Won the following awards:
Been turned into a:
along with having been translated into German, Japanese, and just about every other language in the book, including Finnish.
Information courtesy of William Gibson aleph: www.8op.com/gibson/en/
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.William Gibson, Neuromancer
Neuromancer, William Gibson's first novel, was published in 1984 to an almost ludicrous amount of critical and reader acclaim, and now stands as quite probably the most directly and indirectly influential book published in the last twenty years. It was a radical departure from traditional science fiction, both in style and content. At the time it seemed almost wholly sui generis, a whole new complicated, organic and more that a little scary universe sprung full-form from Gibson's head.
Looking back, we can see that this isn't the case, as of course it hardly could be. Gibson and the Mirrorshades Group he was a part of were followers of a loose tradition, albeit one taken in a whole new direction. A close reading of Neuromancer shows that it owes a particular debt to Samuel Delany, Raymond Chandler, Roger Zelazny, Alfred Bester, John Brunner and Phillip K. Dick, and the New Wave movement in science fiction in general. What Gibson did was not an invention out of whole cloth, but a synthesis and recombination of these influences in a new, shocking and brilliant way.
Neuromancer is the story of Case, a literally burnt-out ex-"cowboy", or hacker, who is half-blackmailed and half-bribed into doing a complicated job for an unknown party, and the weird assortment of criminals he does it with. The real protagonist might be the settings, though: the deadly hustler-based churn of Chiba City, the concrete and steel closed ecosystem of the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, the corporate paradise of Freeside orbital, and the neon-lit ghost world of data in the matrix that Case is drawn to like a moth to flame.
Much is made of the fact that Gibson coined the term cyberspace in Neuromancer, but this is in many ways a red herring, an easily-digested media factoid that misses the point. Gibson knew relatively little about computers when he wrote the book, and the idea of immensely important network serving as a backbone for commerce and human affairs appeared ten years earlier in Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. Neuromancer is not primarily a work of technological extrapolation, but social, and the point is not the network, but the way that the network interfaces with humanity.
One of the most immediately remarkable things about Neuromancer is its prose style. Gibson, like the rest of the Mirrorshades Group, made heavy use of the technique that Rudy Rucker called "crammed prose": text almost overloaded with visual imagery and novel metaphors, so that almost every clause created a new and unusual image. Gibson took this technique to extremes, to the point where passages from Neuromancer have a hallucinatory vividness.
Neuromancer seemed to fill a hole that nobody knew existed. It took its place almost immediately not just in the literary pantheon, but the collective unconscious; a fever dream of confusion and violence that, as time has passed, has seemed more relevant to the present than the future. It spawned an army of imitators that lifted every possible aspect of the book wholesale, to the point where they became the genre conventions of late cyberpunk, and then literary clichés.
Gibson wrote two more novels set in the same universe, Count Zero in 1986 and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988, as well as publishing a collection of short stories in 1987, Burning Chrome, which contained several stories set there, some written before Neuromancer, and some after. While very well received, none of his stories or novels, within or without the universe of Neuromancer, achieved the same level of veritable canonization that it did, despite the fact that his writing has matured a great deal since 1984. Sometimes an author writes one book, if they are lucky, or perhaps, unlucky, which transcends the level of being a story and moves into the realm of a cultural phenomenon, and this is precisely what Neuromancer has become.
A while ago, a Texas oilman who wanted to live to be 200 funded the cloning experiments that resulted in the first successful cloning of a human embryo. Granted, it was only five cells, but this scientific discovery will be used in the near future for medical purposes. We have taken one step closer to the future William Gibson imagined in Neuromancer. Not only does it point toward the possibilities of cloning human cells, but it also illustrates the fact that such scientific benefits are only there for the rich.
There does not need to be massive social upheaval, a nuclear disaster, or any such dramatic change in society to form the urban landscapes in Neuromancer. Instead, Gibson looked his surroundings in the early 80s and speculated as to how they would evolve.
