Every time I try to read Scifi because I heard about some interesting parts, I have the feeling there's a 1 page thesis about the future and technology trying to escape, but buried under some mildly interesting generic storyline and tons of made up terminology and worldbuilding.
-- Orson Scott Card
There is hard and soft types that muddy the quote, but it largely stands.
For concepts yes:
Also wild that he nailed AI and VR but completely missed that everyone would carry a supercomputer in their pocket. The big paradigm shifts are always the ones nobody sees coming.
Just imagine what should be obvious to us now about e.g. AI, but isn't.
The latter is still one of my favorite books of all time, though.
To go straight to the nitpicks:
> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.
Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.
1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.
I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.
What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
GTA "equivalent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)
Those were made in Britain by British creators.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
During the reading the touch on origins and culture of Cyberpunk. The hosts are (I think) reasonably intelligent and well spoken and they tend to get a bit deeper into things around the books than other book podcasts I've listened too -- which seem to mostly just recount the plot.
I had read Neuromancer as a kid but not the other books, I think if you're a Cyberpunk fan you should at least give Burning Chrome a read. It's quite short and digestible seeing as its all short stories.
They also did the entire Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe and some Le Guin (the Earthsea series, not any science-fiction).
I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
Doctorow's late cyberpunk novels like "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" are also very good.
I've not read any of the authors listed, but "downvote" on HN is not an "I don't like your opinion." button, it's a "What you've said contributes nothing, and/or is unsubstantiated or inflammatory."
I like that we now also have "Amara's Law" [1] that makes the exact opposite point:
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
So either that "futurist" was an idiot, or this shows that with respect to future developments, really no one has any idea what they are talking about.
e.g. Twitter started out as a micro-blogging platform, and it had impact in that area. But the real impact on people of this kind of fast social media came about from it's longer term use in shaping public discourse, and how that role is weaponised.
See also the saying "We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us"
As for the other quote, I don't know if it's true that "we massively underestimate what will happen in the next two years" but it seems to be a statement about the volume of change, the number of new things, rather than the continued impact of one.
This post gave me more appreciation of Gibson's impact and a boost to pick it up somewhen later in the year.
So Neuromancer felt like it was on a pretty accurate trajectory to me. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
It's the fate of all writers who create stories about the near future to eventually have time catch up with their imagination. It's sad, because many times their writing is often dismissed once their ideas don't seem so fantastic. Stories about upper class aristocrats in the 1800s still get movies made about them every year, but old science fiction novels lose their luster as time goes by.
Like the article said, the ideas from futurist authors are either incredibly prescient, or miss the mark in ways that make their predictions quaint in retrospect.
Jules Verne wrote about submarines and space travel. H.G. Wells wrote about lasers and military aircraft. Arthur C. Clarke predicted computer miniaturization and global telecommunications (including geosynchronous satellites). Douglas Adams predicted the smart phone and annoying Alexa responses. And on and on: Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Huxley, Dick, Niven, and more.
And everyone has predicted the coming age of AGI. I think it's pretty exciting that I might get to see who called it correctly within my lifetime.
The real 'matrix' isn't just a virtual space we plug into; it's the increasingly complex, often invisible, interplay between our biological cognition and the predictive models that mediate our perception. We're already seeing early signs of 'cognitive debt' and the subtle erosion of our internal models as we offload more mental tasks to external systems. The challenge isn't just building smarter machines, but building anchors for consciousness in an increasingly fluid, data-driven existence.
https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...
The other gobsmacking thing about Neuromancer is space. Near-Earth space feels fully-colonized and space travel is only slightly more exotic than air travel. In a similar vein, post-human biological modification is rather mundane, at least in our hero's circles. This is another area where real-world advances don't measure up. In these two areas I find the book to be quite a lot more optimistic than reality has turned out.
If you hold up Neuromancer to modern society to judge us on our engineering accomplishments, you'll find us coming up very short in every area other than pure software engineering. The irony is that in that particular area Neuromancer veers from science fiction squarely into fantasy. And yeah, it's still great.
Instead of telepathic magic, what if the 'deck' ran on a verifiable, computationally intensive process rooted in a concrete theory of consciousness? We've been archiving our attempt to build just that—the theory, the code, and the narrative simulation. Perhaps a less optimistic, but more grounded future.
You can find the project here: https://github.com/dmf-archive
It sounds like you're trying to build the Cyberpunk equivalent of the shared semi-hard-SF Orion's Arm universe / world building project?
It was already so at the time - anyone working with real computers knew how thin the veil over the magic tech was. Gibson was doing a good Chandler iteration - "When in doubt, have a man come through shining a laser.”
