Neuromancer
I can't imagine what it would have been like to read William Gibson's Neuromancer
Whatever, I suppose that's selling Gibson short: reading Neuromancer in the light of its descendants is hardly fair, and the book isn't about extrapolation or future-conjecture anyway. It lacks the earnest explanatory nature of many "hard" sci-fi books or even the Popular Mechanics-zeal of Arthur C. Clarke, who always seems to be tugging on your t-shirt and whispering, "It could happen, and I'm going to kind of bore you with the details!" Gibson is just...already there, and he has little intention of drawing a reassuring point from A to B. In a way, that's what advances him beyond the genre, and why it makes sense that he's writing regular fiction now: he has nothing to prove. The world is fucked up and he knows it.
It's hard to talk about how good it is without feeling like I'm two decades late to a party I forgot to go to.
Here is a really awesome Neuromancer-related art project, in the works, from Brody Condon, which is a really cyberpunk kind of name, if you ask me.
NEXT TOME: ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S IMPERIAL EARTH.
The first time I tried to read this as a kid I gave up. I read Burning Chrome and Virtual Light and then came back to it.
Also, you should tell us what the next book is, because I am getting motivated to re-read all this stuff, and it would be more enjoyable to have the book fresh in my mind.
Done and done!
It's a fine book and definitely broke some ground, but Bladerunner was released two years before it was published, and that in turn was based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep written about 25 years earlier. I fully realize that this is a geeky comment, and now I have to go reread both. And buy the dvd that has 3000+ versions of the movie.
Whoa. No way! I'm already getting schooled by my readers. Thank you.
I know that Blade Runner is loosely based on Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep -- sometimes it seems that every decent sci-fi movie has at least a little Dick in it -- but I genuinely thought the scenery, that muggy, crime-ridden, techno-Japanese slum, came from Gibson. I wonder if it was the other way around? What a trip.
There are so many other similarities, too! The "off-world" nature of human colonial future (Freeside, in the case of Neuromancer). There's a lot of interesting parallels here:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/postmodernism/plans/postmodplansmatrix.html
Did you hear this amazingly garbage rumor about Neuromancer being made into a movie starring Hayden Christensen? Somebody get this guy away from the classics!
the trip is figuring out whether or not the atmosphere of blade runner and neuromancer actually share that many links to begin with, or if its just some pre existing association that generated before your exposure to either thing. i'm having the same problem with raymond chandler books and humphrey bogart movies right now. how much do they ACTUALLY have in common...?
but you're right, gibson doesn't really spend pages explaining what things are like, that is left up to the reader. so its not his fault we all imagine that it looks like blade runner...
I guess it just depends which one you heard of first, right?
I actually read in an interview somewhere (I'll try to find it) that Gibson saw Blade Runner when it first came out and was so dismayed that he almost stopped writing Neuromancer. Blade Runner had captured the aesthetic he had in mind, and he was afraid of being accused of plagiarism when he completed and released his book.
Alright, found it:
http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_BR_Influence.htm
Wow, thank you for this link! This is a very exciting further muddle of the relationship between Blade Runner and Neuromancer.
No problem! Supposedly there's a movie version in the works starring the (adult) Anakin dude. I'm sure it'll rip off Blade Runner's visual sensibilities!