Listening to: Love My Way - Strawpeople

Last night I started rereading Neuromancer by William
Gibson. I first read the book when I was seventeen and was taken more by the writing
style and the cool tech… the book sat very nicely as a main course to the pooly
proofed (yes, yes, I know… a silly statement coming from me… but it was very badly
proofed¹) hor’dourve of Wired 1.0. Reading it back then I got maybe
20% of the references. But then it didn’t really matter because the book was just
plain cool. The grunge of the book matched the grunge that owned the commercial
airwaves at the time. I had a driver’s license, I had ‘Ten’ by Pearl Jam and I had
tracked down a copy of Neuromancer via a BBS contact… I was king of the new order.
The only thing that kept me from jacking into the matrix full time was my mum bleating
about the toll bill.

I haven’t really read it since then so last night it was almost like coming to a new
book.

Reading the first chapter I was floored by how incredibly relevant the book still
is, perhaps even more relevant in today’s world. I flicked to the front page and was
gob-smacked to see that the book is now twenty-one years old. The only thing that
jars is the importance placed on the USSR… but in 1984 they were still very very
bad and very very scary. Now able to get +90% of the references in the novel I am
struck by how amazing prescient William Gibson was in his writing. His world view
is tracking against our world reality with a shocking level of accuracy. Considering
the book was banged out on a manual type writer it is an amazing feat.

In my own life there are many examples of the world that Gibson painted. I spend the
vast majority of my time using and creating bits of a worldwide network.
My sister spends the vast majority of her time searching for proteins that tweak human
cells one way or another. My brother spends his time doused in neon light mixing
music for amphetamine driven dance hordes. When my parents went to Tokyo they dossed
down in a capsule hotel. A close friend from university spends a good amount of her
time probing and tweaking the inner workings of the brain.

Happy 21st Neuromancer.

¹Though not as badly as the first issue of Business 2.0… which I wish
I had kept, just as an example.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2005 at 3:23 am and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.