‘The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed’ William Gibson, 2003
To be perpetually described as the pinnacle of cyberpunk can not possibly be an easy burden to bear. Cyberpunk is one of those sub-genres of science fiction that has extremely devoted and very intelligent fans. Cyberpunk ‘noir prophet’ William Gibson’s 1984 debut novel Neuromancer is probably the earliest and best known literature associated with the sub genre. The story of a worn out, washed up one time console/cyberspace cowboy computer hacker who is given a chance to regain his former glory (via the use of his damaged cybernetics implants) if he carries out the work of a mysterious stranger – who, of course, represents a larger, more frightening entity. Throw in a street samurai ‘razorgirl’, a strange family that clones itself incessantly and redefines the meaning of incest and a couple of AIs out to rule the world and you’ve got one intriguingly nasty little piece of jagged, edgy techno-cyber-punk. And yes, it really is all that cool - remember that all this came about when you were still messing about on your oh-wow-I-have-a-computer Commodore 64. When you take away the electronic elements of Neuromancer, when you take away the cybernetics, the neural implants, the virtual reality of the matrix and the jacking in with nodes behind your ears, what you get is a very good work of noir – this is, at the heart of it, hard boiled fiction. Gibson is a fan of the classic noir writers – Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and his admiration for the hardboiled novel and its protagonist is clear in Neuromancer. Of course, this just adds an additional layer to the various facets of the novel – cyberpunk isn’t just about developing the plot but also about creating a believable and detailed, almost tactile atmosphere for the plot to rest on.
It has also won the science fiction ‘triple crown’: The Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Huge Award – not bad for the man who re-wrote the first two thirds of the book twelve times in fear that it would sink after the release of Ridley Scott’s beautifully gritty Bladerunner. Gibson was convinced that people would assume he has stolen Neuromancer’s textures from those of Bladerunner’s stunning visuals – themselves based on a story by the great Philip K Dick himself.
Neuromancer presents a scenario in which reality and cyberspace can merge almost seamlessly with the insertion of a single jack – albeit one into the side of your head. Gibson is credited with creating the term cyberspace and his depiction of virtual reality is essentially where most modern day constructs of cyber reality in pop culture have come from. Whether it’s the Matrix films (Gibson first used the word ‘matrix’ in 1982’s Burning Chrome to describe a ‘mass consensual hallucination’ within interconnected electronic systems), or the relationship between cybernetics and humans (the film about data trafficker Johnny Mnemonic is based on a short story by Gibson of the same name), Gibson has had the uncanny ability to create a future that either has, or soon will come true. When Ursula Le Guin insisted that science fiction is descriptive and not prophetic, she clearly didn’t take into account Gibson’s vision of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. But regardless of how prophetic his work appears, Gibson rejects the idea that he is a prophet – although he accepts the description ‘visionary writer’. I’ll still call him prophetic.