Neuromancer

"Neuromancer by William Gibson is the seminal cyberpunk book: it’s the thing that the web is based on. It’s a pretty typical cyberpunk story, being the one of somebody wronged, who has to jack into the mainframe to clear his name. The main characters are pretty distasteful, but because they’re part of this society that is in and of itself a dystopian environment, they’re using these technologies to make these worlds better. They create a real romance around what technology is and what technology can be, and I think that’s really stoked the fire of so many young technologists from the first generation to the most recent generation of technologists who were reinventing things and creating the web 2.0. They’re trying to do things in a very interesting way. It’s idealistic, but in a way that’s very knowing."

"Neuromancer came out in 1984 from the astounding Canadian author, William Gibson. It’s a heist novel. It’s set in a somewhat plausible near future with corporates and AI and cybernetics; where you access the internet through virtual worlds, and where everything is interlinked in a fascinating, rich, really well-developed world. That is why Neuromancer is immensely fun. Why Neuromancer is immensely important is that Gibson builds this incredible, rich, robust world – but he doesn’t really linger on the technological details. We don’t really know how any of it works, and he doesn’t bother explaining any of it. It just is. Instead, the book is about what it’s like to live in a world like this. How do you exist? What does it mean for your relationship with other people? How do you love? How do you work? How do you belong, or have a sense of agency in a world that is this permeated with technology? And because he focuses on the emotional impact of all of it, Neuromancer has never gone out of date – which is kind of amazing for a book from 1984 that predated our modern internet world. It’s still as relevant and powerful and deep and resonant as it always was, because it’s about that feeling – that sense of being surrounded by and dominated by technology – rather than the operational details of the technology itself. Gibson was, and remains, the central figure in cyberpunk. It’s one of the few modern genres where you can point to something substantial and say, “Here’s when and where it began” – and it was Neuromancer . One of the reasons that he’s so important is that he straddles both the worlds that go into cyberpunk: the post-modern fiction movement that was going on at the time, as people on that side of the literary fence tried to grasp everything that was happening in the world around them; and then the change in science fiction after the New Wave, as writers foresaw the impact of personal computing and globalization, and were trying to adapt science fiction stories to account for that context. Gibson created a body of work that both high-falutin’ literary critics and convention-going science fiction fans could see value in. Both could say, “I see the future in that.” And above all of that, he’s just really good. He’s an absolutely amazing writer. His short story, The Gernsbeck Continuum , I love because it is an ode to a future that we never had. It looks at all of the things that we were promised in the middle of the 20th century when the future felt wide open and we thought everything was going to be all glossy and shiny and beautiful. And the story asks the question, “Where’s my jet pack? Where’s my meal in pill form? Where are all of those wonders I was promised?” It’s not dystopian about it – it doesn’t say that we live in some sort of horrible hellscape. It’s just a wistful, poignant look at all the futures that didn’t develop, and all the paths we didn’t take."