Last week, I published an article on Motherboard rounding up some of my favorite fake drugs from the coffers of science fiction. The list isn’t exhaustive; rather, it tackles a representative spread of uppers, downers, psychedelics, and unclassifiables. The tradition dates back to Homerian lotus-eaters, and has been taken up by everyone from Aldous Huxley (his Soma, from Brave New World, is a canonical ‘lude) to Anthony Burgess and William Gibson, whose oeuvre abounds with snorted uppers. In the article, I argue that fake drugs serve a specific purpose in science fiction: they allow writers to make key adjustments to the human brain, just as speculative technologies alter the human world.

Consider it this way: science fiction is like chaos theory. It alters small, key variables about the world, just to see which butterflies cause thunderstorms 10, 50, or 100 years into the future. When we read even the basest genre fiction, we acknowledge that the continuum of reality can persist, in a more-or-less recognizable manner, even when an author has deliberately removed (or added) something vital. Science fiction asks us to imagine all manner of things: flying cars, interstellar travel, cosmic war, and advanced weaponry. We find ourselves in a radically altered landscape–the unchecked globalized sprawl of William Gibson, say, or the shiny planetary colonies of Robert Heinlein–and immediately set about, as in a children’s game, spotting the differences.

The fun is in examining the disconnects, and drawing our conclusions back to the present. In short, when we consider the flying car, what we’re really wrapping our heads around is the significance of their road-bound cousins. But the examples I’ve cited here are only modifications of the physical world. Humanity, despite its space-age digs, is usually the same old dog; an astronaut is just a space cowboy, after all, with a snazzy outer-space backdrop. What about when science fiction wants to be about inner space, not outer space? Never mind those astronauts’ first steps on an alien planet––what about their first thoughts? Just as we imagine leaving the solar system, we must also imagine new ways of getting outside the head.

Like an addictive street drug, the piece has been propagating across the web, thanks to some friendly promotion from The Verge and the great dismal master himself, William Gibson. Of course, many have pointed out that my list lacks many classic science fiction drugs: NZT, the brain-booster from Limitless (incidentally the only drug from this category I can imagine sampling), Nuke from Robocop, and Slo-Mo from Judge Dredd, to name a few. And that’s only the overtly SF inventions; we can’t forget Dylar, an experimental treatment for the fear of death, from Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the various heroin analogues of William Burroughs, or, you know, Hobbit pipeweed. Speculative drugs in film, literature, comics, and video games are such a widespread narrative conceit that a full list would bore readers to tears. To wit, I present to you the exhaustive (and exhausting) “List of Fictional Medicines and Drugs” section of Wikipedia. Enjoy!

And, hey, while you’re over at Motherboard, why not tune in, drop out, and check out some of my other science-fiction and technology pieces?

Los Angeles is arguably the science fiction capital of America. Blade Runner’s iconic sino-Futuristic downtown notwithstanding, there’s a strong historical lineage for science fiction in the Southland: the fan culture which took root here mid-century, the early conventions, the legacy of Forrest J. Ackerman and his one-man museum of memorabilia, Ray Bradbury’s lifetime on the West Side, Harlan Ellison’s local screeds, and, of course, the Hollywood culture machine, which has been spitting out genre epics from backlots in Burbank since time immemorial. Science fiction in L.A. has had many stomping grounds, from the fourth-floor dining room of Clifton’s Cafeteria, where the early heads congregated over free lime sherbet, to the hallowed halls of the L.A. Science Fiction and Fantasy Society clubhouse in North Hollywood, but it’s also always everywhere, just a feeling, something disconnected about a city both so fake and real.

I have been enjoying, very much, being a science fiction reader in Los Angeles.

Not only does the city’s atmosphere of accreting globalization, total simultaneity, and neon lend itself perfectly to my inner wanderings, but the culture is alive and well. Several weeks ago, I attended a birthday party for Ray Bradbury at Mystery and Imagination Books in Glendale. When he was alive, Ray would spend his birthdays at the bookstore, signing for fans and eating cake; after he passed away this year, the owners decided to keep the tradition going. Friends in the community took turns telling stories about Ray, showing off old letters, and reading miscellaneous Bradburiana. Old men in thick glasses sat nestled on plastic chairs like thrones. Christine Bell, the owner of Mystery and Imagination, gave a halting eulogy to her friend that brought the whole room to tears.

