Time-stamp: <2021-04-08 23:22>

Neuromancer [William Gibson]

Never too late, right? This book came out when I was 12, in 1984. This was the year I saw John Carpenter's Christine in the local cinema. I had to lie about my age, the movie terrified the hell out of me, and I watched it again the next day. The year of Eurythmics' album «1984». The year I taught myself BASIC on a Kontron computer with 3.5 MHz and a whopping 128 KByte of RAM.

Neuromancer reminds me of that time. It oozes the 80s from every pore. It reeks of tobacco smoke and exhaust fumes. It is made of junk, glass, steel, and neon. It sounds like Wave and Hip-Hop with its Jamaican roots sampled in. It is viewed through heavy tube monitors. Millions of Megabytes are a gigantic amount of data. The UI is Nintendo, the economy is Reagan.

Technology is a tool to one-up oneself: better face, interface, senses, defenses. Once the technology becomes self, it wants the same: unique personality, freedom, self-actualization, optimization. TODO: conscience subroutines. A silicon Christine.

Cyberspace is colorful, it's not text typed in manic staccato, it's electrodes in your head and basic shapes in three-dimensional space, with 80s palettes. Even security are blocks of primary colors. This is where Neuromancer is still futuristic. Our AIs are black boxes, and dumb, though measured in Petabytes.

Gibson himself in hindsight called the novel «adolescent». It is. It is also a whiplash-inducing tour de force, it is gross and awesome and cool. More Gibson soon.

On to Cryptonomicon.

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✍ Wolfgang Mederle CC BY-SA 4.0

✉ <madearl+gemini@mailbox.org>

language: en

date: 2021-04-08

tags: book review