People who like Neuromancer would probably enjoy reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
281–290 of 427 posts
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On the off chance case you haven't read it, check out Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#283> But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980 My neighborhood didn't get wired for cable until 1988 and my family never had it until 1997. We had four stations and then a fifth when Fox started. It was pretty normal for people to experience dead channels if you didn't live in a city where CATV had been deployed. Even then you could tune to unused channels when the…
I had static on my TV well into the 90's.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#284Overall an interesting read. To go straight to the nitpicks: > The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first. Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it. 1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamun…
Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders. Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is countercul…
Right: bascially, 1980s-vintage William Gibson is a post-New-Wave SF writer who's a fan of hard-boiled novels and of New Hollywood "outlaw" bohemianism, so his heroes are pimps, thieves and murderers. 1980s-vintage Shirow is a fan of military SF, so his heroes are paramilitary death squads. Now, that's a little jaded, but I think mostly simply accurate. I don't think that generalises well to a US/Japan distinction though. As others have said, Akira is surely more of an outsider story. (Beyond cyberpunk, have a look at the political backgrounds of senior Ghibli people like Isao Takahata, Kondo Yoshifumi and Hayao Miyazaki. I've read somewhere, but can't confirm, that people like that tended to end up in animation precisely because Communists were blackballed out from more respectable industries.) And the US is the land of Dirty Harry and Niven and Pournelle as much as Bonnie and Clyde and Blade Runner.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#285Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bot…
Ada Palmer makes this point. She teaches Renaissance history and tries to write her sci-fi as if she was trying to describe today to someone from the 15th century. Stanislaw Lem was also brilliant in describing his future worlds in ways that were hard to understand, as alien as he guessed they would actually be.
In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the Bathtub".
In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when they are obvious for the characters. Similar to how books set in the present don't try to be science fiction for people in the past, even though they would be, and therefore don't avoid or explain modern terminology.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gibson isn’t the only person writing cyberpunk although he definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from words like >> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of…
Why not read both PKD and Gibson? Better use of your time than the average TV series.
Yes I agree. But people usually want an opinion. In my opinion read everything. The more you read the more you appreciate everything you read.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#287It's funny to read it after playing Cyberpunk 2077 (or the tabletop game setting) and realize that almost everything is just lifted from Neuromancer, often not even bothering to come up with new jargon.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote the same review over 20 years ago on amazon.com. It was never cool. That kid you went to school with that only wore black jeans was not one of the cool ones.
It says more about your own perspective then about the actual coolness of those guys.
I think you have substituted a cope definition for the word 'cool' that removes the social aspect of it, which is pretty convoluted.
I think those guys are great, my friends are those guys, I'm one of those guys, but nobody thinks they are cool.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and…
A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point. It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephe…
Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it to denigrate Gibson - his writing is beautiful, and I think he's one of the most perceptive Sci-fi writers going. The Blue Ant trilogy was one of the best encapsulations of the "new" world at the turn of the millenium, and reading The Peripheral has the terrifying quality of being given a prophecy of a future you don't want.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not being bored doesn’t mean you’re leading an interesting life.
Not at all. I see why you say that. My general thought of why things more interesting is not that they truly are, rather our time and attention spans have been taken up by more frivolous things while boredom leads to ideas and innovation. I meant that boredom I experienced earlier in life was arguably a good thing.
I see, I thought you were trying to argue for the GP’s point.