On the other end of the spectrum, I also recently saw William Gibson speak at the Last Bookstore. In a sense it was the perfect genre dichotomy: while Mystery & Imagination is a hole-in-the wall bookshop, all lurid pulp paperbacks stacked vertiginously (and tends to host moldies and tenderhearted horror geeks), The Last Bookstore is a cavernous warehouse, an old bank building in the always-already cyberpunk milieu of downtown L.A.

Gibson was chewing gum and perpetually craning his neck to gawk at the monstrous ceilings, like some kind of enfant terrible bobble-head. He kept referring to the bookstore itself as the perfect example of science fiction’s divergent predictions; if a person from 100 years ago were to peer through a time-portal at us sitting on folding chairs in this once-grand building perverted, he postulated, they would have thought we were dressed like longshoremen and wouldn’t recognized our activity as something cultural. He called the store “glorious, Borgesian, mad in the best possible way.”

He had some great things to say about the early days of cyberpunk, too, namely that the moment the epithet materialized, he immediately sought to avoid the inevitable typecasting to follow. “If we get any on us,” he remembers thinking, “we’re finished.” The attempt wasn’t quite a success; he recalled looking around and realizing that all his contemporaries were lining up to get “Cyberpunk” stamped on the backs of their jean jackets. “I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

He called contemporary SF a “forest of unfamiliar names” and confessed to reading scarcely any of it. Essentially, he said, it’s not a problem with the genre–rather, it’s a problem of genre itself. When science fiction aficionados write off all other fiction as “mundane,” something is wrong, he said, adding, “Isaac Asimov is far out and Cormac McCarthy is mundane? And you want me to talk to you?”

Other great Gibsonisms from my notes:

• “The banal Holiday Inn-like ruins of post-Tolkien epic fantasy”
• “In The Wire, we have our Dickens”
• “Bruce Sterling is the Leon Trotsky of cyberpunk”

Of his recent trilogy’s (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History) diversion away from science fiction, he summed it up as a recalibration of his weirdness stick:

In order to induce the kind of cognitive dissonance we come to good science fiction for, one must have a yardstick for how weird it is right now. My yardstick of weirdness was too short to describe the weirdness outside my window.

Which is as fair a description of Los Angeles as I could summon right now: weirdness outside the window, ever-changing, and rife with exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance we come to good science fiction (and interesting cities) to experience.

As a rule, I avoid judging the quality of a science fiction novel by the success of its predictions. For one, it’s too easy. And I inherently distrust any method of judging literature as cleanly qualitative as “did this invention end up being true”?

Although science fiction’s role isn’t necessarily to be prophetic, it often fulfills its own predictions. The predictive quality of the genre is how you sell science fiction to neophytes: did you know Arthur C. Clarke invented the geosynchronous communications satellite? Jules Verne the modern submarine? Granted, when writers have imagined 10,000 different futures, a few of them are bound to be true–monkeys at typewriters and all that. Still, some form of prescience, whether it pans out or not, is an essential dimension of science fiction, and a variable completely absent from almost all other literature. For that reason, it’s interesting.

A creative approach to future-making isn’t just a burden of conceit. It can actually alter the future; new ideas, presented via radically dissociated future-scenarios in literature, can help us realize the prevalence of old ones, and shock us into perception. This is to say that a strictly pragmatic, humanist, or scientific approach to understanding history (and I include the history of the future in that statement) is not often the most accurate. The unexpected happens continually in the history of science, as in the history of humankind; ideas that seemed like nutty fantasies in the heyday of early science fiction look cute now, because the future is explosive and manifold and strange. Sometimes the best way to predict the future is to make outlandish projections, imaginative assumptions, and intuitive guesses–all the purview of artists.

