Lauren Steates

Book Report #1

Gibson’s Neuromancer: Predictor of the Future or Informer of the Present?

Gibson’s 1984 revolutionary novel entitled Neuromancer is often regarded as the most famous cyberpunk novel of all time.  Neuromancer is revolutionary in that it examines terms such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering long before the concepts were popular.  In addition, Gibson introduces the concept of cyberspace, a concept Gibson created for the name of the book’s digital environment, well before the Internet evolved into what it is today.

The novel opens in Night City, the drug and techno-driven, twenty-four-hours-a-day section of Chiba City, Japan.  In the first line of the book, Gibson sets the tone for the entire novel: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”.  Gibson then plunges forward, immersing us into a dark, hopeless world in which humankind and machine are irrevocably intertwined.

              The protagonist of the novel, Case, was a “cowboy”, a computer hacker, and thief who was “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.”  Caught stealing, his employer damaged his nervous system so that he was unable to access the global computer network.  Deprived of his “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” he becomes frustrated, suicidal and drug-ridden.  Floundering aimlessly in the excesses of Night City, he is recruited by Molly, who works for an ex-military officer named Armitage.  Enticed with the prospect of regaining his ability to plug into the matrix, Case agrees to work as a computer hacker for Armitage.  Using his renewed abilities, Case become connected to an artificial intelligence named Wintermute, who was programed to merge with another artificial intelligence, Neuromancer.  Case and Molly find that Wintermute has manipulated Armitage to recruit Case to unite the two.  Case, now fully reimmersed into cyberspace, finds himself struggling to separate his own identity from that of his indentity in cyberspace.  

In the twenty-some years time since the fast-paced story of Neuromancer was written, incredible technological changes take have taken place at an almost unimaginable pace.  In the course of human history, twenty years is merely the blink of an eye, but the same time frame juxtaposed against the current technological explosion is an eternity.  To the average reader, it may seem incredible that the Gibson’s novel was written before the 21^st Century, because there are connections one can draw between much of the technology mentioned in the book and our evolving world today.   So the question remains: is Gibson a modern day H. G. Wells, forecasting the future with incredible accuracy, or is he simply exploring and expanding upon the present (from his 1984 perspective)?

Gibson’s prescient vision sets the stage for his novel in a world that today does not seem so far away, but that in 1984 might have seemed improbable. Gibson’s imagery places us squarely into what we now recognize as 21^st century technology.  He writes of hacking software penetrating “the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data”.  He envisions economic systems where cash is not only rarely used, but illegal.  He portrays the “electronic thunder of an arcade”, enticing dozens who stand at the consoles “lost in the games”.  He describes Night City as a “deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself”.  He paints a picture of surgically and genetically altered individuals, routinely rebuilding and reconstructing their bodies. 

The most astonishing extension of technology in Neuromancer may well be the international computer matrix. The matrix in Gibson’s novel is a network that humans can physically plug into, connecting their consciousness directly into cyberspace.  The user can navigate though the computer matrix.  This global computer network reminds us all too much of the current day Internet. It does not take much imagination to envision a computer interface that does not require the present-day use of a keyboard or a mouse.  The next logical step may well be the vision of Gibson: a direct link from the brain to the computer.

However, despite how revolutionary Gibson’s novel may seem to the average reader, Gibson himself never suggested that his book was meant to be a predictor of the future.  At the time he was writing the novel, Gibson said he was simply “exploring the present from odd angles” (Rosenberg, 1994).  He explains further that "something that feels like the world today -- or, in the case of 'Neuromancer,' the world of, say, 1982 -- but with the volume turned up, with all the knobs turned up” (Rosenberg, 1994).   

Perhaps Gibson’s Neuromancer gives us a new way to think about the world we live in today.  Gibson has suggested that even the Internet has stopped looking forward to the future.  Gibson is likely telling us that an extrapolation of the past and the present will very often lead us directly to a vision of the future. 

We can examine our society’s addictions and technological obsessions and easily project those excesses into a future that does not look much different than the world portrayed in Neuromancer.  In the words of Gibson, “The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed” (Stokes, 2007).   Gibson does not leave us with an optimistic view of where the human race is or where it will be in the future.   We must remember to keep what makes us human from being overwhelmed by technological advances, in order to prevent us from losing our humanity altogether.