Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#41

Post by simpaticoder » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:43 AM UTC

Glad I'm not the only one just getting around to reading Neuromancer in 2025! The shocking thing about the story is how very few screens there are in the world, and how ungrounded "cyberspace" is in physics. Cyberspace's mechanics are vague, and in fact are inconsistent with the other extent communication technologies. e.g. Case never seems to worry about getting a signal for his deck, and yet does worry about getting signals for, e.g. fax machines on space ships. It feels like the fabric of cyberspace must be ESP or telepathy (which is consistent with its description as a "shared hallucination". Gibson seems to be wrestling with new technology in a similar way to the authors of "Wierd Science" - where basically computers are magic. (And IIRC Gibson famously doesn't use computers IRL).

The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out.

If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#42

Post by mindcrime » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:43 AM UTC

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, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#43

Post by NetRunnerSu » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:47 AM UTC

simpaticoder wrote: post #41

Glad I'm not the only one just getting around to reading Neuromancer in 2025! The shocking thing about the story is how very few screens there are in the world, and how ungrounded "cyberspace" is in physics. Cyberspace's mechanics are vague, and in fact are inconsistent with the other extent communication technologies. e.g. Case never seems to worry about getting a signal for his deck, and yet does worry about gettin…

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 theory, the code, and the narrative simulation. Perhaps a less optimistic, but more grounded future.

You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#44

Post by cubefox » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:49 AM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #5

amarcheschi wrote: post #2

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

Is that your article? I'm afraid I think that it badly misses the mark. Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot. That's the common thread; writing style, setting characteristics, etc., are diverse. Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!" Look no fu…

> Literary cyberpunk is simple; it is nothing more or less than near-future crime fiction where technology (usually speculative) is central to the plot.

I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.

Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades

I don't remember exactly, but I think most of these short stories aren't crime fiction. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" definitely isn't.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#45

Post by aaron695 » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:53 AM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #22

> People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50 years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next two. I like that we now also have "Amara's Law" [1] that makes the exact opposite point: > We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. So either that "futurist" was an idiot, or this shows that with respect to future developmen…

[dead]

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#46

Post by surfingdino » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

One thing that Gibson nailed is the story of Operation Screaming Fist, which eerily reminds me of what's going on in Ukraine. From the Neuromancer wiki:

"Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," which planned on infiltrating and disrupting Soviet computer systems from ultralight aircraft dropped over Russia. The Russian military had learned of the idea and installed defenses to render the attack impossible, but the military went ahead with Screaming Fist, with a new secret purpose of testing these Russian defenses. As the Operation team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their computers and flight systems, and Corto and his men were targeted by Soviet laser defenses."

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#47

Post by navane » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:55 AM UTC

amarcheschi wrote: post #2

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

It's because punk died, which is half of cyberpunk. All the cyber is corporate now. We live in cyber corp. We live in the part that Gibson found, rightfully, totally uninteresting to write about.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#48

Post by surfingdino » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 9:57 AM UTC

elcapitan wrote: post #3

Related: Is there some place that collects the predictions, ideas, concepts from Scifi stories, without all the plot and character stuff? Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.

The US government used to consult sci-fi authors, especially when they were writing stories somewhat based on extrapolations of current advancements of technology or science. I'm not sure any of the notes from those meetings are available online, but I'd love to read them and compare.

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#49

Post by cyberpunk » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 10:01 AM UTC

amarcheschi wrote: post #2

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

Hey, everyone gets older…

Re: Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

#50

Post by macleginn » Sun, Jul 13, 2025, 10:08 AM UTC

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 toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)