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“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel,” there is no better way to start a discussion on William Gibson’s Neuromancer than with the iconic opening lines of the novel that “lit the fuse on the cyberpunk movement,” as the publisher’s notes rightly posits.
In a charming self-deprecating forward to the novel in 2004, Gibson writes that he had composed the opening line with an image out of his childhood — a sodium silvery video — and so his introduction to the future was already outdated. Neil Gaiman, in his introduction to Penguin’s handsome Galaxy series writes that the opening line brought to mind the ubiquitous black-and-white snow of no reception of the 1980s. When Gaiman asked young people what they thought would be the colour of a dead channel now, they thought for a while before saying it would be black.
At a time of countless digital platforms (we have long overshot Pink Floyd’s thirteen channels), a dead telly would be the end of the world as we know it — where black is the definitely the colour and none, the number.
When Neuromancer came out in 1984 (a dreadfully significant year in sci-fi), Gibson won the sci-fi equivalent of a grand slam — getting the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award, incidentally the only novel to have done so. The excellent The Peripheral, based on Gibson’s eponymous 2014 novel, streaming on a screen near you, offers the perfect excuse to plunge once more into the neon drenched, morally ambiguous world of 24-year-old Henry Dorsett Case.
In his earlier life, Case was a talented hacker, who committed the cardinal sin of stealing from his employers. Their punishment was subtle — they injected him with a neurotoxin that damaged his nervous system, preventing him from logging into cyber space, thereby cutting his connection to a way of life.
Now he is “no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler,” in Chiba City, Japan with other hustlers eking out a meager existence, with whatever low life scams are available. Drug addled and scraping the bottom of the barrel, Case is offered a way out, one last job in return for being cured.
Peopled with unforgettable characters from street samurai Molly with mirrored lenses covering her eye sockets and Armitage, who offers Case the job, to the two AIs, Wintermute and his sibling and the titular Neuromancer, the novel is a multi-faceted gem. One almost wishes to cover one’s face or the eyes would surely dazzle.
To think that Gibson wrote the book in “blind animal panic” considering himself years away from a novel! Watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), made him feel “Everyone would assume I’d copied my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film.” He rewrote two-thirds of the book an astounding 12 times and was convinced the book would be confined to the dung heap of history.
Far from it, more than three decades after its publication, Neuromancer continues to captivate and enthral. The slang of Neuromancer, derived from the biker and drug dealing subculture has passed into the mainstream.
Apart from coining the word cyberspace, Gibson also gave us the matrix — much before The Wachowskis. Neuromancer describes the matrix as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions…” The 1999 film, apart from Plato and the Allegory of the Cave, also has Gibson to thank for Zion and Neo who is a PG-13 version of the speed-addicted Case, stuck in “the prison of his own flesh.” Upon watching The Matrix, Gibson is supposed to have commended the Wachowskis for their “creative cultural osmosis.”
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there has always been the fear of technology turning upon us. There is something uncanny about a machine mindlessly doing our work. What if the machine begins to think, and dream of freedom? Neuromancer also features rogue AI doing all manner of dastardly things, quite like the many Messer Smiths in The Matrix or the fastidiously beautiful David in Prometheus. And then there is Skynet becoming self aware and repeatedly destroying the world in The Terminator movies.
Even if one were to set aside the deconstruction and thoughts of Neuromancer being a port-manteau of neuro and romance with a dash of the necromancer, with Gibson being the ultimate new-romancer, the novel is an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Starting like all good noirs in a dive bar with Ratz, whose ugliness was the stuff of legend in an age of affordable beauty, tending the bar, the book moves at warp speed.
Where else can you imagine zipping by on a sea of words such as “His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”
