William Gibsons Neuromancer :: Essays Papers

William Gibsons NeuromancerWhen Neuromancer by William Gibson was first published it created a sensation. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that it was used to create a sensation, for Bruce Sterling and other Gibson associates declared that a tonic kind of science fiction had appeared which rendered alone ordinary SF obsolete. Informed by the amoral urban rage of the punk subculture and depicting the developing human-machine interface created by the widespread use of computers and computer networks, set in the near future in decayed city landscapes like those portrayed in the film Blade Runner it claimed to be the voice of a new generation. (Interestingly, Gibson himself has said he had finished much of what was to be his body of early cyberpunk fiction before ever seeing Blade Runner.) Eventually it was seized on by hip postmodern academics looking to ride the wave of the latest trend. Dubbed cyberpunk, the stuff was being talked about everywhere in SF. Of course by the measure symposia were being held on the subject, writers declared cyberpunk dead, yet the stuff kept being published and it continues to be published today by writers like K. W. Jeter and Rudy Rucker. maybe the best and most representative anthology of cyberpunk writers is Mirrorshades., edited by Sterling, the genres most outspoken advocate. But cyberpunks status as the revolutionary vanguard was almost at once challenged. Its narrative techniques, many critics pointed out, were positively reactionary compared to the experimentalism of mid-60s new wave SF. One of the main sources of its vision was William S. Burroughs quasi-SF novels like Nova Express, (1964), and the voice of Gibsons narrator sounded oddly like a slightly updated version of old Raymond Chandler novels like The Big Sleep, (1939). Others pointed out that almost all of cyberpunks characteristics could be found in the works of older writers such as J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, or Samuel R. Delany. Most damning of all, it didnt seem to have been claimed by the generation it claimed to represent. Real punks did little reading, and the vast majority of young SF readers preferred to stick with traditional storytellers such as Larry Niven, Anne McCaffrey and even Robert Heinlein. Gibsons prose was too dense and tangled for casual readers, so it is not surprising that he gained more of a following among academics than among the expression of people it depicted.