Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."

I've never seen a visual depiction in any cyberpunk-inspired that came even close to getting it right. They mostly all seem to want giant structures made out of neon blocks.

I read an interview with Gibson way back in the 80s that was very telling. He had never touched a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. He wrote it on a mechanical typewriter, because word processors weren't even a thing then. With the money he made from the novel, he felt as a science fiction writer, he should own a computer. So he went and bought an Apple II, state of the art at the time. He took it home and turned it on, and it made whirring, grinding noises, which freaked him out. He had no idea computers should be anything but silent! He opened the case and looked at the disc drive... a Victorian clockwork mechanism of gears, belts, levers, and pulleys. That's like the most Gibson thing ever.

No, it doesn't. Proto-cyberpunk ideas existed, certainly (and more than 10 years before Neuromancer; you can trace the roots back to 60s New Wave SF), but the word itself only predates the book by a year. Neuromancer was very much a crystallization of ideas that had been floating around the zeitgeist.

Or 3 years, depending on how you consider it. The word was coined by Bruce Bethke for his short story Cyberpunk, which was written in 1980 but not published until 1983. Gibson began writing Neuromancer in 1981, though it wasn't published until 1984.

Just checked the wiki and supposedly there are two other versions out there which I guess I'll have to find now.

Oddly, I get the exact opposite feeling.

> a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use.

Are not computing and communications technologies dominant now? Are not the advances in AI (having recently beaten the GO world champion) and the influence of AI in our society (Cambridge Analytica, Google, ect) becoming more pronounced? Aren't we making staggering advaces in medicine (even if these medical advances can only be afforded by an elite few - another cyberpunk theme) ? Aren't the Chinese in the process of establishing a moon base with several "megacorps" planning the colonization of Mars in the near future? Isn't drug use extremely widespread (both illicit and "legally" prescribed drugs virtually ubiqituous)?

I would suggest that if you look at where society was in 1984, and look where we are today, we are well down the path towards a future that looks similar to Gibson's vision in many ways - we just aren't there yet.