Much science fiction looks to the future as a time where equality has been achieved, or at least there is more equality than the 20th century. The welfare state has evolved enough, and there are enough social programs that things have worked out for the better. Star Trek is an obvious example: technology can help us end world hunger, and eliminate money and racism and women's oppression. But even in others, when there is cloning, or space and time travel, it is assumed that everyone will start being cloned and going to the moon, like somehow the government will set it up. The Gibson future, however, surmises that the nature of capitalism will only allow the wealthy to have access to this technology, and that the gap between the rich and the poor has stayed the same, if not widened.
Plastic surgery started gaining popularity in the late 70's and early 80's, which also had a profound influence on Gibson's future. Rich people, particularly the Hollywood/Beverly Hills crowd and mostly women were getting nose jobs, facelifts, and breast implants. People had always been concerned with looking younger, but this was taken to new dimensions in the 80's, and cosmetic surgery continues to outdo itself. I saw a guy on Jenny Jones a few years ago who had steel spikes implanted in his skull. It looked like a metal mohawk, and he could unscrew them to remove them when he went to sleep.
Also in the early 80's, the "economic miracle" had taken shape in Japan. No longer was the United States the sole leader in important technological industry. Japanese car companies, for example, made a huge impact on the world economy. People concerned about the Japanese takeover of the American economy ranted about how people needed to buy Dodges and Chevies, not Hondas and Toyotas. Japan became a leader in electronics with companies like Sony and Hitachi.
Zaibatsus were also a Japanese concept. They were multinational corporations that often "owned" their employees in the sense that they usually stayed there for life. Zaibatsus had been around long before Neuromancer was ever written, but of course, with Japan's development, they were accumulating more wealth and influence in the world economy.
The combination of all these factors shaped the future of Neuromancer. It is a world with immense technological capabilities. People can essentially live forever through cryogenic freezing and DNA reprogramming. They can look however they want to look, and even have superhuman powers. There is artificial intelligence, space travel, cloning, climate control, holographic technology, cyberspace... the list goes on and on. But these things are only available for those who have money, or to those who are willing to lead a life of crime.
It is also a world essentially run by the Mafia and zaibatsus. The Cold War had eventually turned into a real war. Germany (Bonn, specifically) had been hit with nuclear bombs. Neither side seems to have come out successful - we learn that the Pentagon and the CIA have been dismantled (Balkanized). There are televised trials. It is the end of the American Empire, and it seems to have been replaced by Japan. There are several indications of Japan's global influence. People use New Yen even in the Sprawl. The hottest computer parts are all Japanese brands - Hosaka, Sony, etc. Case goes to Chiba City because it has the most advanced medical technology. Japan is the first country to outlaw non-electronic money. The writing on the controls of Armitage/Corto's ship is in Japanese, so neither Maelcum nor Case can read it. The only Mafia anyone talks about, even in the Sprawl, is the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia. The Yakuza is peppered throughout the book, constantly being alluded to. They have an air of ubiquity and eternity. They float in the upper echelons. The Hideo-like clone-mercenary who kills Johnny (who is, incidentally, also Keanu Reeves... he stars as Johnny Mnemonic in that horrible movie) is from the Yakuza. The whole story Molly tells about it has a ring of fate to it. You know it's only a matter of time before they send an assassin she can't beat. You hear things about them, like how if you make a mistake, they chop off one of your fingers. Cathie is amazed that Case, who she thinks is part of the Yakuza, still has all his fingers.
There are other small indications of the Japanese influence on global culture. When case looks up the Panther Moderns on the Hosaka, he gets this image of a boy wearing a mimetic polycarbon suit, and eyes with epicanthic folds "obviously the result of surgery." Epicanthic folds are a characteristic of Asian eyes, where there is a fold of skin over the inner corner of the eye. When Neuromancer was written, people in Asia had started having surgery to remove their epicanthic folds so they could look more "white" or "American." In Neuromancer, the tables have turned, and now people are getting them surgically created to look more Japanese.
Of course, the zaibatsus have the most impact. Early in the book, Case is shocked to see a Mistubishi-Genentech (notice that Mitsubishi has bought out a large American company) sarariman ("salary-man," a word that was invented in Japan before Neuromancer) wandering around Night City. He can tell because of the tattoo on the back of his hand. The companies go to the extent of having surgery done on them to monitor mutagen levels in their bloodstream. (Though I'm not sure why.) Also, when Case sees a bunch of "techs from the arcologies" (more sararimen) at the fight where Linda is killed, he realizes that some recreational committee for their company must have approved it. He then muses over what life would be like as a sarariman. "Company housing, company hymn, company funeral."
