'Neuromancer' and I Are the Same Age

William Gibon's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer and I were born in the same year: 1984.

Before I even learned to walk, it had won the triple-crown of science fiction literature, the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. By the time I was teething, it had ignited a subculture; when I was six, its neologisms had become the lingua franca of the emerging cyberculture; when I was in seventh grade, it had sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. When we were both 22, I read it, thus merging our timelines. Now, like me, it's turning 30.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like for a reader to tackle Neuromancer in the year of our birth. It has the familiar pace of a noir novel, but Gibson’s language is dense, peppered with a lexicon presented largely without explanation: dex, Sprawl, cyberspace, simstim, dermatrode. Many of these cryptic terms have since become commonplace, and part of the Neuromancer experience is a strange recent-history disconnect: to know that the 30 years since its publication have brought us closer to Gibson’s world than we might have anticipated, that we’ve breezed past “cyberspace” into a world of ontological hacking, cyberterrorism, and a tacit, mundane synergy with machines.

Is that the ultimate litmus test of science fiction, that it starts to come true while it’s still fresh in the memory of its readers? Conversely, perhaps Neuromancer’s influence ushered our present into existence. Such is the perpetually tangled hierarchy of science fiction. These ambiguities are Gibson’s bread and butter: his greatest attribute, as a writer and self-styled cultural prophet, is an uncanny ability to spot emergent nodes in popular culture and tease them into reality, just as they are beginning to tease themselves. In many ways, what Gibson writes aren’t extrapolations—they’re parallel worlds. He chases the future along its path like a greyhound chasing a robotic rabbit.

Neuromancer was ground zero for cyberpunk, a kind of science fiction that doesn’t point up, up, and away. Instead, like Gibson’s sprawling cities, it spreads out laterally, in layers of increasing density; cyberpunk is the science fiction of the visceral now, of encroaching slums, biotech, the degradation of flesh, vacuity, political corruption, the corporatization of the world, social disorder, dark alleyways, and new drugs. “Science,” in Neuromancer and in much cyberpunk writing, doesn’t belong to ivory-tower boffins; it’s found in virtual sex clubs and experimental surgeries, abandoned artificial intelligences, immersive media, and filthy hacker warrens.

In 2012, I saw Gibson speak in Los Angeles following the publication of his collection of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor,  and he explained his relationship to “cyberpunk:” which is to say, the moment that the epithet materialized, he immediately sought to avoid the inevitable typecasting to follow. “If we get any on us,” he remembers thinking, “we’re finished.” The attempt wasn’t quite a success; he recalled looking around and realizing that all his contemporaries were lining up to get “Cyberpunk” stamped on the backs of their jean jackets. “I didn’t want to spoil the party.”

Although cyberpunk jean jackets are past peak trendiness—blame The Matrix, which made a salad of the genre with some plagiarized Baudrillard—cyberpunk may still be the most viable framework for discussing the dark perimeters of our world. Or perhaps it’s too close for comfort; Gibson himself has spent the last decade writing fiction that takes place (more or less) in our contemporary universe, in recognition of the fact that extrapolation is impossible in our world of fragmented, divergent, collective nows.

Chief among the urban legends surrounding Neuromancer is that William Gibson wrote it—and every one of his novels until 1988, when Neuromancer and I were four—on a manual typewriter. This nugget is often trotted out to prove that Gibson has the mystic disconnect of a true prophet. The truth is, although it may well have taken someone a few steps removed from emerging cyberculture to spot its salient attributes, Gibson wasn’t operating in a vacuum.

In a (must-read) 2011 interview with The Paris Review, Gibson explained that although he had never so much as touched a PC when he was writing Neuromancer, he had watched teenagers in Vancouver playing old-school console arcade games. The games, so primitive that they barely contained perspective, seemed to have a bewitching effect on their players regardless, who “were so physically involved,” Gibson explained, “it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them.”

As personal computing bloomed all around him in the mid-1980s, Gibson understood that the notional space of the arcade games and the notional space behind all the new screens would be one and the same. That was his crucial insight, and it’s the well from which Neuromancer draws its power. In the novel, cyberspace is “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators.”

Although the novel long predated the universal adoption of the internet as a communication tool, and "cyberspace" as he envisioned it—a semantic space navigated by console cowboys in virtual-reality, where information takes symbolic form as places, structures, and distances—is definitely not our web, he was correct in his estimation of the network as a hallucination.

We all know that the internet is made up tactile things: routers, computers, and vast cables laid under the sea, connecting individual nodes and nations to one another in a completely physical infrastructure. But the “consensual hallucination” of our time is the willful ignorance of this fact. We treat the internet as though it were formless; in fact, the trend of the moment is precisely to imagine it as a cloud, which leaves most people with a vision of tensile webs of information floating, ethereal, invisible, in the firmament. Strangely, this vision isn’t very far removed from Gibson’s cyberspace, a "bodiless exultation." Another tangled hierarchy.

For 30 years, Neuromancer and I have lived in the same world, under the same sky—the color of television, if you will, tuned to a dead channel. It's a world that, in many ways, Neuromancer helped to author. Which is to say, I'll likely spend thirty fretting about my wasted youth and the waning years of my precociousness, but Neuromancer can rest easy. It's made its mark.