Neuromancer, by William Gibson, is over twenty-five years old. It won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick awards — the first novel to accomplish such a task — and forever changed science fiction.
I read Neuromancer for the first time my sophomore year in high school. That was 1986 for those of you keeping tabs on my arrested cognitive and emotional development. In the intervening twenty-five years I have watched, and even participated in realizing, a number of the technological and socio-cultural changes speculated upon in Gibson’s work. So perhaps we do not yet have corporate arcologies, or Squids. But we have decks, and cyberspace. And we call Ono-Sendai “Apple”. Or “Google”.
I’m rereading this book for the first time since high school first to see how well it holds up. And second to see how well I’ve held up in the face of such overwhelmingly disruptive change.
Listening to Gibson read this novel himself is a trip. I got the book-on-tape from the public library a few years ago and put my mind in “free”, trying to parse the dense prose.
I still find it hard to fathom some of what he strains so hard to convey, but I enjoy the journey, even if narrating action scenes is really challenging…
I remain a fan by choice and have re-read his latest trilogy in recent years. Even if he resorts to email narrated summaries to tidy up loose ends and solidify it.
I hope the ride is a good one for you!