The Snow Crash metaverse is infinitely more relatable to most people than the Neuromancer one. (And bonus points when it comes to being widespread, the novel is a lower-effort read. Which isn't a comment on quality... the genres are COMPLETELY different so I don't think that's really a reasonable comparison anyway.)
This has some impact on predictive power too. One reason people tried to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that - more or less, you actually could imagine building that. My friend's daughter talks to the AI, and is learning to read stuff on a glowing screen that knows her name. She doesn't have an abusive step-father, and so fortunately her glowing screen won't need to teach her martial arts for people who are smaller and less powerful than their opponent, and about the importance of running away when there's no way to win. And hopefully her mother will remain a loving physical presence in her life. But the general thrust of the idea in the Primer makes sense, even if we aren't close to "really" building the Primer, ideas from Gibson don't make so much sense.
Science Fiction isn't necessarily about "a version of what we have" but it is about the What If? question and fantasy stories don't address that. Unexpected consequences are the story seed in good SF. Asimov in the 1950s notes that a good SF story predicts not the automobile but the traffic jam. That's where I think Stephenson is good and Gibson has nothing to tell me.
Star Wars says Space Wizards fighting laser sword battles may not vanquish Evil and I'm like OK, cool, but so what? Diamond Age (in some sense a sequel to Snow Crash) has a bunch of interesting things to say about society, about what parenthood means, about Cultural Imperialism, and about what we/how we teach children.
And as to the idea that it became true, well, here in the real world it is Russia that invaded Ukraine and not an invasion by Gazprom or whoever. The sovereign entities are still fundamentally concrete in a way that a corporation is not.
The Fists in Diamond Age may in some sense be tools of the Mandarins, but certainly the Mouse Army don't work for anybody except Princess Nell, their loyalty to her has been blended into all their learning from infancy, almost without anybody consciously intending this (Hackworth is ultimately responsible, but if/why Hackworth chooses Nell rather than his own daughter is unclear, we don't see enough of the other copies of the Primer to discern whether the other two girls could have led the Mouse Army, the novel is about Nell).
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/10/23/traffic/
Pohl in the late 1960s acknowledges that he isn't the first to have this idea, but does actually use "traffic jam": “Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam”
I rather like Heinlein who a little earlier (1966) suggests SF would have predicted something more interesting, instead of car -> traffic jam, Heinlein says good SF would have predicted car -> teenage fumblings in borrowed car.
For instance, Gibson frequently skips exposition, and he delivers the narrative with a disconnected, stream-of-consciousness feel that is meant to evoke the sense of disconnection when “channel-hopping” or digging through large amounts of information on the internet. Combined with the frenetic pace of the story it can be confusing if the reader isn’t paying close attention. I’ll add that this was also Gibson’s first novel.
Compare to Snow Crash, which has a pulpier writing style (it was original envisioned as a graphic novel) or even The Matrix, which has a tight narrative. Those are more accessible to a mainstream audience.
Edit: formatting
edit: A lot of Gibson's stream of consciousness writing style can be attributed to the effect of beat writers like Burroughs on him. It's unique but it's also an intentional stylistic decision. Not really an attempt to capture the aesthetics of logging into the net. And as you may know, Snow Crash may seem pulpier but Gibson grew up on pulp like Edgar Rice Burroughs and it affected his work a bit.
As an interesting aside, There’s an old Canadian documentary film about Rochdale and the hippie scene in Toronto, shot around 1970, that, by pure chance, features a very young William Gibson well before he had published anything - I stumbled across this by chance in the York University film archives about 30 years ago - no idea if it’s available anywhere online and may no longer exist anymore.
It allows him to disguise a literal plot device, which is a nice twist. But overall I thought it was heavy going compared to the Neuromancer trilogy.
I read Neuromancer originally in 1984 and again a few years ago, and for me it still holds up. It's not the greatest book or anything, and I found Count Zero to be much better, but apart from those two books I've yet to read anything else cyberpunkish that comes even remotely close.
Before someone mentions Greg Egan or Vernor Vinge, as they have elsewhere in the thread, I read a lot by these authors and didn't like them either. Way too dry, boring, and unimaginative for me. I know some people love them, but they're just not for me.
But he wasn't a Texan, so I suppose I see your angle. Interesting bit of flavor.
Snow Crash is built around an airport novel style narrative.
Neuromancer has a far more literary tone, and is trickier to digest.
That's the entire reason Snow Crash is cited. Airport novel readership is far more widespread.
I found Neuromancer and and Count Zero eminently forgettable. I never read Snow Crash, so I can't really speak to it though I've read a half dozen of Neal Stephenson's other novels, all of which I found rich with ideas. While I appreciate the literary style, I honestly can't remember the plot of either Neuromancer or Count Zero.