The great science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, in the preface to his epic evolutionary future history Last and First Men, explained it this way:

We are not set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

I love this idea of selecting “a certain thread” from a tangle of possibilities; to me, it really speaks to the complex, simultaneous, and utterly subjective experience of “future” and “futuristic” things. We often confuse futurism, of course, with the high-tech experience; after all, the present day was once the future, and there are plenty of people living on the Earth who live day-to-day much as their ancestors did, unchanged.  For a writer to suss out a thread from such an uneven present in this way and draw it to narrative extrapolation–what the literary critic Robert Scholes calls a “projected dislocation of our known experience”–they need a sense of the tangle, they need to be able to see the larger picture, the context, to see which threads throb with importance and which are just uselessly snarled, going nowhere.

This, to actually get to the subject of this review, is William Gibson’s genius. He often writes about people who are able to cut through webs of information, sensing patterns. Like his characters, the data cowboys, he can see interwoven threads and pull them in just the right place, elegantly displaying the nature of the knot. To wit, he once compared himself to Colin Laney, the protagonist of his 1996 novel Idoru, whose peculiar talent lies in sieving “nodal points” of relevance from vast fields of data:

Laney’s node-spotter function is some sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process.

Like Stapledon said, it’s not a science. As a non-rational process, the results have the effect that art has. But because it plays with interpretations of reality, and because reality is often irrational, the results can–especially when the node-spotting ability is strong–incant elements of the real future.

Idoru centers around Rei Toei, an artificial intelligence embodied as a Japanese idol singer. She manifests holographically, draws deeply from the public web, and is a multiplicity of things to different people. There are as many versions of  Rei Toei as there are fans, with each fan constructing her identity, performance, and form based on their preference. There are some truly beautiful descriptions of her shimmering iteration, coded with icy imagery in shards, the hologram only a visible manifestation of some unthinkable volume, “an Antarctica,” of information. Consistently described as cold, as snow, she moves unhindered from the world to to the web, changing form, like a ghost. The central crisis of the novel is that an important man wishes to marry her: an unholy union of the flesh and the digital.

I’m certainly not the first to draw this parallel, but the fictional Rei Toei was computer grandmother to Hatsune Miku, a real-life digital idol, a blue-haired avatar that is the biggest pop star in Japan. Like Rei Toei, she is an empty shell for the creative impulses of her fans, who write her songs on  Vocaloid 2, a “singer in a box” software platform designed by Yamaha. In a sense, Hatsune Miku is even better than her fictional forebear, because (despite being owned by a technology firm called Crypton Future Media) the songs, illustrations, videos, and sundry visual fanfic that make up her multifarious identity are all collectively authored by her millions of fans. She doesn’t just present herself uniquely to each user; instead, each user uniquely makes her. In concert, in front of millions of screaming fans toting glowsticks, she is conjured from the web into a massive pony-tailed hologram flanked by a live band. Each song performed is the result of a massive pool of user-noodling on the Vocaloid software, perfectly synthesized and on-pitch, belonging to everyone while simultaneously being unachievable for anyone.

It’s uncanny that, in 1996, Gibson could spot the cresting twin vertices of Japanese pop-idol culture and the democratization of mass-media, infer their ultimate collision, and give us Rei Toei. But it’s the particular skill of the science fiction writer to draw those threads; this strange hybrid of digital pop culture was undoubtedly a long time coming.

And stranger things await us still, if we know where to look.

Image by Dream Beam.

Any regular reader of Space Canon knows my fondness for cyberpunk; Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling have all received breathless passes on these pages. Cyberpunk at its peak–before the movement was co-opted by 90s ‘netsploitation flicks and video games–was sexy, prescient, fiercely countercultural, and absolutely the medium most fit for our impending technological milieu.

Still, even an old head like me knows that cyberpunk today is associated more with rollerblades, bad computer animation and mirrored sunglasses than any intellectual subculture of note. For most people, it’s basically a joke: ha ha, let’s rent Hackers! And yet, we live in a world where crypto-anarchic hacker cabals launch decentralized attacks on megacorporations and governments, where institutional intrusion into the Internet threatens our privacy, where even the most milquetoast norm lives half their life online. Which is to say, shouldn’t the issues raised by cyberpunk fiction be more relevant than ever?

