet they still need to use pay phones because the cell phone is not part of the envisioned environment. Still, fans of this book — there are many, and I include myself in their ranks — will overlook such tiny oversights: by any reasonable standard of forecasting, Gibson’s novel stands out as one of the most prescient of its era.
When Neuromancer was published, only around 1% of Americans owned a computer, and the World Wide Web was just a glimmer in Al Gore’s eyes. Yet Gibson not only conceived of a plausible evolution of virtual reality, but had already envisioned the kind of hacker culture that would emerge as the dark side of the web. To grasp the future of the technology would have been a stunning achievement in its own right, but Gibson also had a hold on the attitudes and slang, the very anthropology of cyberspace. The formula was so distinctive and persuasive that Neuromancer was seen by many as more than a fine book. It heralded a new movement, a variant of sci-fi that came to be known as cyberpunk.
Article comments
1 - Alan Kurtz
In trying to convey a type of "techno-anomie," the reviewer tells us, "Gibson envisioned the kind of hacker culture that would emerge as the dark side of the web." To me, the dark side/light side metaphor is misleading because anomie rules globally on the web. Wikipedia describes anomie as normlessness arising from "a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards. Though anomie is commonly associated with low regulation, Durkheim postulated that overly rigid (e.g., totalitarian) societies would also produce anomic individuals."
What we see nowadays, more than a century after Durkheim's Suicide (1897) and a quarter century beyond Neuromancer, is unregulated cyberspace producing anomic individuals who are enabled by this medium to exercise what amounts to totalitarian control within their particular realms. Such small-scale tyranny makes the Internet's seeming all-out freedom of expression illusory. If the sites we visit most differ only in degrees of rigidity, an unregulated collective restricts our perception of the world.
That was brought home to me recently at this very site, detailed in my Comment #4 to "Jazz Is Like Communism." Blogcritics, I charge, is less a sinister cabal of superior writers (as it bills itself) than a smug covey of inferior editors. Without rehashing that argument, I note here yet another example of how lazy and inept our editors are. More than 20 hours post-publication, they have still not bothered to fix the typo: "Ah, William Gibson broken [sic] the rule with his 1984 classic Neuromancer."
Look, anyone can make a mistake. God knows, I've committed more than my share. But to trumpet your incompetence as superiority is unconscionable. I can state from experience that writers and editors at Blogcritics are not a team; they are toilers and overseers working at odds. At their best, editors "correct" things that were not wrong in the first place and miss the stuff that needs repair. At their worst (see my abovementioned Comment #4), they stab writers in the back. This tawdry, localized venality suggests that "techno-anomie" is evolving in ways that will ultimately confirm George Orwell as more prescient than William Gibson. Dystopia has a thousand suburbs.
2 - Alan Kurtz
It looks like I rattled the right cage. Somebody finally got off his butt and fixed that typo. Great work!
3 - Dave Nalle
When Neuromancer was published, only around 1% of Americans owned a computer, and the World Wide Web was just a glimmer in Al Gore’s eyes.
I have to take exception to this. Al Gore's "invention" of the internet took place in 1979. I was there.
And while home computer ownership may have been low in 1979, those of us who were making serious use of computers were already on our second or third computer by that point. The user base may have been small, but usage was intense.
Neuromancer was published the same year that FidoNet was launched as the first major private non-business, non-government, non-educational network, so Gibson was not looking terribly far into the future.
You do have an interesting point on the absence of cell phones. Since wireless phones had already been commercially available for decades at the time the book was written it's actually surprising that Gibson didn't anticipate their widespread availability.
Dave