“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

Note: I didn’t start using computers until summer 1992, because from 1986 I’d been working at a Japanese university that somehow missed signs the digital age was nigh. I didn’t get on the web until Fall 1993 when the online Chronicle of Higher Education helped me find the job that sent me to Latvia. That was the last time I was an early adopter. I broke down and got a mobile only in October, 2022. I’m not bragging, believe me.

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Written in the early 1980s, when MS-DOS gibberish and floppy disks were in their infancy, this science fiction novel posits our digital future.

This novel was released in 1984, but I didn’t read it until 1986, when I was just out of grad school and free to read stuff not assigned, working in Japan about 50 hours a week. At the time, I was very impressed with Gibson’s ability to construct the atmosphere of the street – the boring logic of territory, coercion, hustling, and saving face. The dense sentences of polysyllabic words didn’t bother me nor did his assumption that readers would just have to keep up when he introduced weird concepts like a pandemic that kills all the horses and:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

What, asked Gibson, will people do with this magical technology? Learn? Forge bonds in humane communities? Let in the sunbeams of enlightenment?

Nah. They’ll steal. Cars extend our legs, radio extends voices and ears, screens our eyes, and tech extends our sticky fingers into the tills and data banks of other people. People will also use tech to modify their body for non-medical purposes. People will improve their looks and customize their senses. How installing doodads on and in the body will usher in the new utopia is not even an issue since enhanced people seem to be living kind of how we live now – driven by “our almost irresistible desire to see ourselves as somehow above nature, above the body (Oliver Sacks)”.

So, as I re-read this in 2023, I conclude that Gibson got it right about the world wide matrix, drones, viruses, hacking, flash robs, and the ruthless super-rich and their lawless minions. The plot is about Case, a hacker, who is hired by a mysterious shell of a guy Armitage, to pull off a big heist. Or something. 

Case is assisted by bodyguard and personal assistant Molly, who is creepily enhanced, and Riviera, a sadist at least half psychotic. Case has a help desk in the form of a dead guy whose hacking ability is captured on disk. Case also meets an AI. The jury is still out as to whether Gibson will be prescient about AI, i.e., that a special police force, with unlimited powers and the pleasant attitude that goes with them, will be assigned to prevent AI from becoming smarter on its own and realizing it.

There are no human beings in this novel, starting with our hero. Digital technology enables Case to surf the net, that is, to extend his mind into vast banks of data and information and money but excessive time doing this has turned him into a workaholic whose relationship with his own body is uneasy and alienated. He feels guilty, justifiably, for the bad stuff that’s he done.

Recommendation: still well worth reading. While the Blade Runner-like atmosphere is way cool enough to turn heads that think anime is really something, we adults can get into the story of Case and how he gradually learns that he can live a life that doesn’t involve hating himself even after he's done hateful things.