It'd almost have to be. The Sprawl novels were a product of the 1980s; the fragments of backstory we're given imply that the Cold War continued for decades longer than it actually did (and went "hot" at least once in a nuclear exchange over Germany), and that Japan became the world's dominant superpower rather than the US. It'd be exceptionally difficult to remove these elements from the story and rebase it on the world's actual history without losing a lot of the flavor of the story.

>Japan became the world's dominant superpower rather than the US.

According to Gibson himself, the US itself no longer exists as a country in the Sprawl novels. I never noticed it from reading them, but apparently the only person who mentions the US as a country is Armitage/Corto, who is a generation or two older than the other characters, and even he is just talking about it in the context of "the war" the other characters were too young for.

Huh. I never noticed that before, but you're right. Do you happen to know if Gibson ever explained what happened to the US, or is that left as an intriguing blank spot?

I'm trying to find the interview where he talked about that it that I read a decade or so ago, but as I recall, he said that his idea (which wasn't actually stated in the books) was after the brief WWIII, the US was demilitarized and broken up into smaller states, of which the "Sprawl" (the urbanized US East Coast from Boston down to Atlanta) was one of.

The challenge is to avoid cribbing from Blade Runner, or modern popular works influenced by it (such as Cyberpunk 2077 - whose original tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020 was in the same wave of '80s cyberpunk). Gibson hadn't yet seen the film when he wrote the book!

According to Wikipedia, Gibson did see Blade Runner and even rewrote substantial parts of Neuromancer due to that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.willia...

Maybe some TOS style blinkenlights…

Maniac (Netflix) nailed the retro-techno-cool vibe for me.