Two decades later, Time magazine would pick Neuromancer as one of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. Yet Time, and almost everyone else, was late to the game. A decade would elapse after its publication before the New York Times would even bother to notice that Neuromancer existed — although it had won the Hugo, the Nebula and Philip K. Dick Award on its first appearance, sort of a sci-fi equivalent of the Triple Crown. The judges on the awards panels got this one right, even if the highbrows missed out for many years.
This book is now on its second and third generation of readers, and its reputation is secure. Yet I fear that too much of the buzz surrounding this novel still treats it as a sociological phenomenon. Gibson is given credit for making a prediction that proved to be uncannily accurate. His book is thus put on the shelf next to “Moore’s Law” and other formidable hypotheses that anticipated our current-day high tech lives. But this pigeonholing misses the main reasons to read Neuromancer today, now that cyberspace is as blasé as a transistor radio, at least from a conceptual standpoint. Neuromancer still earns its readership through the sweep of its prose, the intensity of its vision, and the provocative nature of its characters and plots. And those virtues run no risk of technological obsolescence.
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