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Comment by skmurphy | Hacker News Reader

Neuromancer, William Gibson’s first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction: a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use. I recently re-read it and was struck by how things have turned out differently.

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Gibson’s future just may not have happened yet. In the ‘50s our sci-fi showed rockets landing in the same manner (in reverse) that they launched, and it’s slowly becoming a thing now. Some things, like people living in space or AI, were always obvious and easy to predict. Some things were strangely overlooked (cellphones).

That's certainly possible. It's interesting that the developers of the Motorola Star Tac phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC said that they were inspired by the Star Trek communicators so science fiction had definitely predicted cell phones. There is an entire site devoted to tracing real inventions to their science fiction counterparts: http://www.technovelgy.com/

Sometimes these science fiction counterparts are called 'diagetic prototypes' or 'design fictions'. Has been a favorite topic of Mr Bruce Sterling's for a while now https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic-protot...

“The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson

> I recently re-read it and was struck by how things have turned out differently.

Oddly, I get the exact opposite feeling.

> a dark future where computing, communication, and artificial intelligence technologies were dominant, complemented by significant medical advances, large inhabited satellites in Earth orbit, and considerable drug use.

Are not computing and communications technologies dominant now? Are not the advances in AI (having recently beaten the GO world champion) and the influence of AI in our society (Cambridge Analytica, Google, ect) becoming more pronounced? Aren't we making staggering advaces in medicine (even if these medical advances can only be afforded by an elite few - another cyberpunk theme) ? Aren't the Chinese in the process of establishing a moon base with several "megacorps" planning the colonization of Mars in the near future? Isn't drug use extremely widespread (both illicit and "legally" prescribed drugs virtually ubiqituous)?

I would suggest that if you look at where society was in 1984, and look where we are today, we are well down the path towards a future that looks similar to Gibson's vision in many ways - we just aren't there yet.

> Neuromancer, William Gibson’s first novel, was published in 1984. It helped to establish the cyberpunk genre of science fiction

Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer -- Brunner's Shockwave Rider form 1974 comes to mind (and is a pretty interesting and strangely timely read, given that it is almost 50 years old).

Shockwave Rider is interesting because of how early it was and how unique at the time. That doesn't establish a subgenre though.

Cyberpunk wasn't coined as a term until right around the same time as Neuromancer came out and Neuromancer swept the big sci-fi awards, making it a fair thing to say that it 'helped to establish'.

Brunner is amazing - far ahead of his time.

"Stand on Zanzibar" is one of my favorite books of all times. That said, I think the Shockwave Rider actually holds up less well than Neuromancer, because it was more tuned into the reality of software of its day.

Still a great read though.

Now I need to go and reread the Stand on Zanzibar.

- bookworm/assassin

Don't forget Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man are interesting precursors to Gibson.

He also wrote a fantastic, underrated novel that is definitely his most cyberpunk: The Computer Connection (1975), also published as Extro. It's great fun, and at times paints a future even more callous about human life than Gibson ever described (the main character is arguably a serial murderer, even if he has good intentions). The book was poorly reviewed at the time, and I wouldn't mind admitting that it's "flawed", but it's still one of my favourites.

I keep thinking I read Gibson said something along the lines of "Delany's Nova was his attempt to reach the heights of The Stars My Destination, and Neuromancer was my attempt to reach Nova."

But I haven't been able to find it again. Maybe I imagined it.

One of the most significant pre-Gibson cyberpunk titles was True Names by Vernor Vinge -- a computer scientist who understood the nature of technology as it existed at the time of writing.

I agree that there were a number of earlier novels and stories that were cyberpunk in their sensibilities: John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" and "Stand on Zanzibar", Vinge's "True Names", Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" are some of the most obvious. I think Neuromancer helped establish cyberpunk because of it's popularity and it's vivid conceptualization of "cyberspace" as a separate parallel realm, similar to the Celtic Otherworlds, that is visited in more of a lucid dream state--to pass the final barrier Case has to flatline and cross over into what is essentially a land of the dead.

I think Shockwave Rider captured the sense of accelerating change and what Toffler called "future shock" (modeled on "culture shock" it's the discomfort from finding yourself embedded in the foreign culture of the future). Vinge anticipated privacy issues (and may other important considerations in his other works like "Rainbows End") and Dick is exploring the nature of what it means to be human.

Gibson's Neuromancer shows a world where extensive body modifications are commonplace, but it does not seem to affect anyone's self-image or concerns about identity. So at some level "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is more philosophically and psychologically profound.

Other early works that I associate with cyberpunk are:

Vernor Vinge, True Names

Thomas P Ryan, The Adolescence of P1

Algis Budrys, Michaelmas

Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One

Obviously, SF involving computers is pretty extensive, and there is a fuzzy line between "cyberpunk" and "this story involves computers at some level." My criteria are: Are computers major characters in the story, and secondarily, are they helping other characters break lots of rules? :-)

>Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer

No, it doesn't. Proto-cyberpunk ideas existed, certainly (and more than 10 years before Neuromancer; you can trace the roots back to 60s New Wave SF), but the word itself only predates the book by a year. Neuromancer was very much a crystallization of ideas that had been floating around the zeitgeist.

Or 3 years, depending on how you consider it. The word was coined by Bruce Bethke for his short story Cyberpunk, which was written in 1980 but not published until 1983. Gibson began writing Neuromancer in 1981, though it wasn't published until 1984.

>Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer (...)

Interestingly, the movie Blade Runner hit theaters before William Gibson had finished writing Neuromancer. When he saw the movie, he was afraid people would think that he ripped off the movie's aesthetic. [0,1] Most people would probably assume the movie was influenced by the book, but the movie almost killed the book.

[0]https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-did-william-gibson-really-feel-a...

[1]http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_01_01_archive.as...

The space part of the book always seemed weirdly out of place to me given its near future run-down setting. It's unclear exactly when the novel was set, but probably within 50 years of its publication date of 1984. I can see how things like VR interfaces and even human-level AI could be early/mid 21st century things (particularly from the 1980s viewpoint), but things like cities in orbit seems more like a distant future several centuries out.

I recently watched a 1979 James Burke history show which was commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the moon landings. I was too young when this show was produced to really remember this time period clearly. This made me think about the timeline of the space age and just how short it was. That crowning moment was only about 15 years after the first satellite or 25 years after the end of WW2, when jet engines were barely known to the world.

For someone like Gibson, that period was their childhood. They can be forgiven for assuming it would continue to rapidly expand. In the early 1980s, we had the space shuttles going up like clockwork and MTV was using film clips of those big moon rockets as part of their station-identification clips. By and large, people still thought of space as present and future tense. People didn't really understand it as a demonstration of massive budget redirection and military-industrial might, and that nothing had really been done to solve the physics and make space travel a consumer possibility with low marginal cost.

To me, Gibson's later works try to correct that mistake. His focus shifts ever more towards the information flows, power brokers, and large-scale consumerism. He turns away from the military and space age set pieces. He treats weapons more as artifacts and surplus of a bygone era, just as this big nation-state technology must have seemed to him relics of his past.

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