Since I got into this website stuff and the baby came, I haven’t been reading much, not like the novel-a-week I used to go through. But a couple of days ago I realized that I don’t actually have to watch that tape of Barney with him, especially for the second and third time, and I picked up a book to keep my mind occupied.

For some reason there are some great books out there, classics that I know about and have been meaning to read, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. On this occasion I was able to address one of these omissions – I picked up a copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson, the novel that defined the cyberpunk genre.

Sometimes, when you read a ground-breaking book a long time after it came out (in this case, twenty-five years later), you end up being disappointed. The style has been copied and used in other books that you’ve read in the meantime, and often expanded upon and improved. The most extreme example that I’ve encountered of this was picking up Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, expecting to read a great detective novel. There was no such disappointment in Neuromancer. It’s still fresh – prophetic, dystopian and relevant. Twenty-five years is an eternity in science fiction, and we are still tramping directly down the path envisioned by Gibson.

Posted by Greg in Posts About Me, Society

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