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Don’t Let the Legacy Ghosts Run the Machine

Editor's Note for May 2014

By Bill Coffin | Updated on May 07, 2014
One of my favorite science fiction novels of all time is Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It is hailed as one of the best SF novels of recent decades and it was the first winner of science fiction’s “triple crown”—the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It is considered a benchmark in the cyberpunk subgenre and it is the first work that popularized the term “cyberspace,” a word that Gibson first used in an earlier work, and which would be used to describe the early days of the World Wide Web. 

Published in 1984, the book was way ahead of its time, envisioning not just a PC revolution, but an advanced version of the Internet where users would interface directly with their minds. The story is of a hacker named Case who is one bad day away from a drug-addled suicide, and how he is recruited by a bunch of shady characters to rehabilitate himself and pull off the greatest hack cyberspace has ever seen. The book is filled with a unique lingo and a supercharged vision of the future that borders on intoxicating for any tech geek who reads it.

One might be tempted to think that Gibson was himself a techno-savant, but that is not so. He knew nothing of computers when he wrote the novel. Its inspiration came from when he saw some kids engrossed by a stand-up videogame and he imagined a world where you could actually enter the game and become one with the computerized world within. He did not even own a computer at the time. Science fiction’s greatest novel about the future of networked computing and its effect on human culture was banged out on a Depression-era manual typewriter.

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