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Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

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Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint. I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.

go back a bit further though and you'll get to Arthur c Clarke who accurately predicted geostationary communication satellites

Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows:

>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.

>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.

His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#262
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi: https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar... EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...

I hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years. The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads. Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really…

> The Forever War

I love books that attempt to deal with time dilation/travel correctly.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#263
post #39

If you're interested in reading about cyberpunk and why today it feels "dated" - or at least to me, how it didn't manage to reinvent itself and remains crystallized in time -, there's a wonderful article here: https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/what-was-cyberpunk-in-memo... Be advised it's quite long

An example of cyberpunk that is not dated - Hyperion Cantos[1]. It might not look like cyberpunk at the first sight but it definitely is. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos

I disagree. Hyperion has some of the surface elements of a cyberpunk work - primarily by way of "The Detective's Tale" (Lamia's story) - but it isn't cyberpunk overall, no more than it's a horror novel by way of Duré's story (for instance).

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#264
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss. Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all. Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.

There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.

It’s not just engineering. There’s some value in being naive enough to try something.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#265

One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toa…

Yes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge. And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff

So the basic desire of the ruling class is to definitively control the underclass.

And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#266
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably not the jargon but the writing style. Gibson is one of the few sf/fantasy writers that doesn't feel the need to be easy to follow. Breath of fresh air if you ask me.

Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson: "It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."

It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992.

I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing.

I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream of fragments, most of which are shallow simile. But they imply a larger metaphor as they settle into the mind and fade out.

(Edit: I mean, yes, they are sometimes a paragraph long sentence. But they don't require such careful parsing to understand. Now Stephenson on the other hand...)

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#267
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss. Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all. Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.

There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.

The uneducated engineer addresses reality. The educated engineer addresses the best modern ideas about reality.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#269
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future. If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint. When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesti…

> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint. I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.

The scene in Neuromancer involving a row of pay phones in the airport seems kind of hilarious today.
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