He wrote Neuromancer while I was still using a Vic-20, long before the public really knew about a thing called the internet, yet Gibson visualised not only the Internet, but a very likely future of the virtual-reality equivalent of the Internet, which was a big thing in the 90's, but the technology just wasn't there and sort of died and faded out of popularity. VR became popular again, imo when Oculus Rift where making waves in the tech community 2010(ish). He is a visionary.
Probably a big part of why the novel worked so well - one had to use imagination! The reality of much of this tech in the 20th/21st century is kind of a downer. The engineer in me is torn and wants secretly to go Luddite at times.
i remember being a young kid in the 90’s and the closest i saw to VR was a very short lived thing at 6 flags. even if it didn’t crash all the time, it wasn’t worth the line at all
Listening to William gibson readings of neuromancer gives me the same feeling/rush/awe of seeing a gorgeous car or a stunning woman, it throws me into a trance and takes my breath away and I’m just dumbfounded
@@thomasjardine2108 From wikipedia: "Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre steampunk."
Thanks. This series of videos has certainly been an unusual & entertaining look into the origins of cyberspace & the cyberpunk aesthetic. There have clearly been many, many stories involving computers, long before they were a common & central part of our personal lives. What's most fascinating to me is how, just when that was actually happening in the late 70s & early 80s - but long before anything like the internet ever began to take shape - we started telling ourselves new stories altogether. There seemed to be a very unconscious fear & loneliness - or the anticipation of such - in us, of becoming lost in a purely technological & computerized landscape. And right then, we saw stories emerge wherein writers of books, movies, etc., helped us deal with that, by envisioning just such a world. The protagonists of these tales did, indeed, find themselves in breathtaking vistas entirely wrought in ones & zeros - the digital bits of a computer dreamworld made real. It may have been exactly the right therapeutic regimen we needed, to prepare us for the blossoming age of the human / computer interface. I find it nothing short of amazing that a few people had the vision to look ahead and see some of the issues we would face, and the courage to show it to us before we were engulfed by it. So thank you to all those who gave us a little taste - and a warning - of things to come. tavi.
"The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise was quoted extensively in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The parallel with Babbage's computing machines is made explicit, as allowing plausibility to the theory that transmutation of species could be pre-programmed." ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage )
There are steampunk novels and short stories before 1990. Tim Powers' "The gates of Anubis" is from the 80's I believe and KW Jeter coined the term in those years.
Yup. A short story he wrote there (“Johnny Mnemonic”) really started the idea, but it was expanded upon and crystallised with Neuromancer. Mona Lisa Overdrive is the sequel.
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My cyber garage was covered in cyber graffiti. "This has to be the work of those damn cyberpunks from up the street," I thought. I turned back from the window to face the television in the living room. It was tuned to a dead channel. An anger rose up inside me. The same anger that had helped me get through the GONGO-12 conflict in the BLING BLONG sector. "They cut my cable. Those damn cyberpunks cut my cable!" -William Gibson, The Cyberpunks.
Cool, he's a great writer with a lot of style and creativity, yet he's so dismissive about everything surrounding cyberpunk, I guess he was afraid the fad would overwhelm his writing...
Well he anticipated that his vision would be outdated by now, and it really is. What we see now with Games like HL: Alyx is not really the Cyberspace he envisioned but just an enclosed space in a predefined environment, not the Wild West that the "Deck Jockeys" of his writings were experiencing.
Well, there is that part in Neuromancer that involves the precise ringing of a bunch of pay phones. To be fair, widespread cellular use wasn't going to be on the horizon for a few more years. If you watch Series 1 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), for instance, their communicators would still have been sci-fi at the time. In the 2003 series, they would be called "Shell cells." Technology moves fast, even in sci-fi.
I place videos on RU-vid out of respect and interest. No need to hear somebody saying what he doesn't like about it. But if you feel the urge, then do that on your own RU-vid channel. Simple as that.