While zaibatsus in the 20th century didn't legally own their employees, it seems they have taken several leaps closer in that direction. That is a frightening picture. Working people, in Case's time, are like slaves. They are owned by one company for their entire life, branded like cattle, only participating in activities deemed worthy by committees. There don't seem to be many other choices. Saraiman or criminal, unless you're born into a privileged position, because we don't really get a sense of fluid social mobility.
Nearer towards the end of the book, Case thinks about the mutability of the Tessier-Ashpools in relation to the immortality of zaibatsus. "The zaibatsus, the multinationals that had shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. ...You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory." So the zaibatsus, in Gibson's future, have developed so far that they have control of the global economy and thus shape history. They also are indestructible, like the Party in 1984. An eternal oligarchy.
Bill Gates is almost a character from Neuromancer. He has more money than most people can fathom, and it comes largely from the tech industry. (As an aside, during the post-September 11 search for Osama bin Laden, the media was ridiculing people in Afghanistan when the American government was offering them $35 million or some such extravagant amount for the bounty of Bin Laden, because they couldn't understand how much money that was, or what you could buy with it. And they say the gap isn't widening.) He's certainly a product of the Information Age. Everyone knows who he is, and what he looks like. It is unclear to me what his house is like, because probably a lot of what I've been told is rumors, but he nevertheless has a gigantic Straylight-ish house equipped with incredible technology. On New Year's 1999-2000 he had a firework show on his lake that was more impressive and drew more people than the one produced by the city of Seattle.
We don't get many glimpses of the lifestyle of the poor in Neuromancer, but there are enough for us to know that the living conditions for poor people haven't improved much since the 20th century. We know there is still prostitution and drug addiction, and that if you want to live a lifestyle of luxury you have to commit crimes - in order to become a razorgirl assassin, Molly first had to make money as a "meat puppet." In order for Case to play around in the matrix, he has to do hacking jobs for people, cutting through ice, et cetera. We hear about the hotel Case stays in with his girlfriend Marlene when he is younger, which is positively infested with cockroaches. The cityscape most people have to inhabit is a nightmarish "neon forest" with a "television sky" that glares brighter than the neon forest itself. People have to wear air filtration masks because of the pollution, so we know that industry has further damaged the environment. In Chiba City, most people eat krill-based food. This sounds even more unpleasant when it is compared with Freeside. Freeside is pristine, Eden-esque, and completely manufactured to look natural. We get several descriptions of things people now take for granted that are very expensive, bourgeois luxuries in the future when Case first arrives in Freeside. Outdoor activities like hang-gliding, for instance. Hand-woven fabrics, wood, wicker baskets. Not only are natural resources much scarcer than synthetic resources in the future, but these things are very labor-intensive and must be made by human hands instead of machines. There are descriptions of too-cleverly-sloped meadows and unnatural-looking trees. Case is disgusted by the smell of fresh-cut grass. To him, all of this is foreign. The emphasis is on the fact that it is all manufactured. "Nature" as we know it now can not be re-created by humans because that is the definition of nature - not man-made. Earlier in the book, Molly takes Case out for an extremely expensive breakfast where they eat real bacon and eggs.
The only other encounter we have with nature is the beach near Morocco in Neuromancer/Marie-France's virtual reality. Here, in a scene we might find calm and beautiful, Case is terrified. "He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all. Behind him, a gull cried. He shivered." He even starts crying and is so frightened that he pees his pants. He notices that the tide "had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any Tokyo gardener produced." Again, he compares the subtleties of nature to things that are manufactured. But again, this nature is not real, either - it is a re-creation. The loss of nature and things natural is obviously something that troubles Gibson. The fact that people in his future are frightened by the isolation and calm of nature is meant to be frightening to us.
