And second, the figurative underworld of cyberspace, where an analog of today’s internet is navigated not by keyboard, but by direct brain connection to a complex graphical representation of communications and data. First, the literal underworld that every society has, people living on the lawless margin, here mostly centered around Japan. The world of the story, set sometime in the twenty-first century, is only partially sketched, but focuses on two underworlds. It was an interesting inversion in 1983, even if now it’s in every movie made, and just stupid. The second is the sexy cyberpunk girl, Molly, who is indistinguishable in her actions from an alpha male but is still, for no reason, hot for the beta hacker. The first is the skilled but beta hacker, one Henry Case. Neuromancer contains two of these, the main players. The author, William Gibson, is famous for coining phrases that are now in common usage, most notably “cyberspace.” Less obviously, Gibson created original characters that became archetypes of later fiction.
So let us talk about what is now our present, and what that says about our actual future. Yet, this book, published in 1983, is a fun ride and shows us visions of many things. But no matter, since none of this arrived, and it is long since clear none of it will ever arrive, at least in our world as it is now constituted and ruled. Aging and death would soon be conquered the removal of all limitation would be, within a decade or two, the lot of mankind. When I first read Neuromancer, a science fiction classic of the modern age, twenty-some years ago, serious people believed that our certain technological future was one of accelerating, boundless plenty.
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