Yes, I get that the post-singularity world is supposed to unpredictable/unimaginable in principle... but it's the author's job to imagine it anyway, else why am I even bothering to read his books on the singularity? If he doesn't/can't imagine it, I judge it a failure and a disappointment.
I don't remember details about Egan's work, except that nothing in it seemed particularly interesting and nothing wowed me... hence I really can't remember much about it except the premises of some of his novels, like Permutation City.
This is contrary to works by authors like Gibson, Herbert, and Dick, for instance, which I'll never forget. They're just leagues ahead of lesser authors like Vinge and Egan.
The point of introducing the fantasy element of the Zones of Thought was to allow Vinge to write a FTL space opera without having to deal with post-Singularity speculation.
When species transcended, they left the Beyond and went into the Transcend.
PAIGE: This is William Gibson, Harry.
HARRY: Oh, yeah... Neuromancer, right?
PAIGE: He invented the word "cyberspace."
GIBSON: And they'll never let me forget it.
Drugs that make you see Cathedrals, a cult and politics intertwined... and a rhinocerous. LOL.
Neuromancer on the other hand I still think about, and I haven't read it in a decade.
If you don't take it as being serious in any way (other than in its satire of cyberpunk and its lambasting of a corporate-owned American future), I find it quite enjoyable.
But it is a satire. I hope :)
(Market Forces by Richard Morgan is another book I very much enjoyed, which is also very much this way)
Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we still don't have "professional road surfers", but that doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant:
"Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball joint. As the wheel rolls, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it. If you surf over a pothole, the rubber prongs probe its asphalt depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds, smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right - you cannot be a professional road surfer without smartwheels."
I mean, stealing the whole "skitchn" thing and slapping "Smooth move, ex lax" on a car when they try to shake you is just campy.
"Poor impulse control" -- just slapstick comedy at that point.
That's part of the fun in my view, but it's equally fair just not to like it - de gustibus etc. Or maybe it's just a timing thing; I first read it when I was young and it was new, and maybe that has as much to do as anything with why I liked it so well and still regard it fondly.
Fun for five pages, but when that tone keeps going, my brain just ends up feeling burnt out.
Neuromancer on the other hand has aged incredibly well. The ICE tech doesn't make much sense, but the characters feel honest and real, and so many actual contemporary issues (AI ethics, transhumanism, transgender issues, mass surveillance, anonymous coordinated activism, economic oligarchs heading into space, even a tank war in Europe!) resonate throughout the book in ways that don't feel dated.
Ironically although, I had a hard time reading Neuromancer while snow crash was a breezy fun read in high school
I'd be interested in reading descriptions of cyberspace that are better than Neuromancer's.
So far I haven't found any.
The internet did not become a new reality. Instead, our own reality is melding with the internet through always-on devices and miniaturized sensors and wide wireless networks.
Instead of some kind of digital lovecraftian portals hidden away in parts of realspace that connect to this magical deadly realm, the modern vision of cyperbpunk should probably have included something more like an ethereal plane -- a perfect mirror of the real world that happens to ignore its physical constraints and provide ways to manipulate and bypass the realspace.
And then the artist says 'the internet is e-ver-ting'.
Chombo says "Somebody told me that cyberspace was 'everting'. That was how she put it." (Spook Country, pp. 64). Feel like the girl he is referring to may be the one I'm thinking of. Must be Pattern Recognition.
Thanks :)
The data analyst guy who ends up obsessing over the VR idol and ends up in a cardboard box in the Tokyo subway is super super interesting. Probably my favorite part of the whole trilogy. If I am not mistaken, Gibson actually took a lot of inspiration for that character from his own experiences with photography. The ability to intuitively line up the right F-stop, shutter speed, and film speed with a scene and natural light in a second is the inspiration for the way the analyst intuitively senses 'nodes' in a social network.
And I personally think that it is this notion that led the author to write about causality in the Peripheral-Agency series.
I still love his vision.
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful. “So I was listening to it as an English honours student. I would take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a world from those bricks. Consequently there are other things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson...
His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently metaverse-like:
The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine" – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson...
Neuromancer is not supposed to be a manual on navigating real-life computer networks.
It's science fiction. Readers are expected to suspend disbelief.
Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is it? :shrug-emoji:
Matrix isn't Gibson's term. Doctor Who used the term Matrix back in the 70's referring to a supercomputer simulated reality environment.
“Hack the Gibson!”
Must have been a call-out :)
“Please, he prayed, now—
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now—
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”