If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time.

Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero). That can be boring to someone expecting lots of "pew-pew-pew I hacked the mainframe". Snow Crash also didn't really age well in terms of dorkiness (cyberdogs breaking the sound barrier, nukes attached to a biker-thugs brain, gangs in cyberspace ?!?!?, etc.), but at the time we were all floored by the new concepts.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I love the sprawl trilogy, but my feeling has always been that the entire plots are excuses for the big set piece events. The characters exist so that he can write vivid scenes and try to paint a picture, everything between is just so they get to the right places for him to do that.

> it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero).

I don't think there's were any character overlaps between Neuromancer and Count Zero, are there? Mona Lisa Overdrive certainly does.

And you can't tell me you don't shiver if someone says "I'm sure he'll listen to reason.."

Contrast with Asimov, who's books were carried by ideas but had a very tedious style.

    If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. 
    Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992

Or art that was produced more than N years ago but didn't produce any imitators that retroactively diminished the original for you?

I guess I'm not enjoying things right. I read Snow Crash in the 2000s (and LOTR in the 90s) and enjoyed the hell out of them even though they were "outdated" and had inspired countless derivative works in the ensuing decades. In fact, I had a good time playing Ms. Pac Man just last weekend.

When I read Snow Crash it definitely felt like the product of an earlier decade but I didn't hold that against it. I like understanding the context in which a piece was made.

If you don't, that's okay and you're certainly not alone. Feels like you're missing out on some good stuff though. Possibly a lot of good stuff. Possibly the vast majority of human artistic output.

Hardly. Most human artistic output does not create its own genre and spawn a host of imitators.

Classics are coordination points but generally less fun. "Seinfeld is unfunny" is real, you're genuinely better off watching something more recent if you just want to enjoy yourself.

Arthurian dragons have largely been the same beasts for, oh, 1000 years.

3d internet chat rooms in Snow Crash have been tried and are ... lame.

I appreciate you thinking critically, but your arguments aren't very strong.

Also, I'm not gatekeeping, I suggesting why a person might not have liked something. There's a concept called "novelty", meaning "newness". The first time you encounter something it is exciting. If you spent the first 15 years of your life using an iPhone, then read an Asimov novel that introduced satellites, you'd be like "So what?" See? When Asimove wrote about satellite communication, IT DIDN'T EXIST yet. But when you read his book, it was old-hat to you, so you probably might not like his books.

That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to tell you how to enjoy things. Chill dude, you'll live longer.

Cyberpunk in general inherits from noir.

I often say that genres are what happens when mediocre artists latch on to something fresh someone created, and to me it's only worth spending time with the originators. Though I understand lots of people like that something that engrossed them can be sought further in a genre.

And that's pretty much how I felt about reading Neuromancer. I like cyberpunk so I want the real thing, not the emulation. Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell are so much better than Matrix. And I love the Matrix.

I acknowledge that a lot of the media I consume ends up being just part of a genre, and that I often don't even know the originals and only have access to simulacra.

But when I think about what I wanna read next, what albums to buy records of and so on, I prefer to go as far upstream as I can or know about.

But, some things are clearly... more distinct from their forebearers than others.

I subscribe to the Asimov's sci-fi short story magazine (I highly recommend it!) and yeah, I have to skip every story that starts with "the world was devastated by climate change 20-50 years ago, here's how we're surviving now above the flooded remains of our world." I just can't take it.

I have read a lot of blogs and articles from authors and agents about thematic checklists for publishing.

On the flip side, immigration makes up the vast majority of content creation, and the leading edge were using these premises 20-30 years ago when they were more novel

Scariest shit I've ever read, worse than any horror novel. Thankfully it's just a dumb story and the science of it is really dubious.

Like, sure, because you grew up on music that wouldn't have existed without them. You heard them thousands of times already in tribute from younger bands you like.

Context matters. There are cultural classics you just cannot understand without having lived in the times.

> it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine

So you've read works that build on Necromancer earlier. Care to share some of those books/authors and concepts?

One common barrier to suspension of disbelief is the Fermi Problem. A great deal of space opera just ignores it, but once you take the argument seriously it ruins much of the world building.

If I want to ignore rationality of the world design and just read human achievement porn I'll head over to r/HFY.

Ignoring the Fermi Argument is an internal inconsistency. The world just doesn't work on its own terms.

I'm curious... if you're willing to say, when did you first read Neuromancer? And had you read a lot of other cyberpunk themed media beforehand?

but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine.

Yeah, if you'd already been exposed to a lot of the core ideas / themes from other more contemporary works, I can see how that might take away a bit from the Neuromancer experience.

To give a counterpoint... I first read Neuromancer about 1993 / 1994 or somewhere in that range. And I believe it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. I think maybe the only other media from the cyberpunk genre that I'd been exposed to then was the "Max Headroom" tv show. Anyway... Neuromancer absolutely blew my mind and I was instantly hooked. To this day it's one of my favorite novels, and I've re-read it several subsequent times. And will almost certainly read it again (and again...) I can't get enough of it.

Of course it's hard to say exactly why our respective reactions to it are so different. There are a lot of variables. But I think your notion from above has a lot of merit to it. If one experiences a derivative (or many derivatives) of something before the original, does the original them come to feel like a cheap copy?

I've had that experience with cover versions of songs before. That is, times when I heard and loved a cover, and then only later heard the original. And in many (maybe all) of those cases, I still preferred the cover over the original.

In terms of influence I suppose I'm mostly thinking of movies and shows such as the Matrix, but I also read so many short stories involving VR and techno-dystopias it's hard to pinpoint. Snowcrash is certainly up there (yes I tried to read Snowcrash first, having done no research, and liked it even less). Having played every Shadowrun game doesn't help (the universe is in a lot of ways "just" fantasy Neuromancer).

All that being said, Neuromancer doesn't read like a cheap copy either. More like I've been riding bicycles all my life and someone presented me with a penny farthing. I appreciate the innovation, it's just not particularly mind-blowing anymore.