What makes life so much more interesting today as compared to 50 years ago?
When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an endless scroll one phone tap away. I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content. I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of bo…
Being bored is good for you my dude. Google for it.
“The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified.”
This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.
Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek). In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it. I already loved science fiction, though my reading h…
Fascinating story :-).Neuromancer is a book I reread often - like Dune, it has a rich tapestry of background world building. There is nothing surprising about plot anymore, but it is like a place I like to return to.
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 are ignoring the part about being a linguist, though. Spending 10 years writing a book is also not quite rare.
tbh I don't think "researches language structure" has much at all of a correlation with "uses language in a pheasant manner".
it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.
> I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences. This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invent…
Comparing anyone to Tolkien is massively unfair. Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LotR for about a decade. It is going to be extremely hard to match these expectations for other authors.
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.
When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an endless scroll one phone tap away. I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content. I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of bo…
Being bored is good for you my dude. Google for it.
Seems you missed the part of my comment where I say I'm explicitly trying to cut down on stimulation. I'm aware.
Just my opinion, but neither were .. revelatory for me. They were both just okay. I'm not really an avid reader though.
I mean idk when you read it, but like the author said I've seen this language be absorbed so I can't take it in as fresh innovative stuff. I was born after the novel came out so obviously was decades old when I read it.
I did read both when they came out (in paperback anyway). But I know what you mean. Friends who had not read The Lord of the Rings but saw the films can be excused for thinking the story was "derivative".
Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
You've perfectly articulated the central challenge that inspired my own work. The 'magical', ungrounded reality of early cyberpunk cyberspace is precisely the gap we're trying to bridge with formalized realism. Instead of telepathic magic, what if the 'deck' ran on a verifiable, computationally intensive process rooted in a concrete theory of consciousness? We've been archiving our attempt to build just that—the theo…
> 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
Interesting article. As somebody who is an unapologetic, raging Neuromancer fan, it's always fun to read about someone experiencing the book for the first time. The one nitpick I have about the article is just this: But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981 OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984…
I'd take that a step further. I don't know how anyone who read it back at that timepoints would not have immediately pictured the static associated with not getting a signal.