Basically, what happened? Where did cyberpunk go? Well, the question piqued me so much that I wrote a long piece on the subject for my favorite blog, Motherboard. In the process, I managed to get essentially every major cyberpunk author, ranging from the O.G. participants to those who have (for better or worse) inherited their legacy, to contribute their thoughts on the question. Rudy Rucker offered this, “If nobody’s pissed off, you’re not trying hard enough. I’ll never stop being a cyberpunk.” William Gibson, on the other hand, was less rough-and-tumble; “Cyberpunk today,” he noted, “is a standard Pantone shade in pop culture.”

Want to know what Neal Stephenson said? Or Charlie Stross? Check out all ten cyberpundits’ contributions at “It Evolved Into Birds: Ten Science-Fictional Thinkers On the Past and Future of Cyberpunk.” And don’t miss the original essay, “What Happened to Cyberpunk?” And if that’s your thing, it’s blowing up on Reddit right now.

In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with photosensitive chemicals, which began gradually fading the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light. The text was about memory, and the idea was that a reader would experience it as such, with the words becoming memories as they were consumed. Like a conversation, like a moment experienced in direct time, one could never recall it precisely, or command it–as on a computer–to return. It was simply lived, then faded away.

Although Agrippa was engineered to be ephemeral, it committed one cardinal error: it was written at the dawn of the free information age. Almost immediately after the poem’s initial “Transmission” (a complex affair involving illusionist Penn Jillette and a vacuum-sealed sculptural magnetic disk) enterprising hackers pirated the text and disseminated it online, on USENET groups and listservs. Since Gibson didn’t use email at the time, fans faxed him pirated copies of the text in droves. If Agrippa had been undertaken today, I can only imagine the full text would have been leaked before it even made it into the art gallery. The project was, in short, a failure: not because it was a bad idea, or poorly-executed, but because there simply is no such thing as a transitory memory anymore. When someone tries to artificially construct one, our networked technological milieu literally wrests it away and commits it, permanently, to the cloud.

We no longer serve one another sensory impressions, live largely felt experiences; we no longer conjure up the past through a patchwork of fallible nodes of thought, ever-shifting, foggy and surreal. It’s difficult today, perhaps impossible, for an artist to make something with the qualities of pure memory: intangible, subjective, and yet with real emotional affect. In an age of hyper-documentation, of consistent quantifiability, every click leaves a trace.

Which, of course, may have been the very point Gibson was trying to make. Agrippa, in attempting to emulate natural memory, was an impossible object. By being technological, it was inherently destined to assimilate itself into a greater collective cache of experience. In his new collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor, he addresses this more succinctly: technology, in a sense, is memory.

In Gibson’s view, our technology is–always has been–an direct extension of our humanity. He argues that the moment we began began taking photos, making films, externalizing the human experience with so-called “mass” media, we set into motion an immeasurably vast prosthetic memory for the race. What we can’t remember, or live directly, we can now conjure up through images, films, and data; we can remember second-hand, often losing touch with the difference between our memories, truth, history, and the experience of others. We can view things at a distance, things which happened before we were born, we can watch the dead talk: ghosts have been walking among us since the first image was recorded. Of film, Gibson writes, “we are building ourselves mirrors that remember–public mirrors that wander around and remember what they’ve seen,” adding, “that is a basic magic.”

Only briefly does he make what I think is a crucial leap to extending the argument beyond the parameters of 20th century technology. The prosthetic memory of the human race isn’t just quantifiable in archives of film, living networks of interconnected conversation, and endless bytes of media data. It’s also a different kind of information: mesopotamian clay tablets, cave paintings, the printed word, anything, in fact, that is capable of representing a fragment of ineffable experience in physical form. Of course, this isn’t Gibson’s territory, the cyberprophet, the calm-and-bemused  voice of techno-truth, but he tackles it:

“Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema.”