Common people don't have any access to nature, constructed or not. In Molly's/Case's travels through the Villa Straylight, we also get the sense that very few people have access to or are interested in history or the past. Case sees libraries coded by the Dewey Decimal system that he finds completely mystifying. There are all sorts of things they run into that are familiar to us that seem irrational and crazy to Case. In METRO HOLOGRAFIX, all of the junk is just that - junk that nobody is interested in anymore. The rest of history is bought up by the rich and hidden away.
A lot of the stuff in the Straylight sounds like they just bought entire museums and stashed them up there - when Molly is walking through and Case is trying to observe everything, we get, "He had to satisfy himself with her disinterested glances, which gave him fragments of pottery, antique weapons, a thing so studded with rusted nails that it was unrecognizable, frayed sections of tapestry." Later on, according to Paul Brians' "Study Guide for William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)," Molly glances at a glass sculpture by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp titled "La mariée mise à nu par ses célebritaires, même." That means "The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even." The sculpture is apparently famous because it was cracked during transport, but it is familiar to most people with the cracks. This must have significance to Gibson's view of history - over time, memories and meanings of objects are lost. Therefore, when Case sees the library, it mystifies him, while to us it makes perfect sense.
Gibson goes so far as to tell us that "Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power." In other words, those with control over the money have control over everything. That is more the case in Gibson's future than it is now. You can buy absolutely everything. Even privacy in the Finn's "white room" is something you have to buy. Everyone refers to things by their corporate name: the Hosaka, his Hitachi, the Yeheyuans, the Mercedes, the Braun coffeemaker, et cetera. All of the technology I alluded to earlier is available to those with money. Immortality, even, can be purchased. The problem, however, is that only a handful of people have enough money to buy all of these things. Everyone else lives a relatively mundane existence, surrounded by urban decay. Under modern capitalism, no matter how much technology is developed, the social inequalities will remain. Unless these benefits can be available for everyone, how much have we really progressed? That is one of the questions posed in Neuromancer, and is certainly one of the main reasons this isn't just a fantasy novel, but a dystopic vision of the progression of capitalism.
People Aren't Made of Numbers and Vice-Versa: Shaping Identity in Neuromancer
Cynics are fond of pointing out that society tends to wear down invidual humanity. There is nothing new or shocking here. This is economics. This is good business. What is desirable in a product is distilled to a formulaic essence and packaged neatly. Humans, too, are boiled down to marketing science. Glossy shots, red lipstick, concrete biceps, and an ever-decreasing waistline set the standard. People are reduced to little more than the sum of their parts, a pair of matchstick legs, a rippled midsection, the right shoes and right make-up. Information technology makes the dissemination of these trends mercilessly easy: In response to the Atkins Diet, tens of thousands of Americans strike carbohydrates from their diets. A cell phone that simply calls someone is archaic at best; people need infinite text messaging and a built-in digital camera (with no roaming charges) so that they can e-mail pictures of their new car to their friends in California, New York, or Antarctica. Jessica Simpson mistakes canned tuna for chicken and millions of viewers laugh at her in unison. These societal constructs chip away at the very humanity of the people who live amidst them. In William Gibson's Neuromancer, a motley cast of characters face this cold reality, that their humanity is being systematically stripped, and that even attempts to take advantage of the seemingly positive facets of cyberculture can turn on them. It is only when they come to direct blows with this hulking information society that they can find a form of redemption. In Gibson's cyberpunk world, technology and humanity simultaneously clash and meld, creating a society in which humans scramble to interact with technology, using it to gain footholds or augment their actual physical bodies. Humanity, in a sense, ceases to be defined by being human — The Ashpools and Hideo, for instance, are clones, their DNA unoriginal, replicated like the numbers and symbols that make up the infinite information networks of the Sprawl. More apparently, Dixie Flatline is nothing more than a computer program hacked and grifted from a corporation, but he is virtually the only major character in the book that treats Case like a friend without a motive behind it, aside from Linda, who is relatively unimportant to the flow of the story after her initial involvement. (Damyanov) Through this relationship, Dixie gains at least a semblance of humanity, while Case is drawn ever closer to technology. Dixie himself illuminates the question of human intelligence during a conversation with Case:
"Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one, see?" "Wait a sec, " Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?" "Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess..." The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. "But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human." (131)
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two). (258)
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