It must be said that SF always had a lot of magic (ahem, "sufficiently advanced technology") going on, and in the 1980s it translated to shiny zigzagging light paths such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron and implausible "lightsabers"
No, he famously didn't own a computer when he wrote Neuromancer.
“I wrote Neuromancer on a manual portable typewriter and about half of Count Zero on the same machine. Then it broke, in a way that was more or less irreparable. Bruce Sterling called me shortly thereafter and said, ‘This changes everything!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘My Dad gave me his Apple II. You have to get one of these things!’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Automation—it automates the process of writing!’ I’ve never gone back.” [1]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
Maybe they're using the Ansible
The one nitpick I have about the article is just this:
But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981
OK, while cable and 24-hour news were indeed around by 1984, cable wasn't ubiquitous yet in 1984. Maybe in big cities, but in the rural area where I grew up we didn't even have cable TV service available until about 1989 or 1990 or so. And beyond that, even people who grew up with cable would have seen shots of "televisions tuned to dead channels" in movies and other TV shows and what-not. I'd venture that not many Gibson readers in 1984 were even slightly confused by the "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" line.
"Corto was a member of "Operation Screaming Fist," which planned on infiltrating and disrupting Soviet computer systems from ultralight aircraft dropped over Russia. The Russian military had learned of the idea and installed defenses to render the attack impossible, but the military went ahead with Screaming Fist, with a new secret purpose of testing these Russian defenses. As the Operation team attacked a Soviet computer center, EMP weapons shut down their computers and flight systems, and Corto and his men were targeted by Soviet laser defenses."
This is why, despite being great conceptually and story-wise, ultimately I did not like Neuromancer. Plenty of other novels have tons of in universe jargon but don't feel as exhausting to read as Neuromancer. For instance, Tolkien invented multiple fictional languages and his books tend to have 100+ pages of appendices explaining everything, but his prose flows so naturally.
Perhaps Neuromancer would benefit from an ebook edition incorporating a recent CRPG video game innovation, where in universe terms in text are highlighted and you can click/tap on the highlighted terms to get a little tooltip box explaining what the term is.
it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.
I suspect talking to Gibson in person probably requires a good deal of studied attention as well. That can be exhausting for an entire novel.
As I've gotten older I've realized that I have very little in common with Vinge philosophically. But he was a person who thought very deeply, and it shows.
Neuromancer is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
So trying not to spoil too much: Count Zero asks questions about / describes how AI could have influence over religious/spiritual life of humans.
Will we see AI preachers having a real influence on human religious life? ChatGPT the prophet? Maybe this is the real danger of today's nascent AI tech?
You are so lucky to have read the book for the first time in 2025.
I have to say, that quoted paragraph in the article is not enticing me. I'm tempted to just read the wikipedia article and maybe clarify a few things with ChatGPT and call it a day. If I'm going to work that hard to read something, it should be because the topic itself is complex, not because the writer purposefully (or unskillfully?) obfuscated the material.
In the way that I couldn't keep reading Altered Carbon because the writing was extremely grating to me.
With Gibson, all that world building happens with prose. It reads like poetry sometimes where what is written implies a half dozen connections to things never mentioned directly. Unpacking what lies beneath the surface is the immersive bit of his fiction.
If you feel that’s a waste of time and you can get all you need from a Wikipedia plot summary then you’re missing the whole point of the work.
But then if you read more Gibson, you will come to realize every single Gibson plot is like that. It's always a mysterious man (always a man!) with apparently unlimited resources who needs to hire someone, usually a ragtag group of specialists, to obtain a McGuffin, usually under false pretenses. Sometimes the group is on the run, but the protagonists invariably end up passive observers in an Easter egg hunt (with the possible exception of Turner in Count Zero) and are generally being manipulated into doing what they do. I think the most egregious example of this is The Peripheral, where the heroine does absolutely nothing; it's a classic witness protection plot where the main character is just a pawn, moved around for safety or as bait, while observing as things happen to her. The sequel, Agency, has an ironic title given that the heroine does even less and appears to have no agency at all.
Once you realize the basic skeleton of a Gibson plot, you come to appreciate how well the world building hides it, but it's clear he ran out of ideas quickly after his first book. The two Neuromancer sequels had a bunch of action but were once again about McGuffins and behind-the-scenes manipulation. The Bridge novels is another McGuffin hunt with lower stakes. The Blue Ant books even more so. With The Peripheral he seemed to trying at something completely new, but ended up stuck in the same mold, parallel universes being used to uncover the identity of someone pulling McGuffins from behind the scenes
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think Neuromancer was Gibson's one good idea, and while his execution — world building and prose and so on — has been top notch throughout, every book has been weaker than the last. I had to look up his post-Bridge books on Wikipedia to even remember what they were really about. When I look at the wonderful works of contemporaneous authors like Iain Banks, Gibson doesn't measure up. Banks is an apt comparison, I think, because like Gibson his books are also immensely plot-driven and McGuffin-based, and often lean on similar themes, but with very different results.