While media is an “extended nervous system we’ve been extruding as a species for the past century,” art is a complex memory we’ve been collaboratively creating for much, much longer. It’s too big for a single individual–or a single machine, hopefully– to experience it all at once, but it’s the central project of the human race. And it can’t be pirated, or destroyed: only lived, and added to, often thoughtlessly, by succeeding generations of increasingly technological human beings.

Additional Materials:

Full text of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Distrust That Particular Flavor on Amazon
Fantastic video interview with William Gibson on Motherboard TV

Virtual Light is the first book of William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, in which an nonfunctional, shanty-town Golden Gate bridge is a major feature. Like his previous “Sprawl” trilogy, it leans low and hard into its dystopian city-scape, positing a completely probable slumification of the modern metropolis — one which has developed laterally, growing in spontaneous density, rather than upwards into the mega-skyscrapers and glass-domed arcologies of standard gung-ho futurism.

Unlike the Sprawl books (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), however, Virtual Light doesn’t take place in the future, not really; with a time-stamp of 2006, it’s an alternate present rather than a straight science-fictional tomorrow, although the effect is the same. While stories that unfold in the future give us an extrapolative shock, Gibson seems to understand that in an urbanized world of mediated digital communication — a climate of instantaneity — the distinction between “now” and “tomorrow” is irrelevant. Reality fluctuates wildly from individual to individual depending on his or her point of perceptual entry, and hence Gibson’s dystopian 2006 is as real as the person reading it.

As with many Gibson novels, the most compelling thing about Virtual Light is its atmosphere. The environment of the novel, essentially an archetypical cyberpunk milieu, is dizzying: a California divided into two nation-states, jacked up on privatized security thuggery, pocketed with anarchist utopias of organic provenance. Data pirates, security cops, hackers, and televisual evangelists war over hardware; namely, a pair of “Virtual Light” glasses, a virtual (today we might say “enhanced”) reality device that ratchets directly into the optic nerve, overlaying any number of data points seamlessly onto the visual plane.

This book is about architecture and perception. The crux of the plot is that the virtual light glasses, when worn to gaze upon the city of San Francisco, reveal a plan by overseas developers to restructure the city. The plan, to plant nanomachines in the downtown that self-construct into buildings — buildings that “just grow” — is presented as being so fundamentally repulsive and unnatural that the hacker underground is galvanized to prevent its implementation without any encouragement.

That’s because architecture, here, is a metaphor for class: the rich, in Virtual Light, live in planned corporate megaplexes — giant glass domes, gargantuan malls — while the poor live in organically-generated slums, which are portrayed as being vibrant, warm, human communities, beautiful in their senselessness. Gibson’s tenderness for the slum is manifested through the character of Shinya Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist studying the community of the Bridge.

“The integrity of its span was as rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic.”

The Bridge, which Yamakazi describes in his notebooks as an “accretion of dreams,” something with “magic and singularity,” a “pointless yet curiously artlike feature of the urban landscape,” is the home (physical and spiritual) of Virtual Light‘s most likable protagonists, those fighting the nano-urbanization of San Francisco. There’s a clear binary here. On one side, the wealthy, whose urban environment is intentional, architectural, built, technological, clean, and corporate. On the other, the poor, whose practical ingenuity has cumulated in a massively dense, anti-technological, piecemeal construction that somehow reflects the best qualities of the human spirit, of a community of individuals fighting against the compartmentalized alienation of the modern city. On the Bridge, everyone lives on top of everyone else, in an interconnected system functioning entirely outside of the matrix of the law.

The Bridge, Gibson clearly iterates, is real life — sweat, filth, and color.

The Bridge, as represented (poorly) in the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, which was written by William Gibson.

The city, on the other hand, is Virtual Light: it’s data. It’s glass and steel. It’s businesslike efficiency, robot maids, and stringent rules. And it has no right to impinge on the Bridge’s natural quality of growth — it simply can’t, in Gibson’s world, share any qualities whatsoever with the people’s Temporary Autonomous Zone-esque urbanism. The rich just mustn’t implement technologies that mimic the organic development of the slums. It would be a perversion, a co-opting of the underground.

