Neuromancer today

Eileen Gunn on the enduring significance and wonder of William Gibson.

William Gibson and Eileen Gunn have been pals since the early days; it was Gunn — then a Microsoft exec — who hosted Gisbon — then a penniless writer — in Seattle and brought him to the hacker bars where he eavesdropped on what he calls “the poetics of the technological subculture.”

It’s been nearly 40 years since Gibson’s seminal *Neuromancer* was published, and today on Tor.com, Gunn writes at length about the meaning of that earthshaking book then and now, and what it says about Gibson as a writer and thinker.

https://www.tor.com/2022/02/10/the-peculiar-dystopian-optimism-of-william-gibsons-neuromancer/

She reminds us that reading *Neuromancer* today is a very different experience than it was when she read the manuscript prior to publication. Gibson’s coinages — notably “cyberspace” — are now all around us, so they disappear rather than leaping off the page. What’s more, the world he depicts — America in decline, China and Japan ascendant, corporate power eclipsing democratically accountable states, inequality stretched to the breaking point — is no longer a speculative shock.

Gunn tunes into Gibson’s prose, where “there’s not a word wasted,” as Gibson’s “cool, collected language doesn’t make…