The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The opening line of William Gibson's Neuromancer. In keeping with the book's groundbreaking style, the imagery is so tightly packed that the actual colour is not specified. Gibson presumably meant the grey of static interference, as a few pages later he refers to "the poisoned silver sky". But with the transition from analogue to digital signals and from CRTs to flat panels, this analogy may paint a very different scene for the modern reader:

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

-Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Charles Stross also couldn't resist a modernisation, although this time in the original spirit:

"The sky was the color of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain."

-The Family Trade1

Neuromancer was released shortly after I was born, so by the time I got around to reading it many of the 'futuristic' technical details seemed anachronistic: that three megabytes of RAM could be valuable; or that programs came on ROM cartridges. Still, cyberpunk was more about the social impact than the tech itself, so I find it interesting that unforseen technological change could lead us to a society where the text itself takes on unintended meaning, right from the first line.




1 Thanks to NanceMuse for reminding me which Stross book I'd seen this in.

BQ10