I do love Gibson's dense, beautiful prose, and will read anything he writes just for the pleasure of it, so there's still that.
In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.
I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.
That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.
At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.
To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.
P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
This actually isn’t true. I can’t remember how much depends on the rest of the trilogy for nailing down the exact years in which it occurs, but as I recall it’s fairly clear the books in the trilogy each occur seven years apart over the late 2050s-2070s or so.
Neuromancer refers to the “Act of ‘53” that grants personhood to (certain?) AIs, so the events obviously happened after that. The other books make it clear that they occur during the 21st century (the banlieues of Paris dating to the middle of the prior century, a reference to the Wow! signal as having occurred in the preceding century).
amarcheschi•5h ago
Be advised it's quite long
A_D_E_P_T•5h ago
Now I know that some people are going to say, "but what of social structures and evil corporations?!"
Look no further than William Gibson’s Burning Chrome story collection:
-The word "government" is barely used, and the features of the setting’s governments are wholly irrelevant to the stories. (In fact, the IRS and other Federal agencies are briefly mentioned, which does not imply total anarcho-capitalism.)
-The word "corporation" is also barely used, and the stories (with one exception, of a sort,) have nothing to do with corporations controlling everything and making a mess of things.
-The stories don’t suggest very much about the social structures of their settings, overall. If they’re "dystopian" at all, it is by necessity -- as most of the action takes place in the underworld, with hackers, rogue agents, washed up ex-military operatives, etc. Thus, whatever the setting is, the story takes place in its seedy underbelly.
Yet surely nobody doubts that Gibson's collection is a work of cyberpunk, and an incredibly influential one at that.
What's overused, and what have become dated, are some aesthetic tropes that have become associated with the genre. But you can certainly write good cyberpunk without them. Just write a near-future crime novel where technology is central to the plot.
amarcheschi•4h ago
AnonymousPlanet•4h ago
Their works were also big on the impact of globalisation (corporations become more important than counties) and the cultural impact of technology.
The caper plots are just a coincidence.
If you write a crime novel with technology set in the near future, you might just end up with the kind of science fiction that the cyberpunks were trying to get away from.
mnky9800n•4h ago
>> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer
Or
>> 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. ~ idoru
I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer.
I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.
nottorp•1h ago
cubefox•4h ago
I wouldn't call cyberpunk crime fiction. Some of it is, some of it isn't. Perhaps most of it isn't. For example, Bruce Sterling tends to have little to do with crime fiction (e.g. "Schismatrix"), yet he is a paradigmatic cyberpunk author.
Or look at the prototypical cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" from 1986:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades
I don't remember exactly, but I think most of these short stories aren't crime fiction. Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" definitely isn't.
keiferski•5h ago
You could probably tie this to the general financial precariousness of the average young person today vs. in the 70s and 80s. It used to be much easier to get a solid income and housing from a random job, which left more time and mental space for things other than the profit motive.
Not sure if we will ever get back to that. Maybe basic income, but that is almost inherently tied to the system, so probably not. You’d need an economic situation in which everyone feels comfortable enough without actually being dependent on a specific institution like the government.
bloqs•5h ago
throwpoaster•4h ago
isoprophlex•4h ago
Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within existing systems, is no longer a counterculture.
My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or was it subsumed and perverted?
KineticLensman•50m ago
MomsAVoxell•4h ago
Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…
RamblingCTO•3h ago
amarcheschi•4h ago
Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.
Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.
I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any
keiferski•4h ago
Cloudpunk is the same thing as the recent Cyberpunk game: fun, but operating on stale tropes and aesthetics that haven’t changed in 40 years. This is a problem that pretty much every piece of cyberpunk media has.
TheOtherHobbes•2h ago
There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.
Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.
saturneria•2h ago
I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.
The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.
Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.
loloquwowndueo•2h ago
anton-c•1h ago
I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s.
I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content.
I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of boredom, I don't think I'm an isolated incident.
loloquwowndueo•30m ago
anton-c•11m ago
fao_•2h ago
Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.
totetsu•1h ago
ecocentrik•1h ago
ecocentrik•1h ago
Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.
JKCalhoun•57m ago
xvilka•4h ago
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos
navane•4h ago
cyberpunk•4h ago