The takeaway, it seems, is that the poor — i.e. the nontechnological — are the only truly connected people. Technologies like Virtual Light, or the complex computer systems that monitor the security of the wealthy, only serve to alienate people from one another. A clapboard house constructed bit by bit from hand tools, a bicycle, a slum full of cultures woven into a hallucinatory puzzle: these are the real connective technologies. It’s obvious (to me) that Gibson is often mislabeled as a cyberprophet, a digital zealot. He’s quite the opposite: not a luddite, but certainly an advocate of that human je-ne-sais-quoi that seperates us from machines.

An almost certainly incomplete glossary of fictional concepts in William Gibson’s Count Zero that are never explained and that you are supposed to understand by context, which is inscrutable since all these future-terms are neologisms and none could even remotely have been understandable to an audience in 1986, except to deep Gibson nerds who might have scrutinized every novel in the Sprawl Trilogy, which is understandable:

Biochip: An integrated circuit chip, superior to the silicon microprocessors that are common in Count Zero‘s era, that provides the basis for creating a virtual entity. Designed by the ubiquitous Maas-Neotek corporation.

Biosoft: A biography that includes actual life experience from the subject, to be experienced via internal mental experience (as in simstim, see below).

Cowboy: A hacker. Also known as a “Console Cowboy.”

Cyberspace Matrix: A “consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators,” essentially a more baroque version of our internet, with virtual reality and complex data are presented visually as multi-colored, three-dimensional forms, “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and costellations of data…like city lights, receding.”

Cyberspace Deck: A computer, that which you use to “access” said Matrix (i.e. project your disembodied consciousness into it).

Derm, Dermadisk: Medicine. An adhesive patch that transmits a drug transdermally when applied to the skin. Also used to take hallucinogenic drugs recreationally.

ICE, Black ICE: Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, a kind of physical, three-dimensional firewall that can cripple or kill any hacker attempting to access off-limits data in the Matrix.

Icebreaker: Hacker software designed to crack corporate ICE.

Ono-Sendai: A cyberspace deck or computer console designed by the Japanese corporation Hosaka. Top-shelf.

Orbital Terminus: A space airport, specifically for low-orbit flights.

Simstim, Simstim Link: Simulated Stimuli, a mostly recreational technology that enables its user to experience a full range of sensory experience coming from another person. Simstim soap operas, films, and television shows have replaced all other forms of visual entertainment. The technology can also be used as a one-way communication link between two people, and Cyberspace Decks are simplified simstim units.

Slamhound: A mobile bomb.

Sprawl: A mega-city that is the indeterminate result of all major cities merging together.

I’m totally selling Count Zero short by making this entry entirely about its language, but for the sake of all its future readers, I can think of nothing more helpful in the process of shlepping through Gibson’s Sprawl-world than a glossary. One thing I appreciate about Gibson’s canon is his devout unwillingness to make things easy on his readers — the end result being a kind of fetid sensory overload that fully evokes the overbearing complexity of a world that has just kept on growing, becoming denser and thornier in the generations since the present day. After all, we pound towards the future every day with our increasingly Gordian technology and no solutions for actually integrating it in everyday life: the result is the oppressive web of data and experience that Gibson understands so well.

For what it’s worth, however, I could easily write unreadable academic theses on 50% of the plotlines in Count Zero, which is largely about sentient AIs populating the cybersphere with the avatars of Voodoo gods.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to read William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984. It’s so absurdly dense and riddled with cryptic terms which have since become commonplace, that it must have been virtually hieroglyphic at the time. Part of the experience of Neuromancer is this incredible recent-history disconnect: to know that the course of 24 years have brought us a substantial step closer to Gibson’s world than we might have anticipated, that it would make concepts like “cyberspace” and “matrix” the stuff of pop-culture movies and general, undisputed understanding. Is that the ultimate litmus test of science fiction, that it starts to come true while it’s still fresh in the memory of its readers? Or maybe it’s because of Neuromancer that any of these things happened. Either way, it’s almost shocking to see how heavy-handedly the novel’s themes have been borrowed over the years: The Matrix took most of it and tossed in some plagiarized Baudrillard, Blade Runner took Chiba, took Case, the look of the book and its the self-loathing antihero.

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.