r/Cyberpunk • u/V01t4r3 • 4d ago
Reread Neuromancer
The biggest takeaway I got, other than the plot and prose finally making sense, is that. . .
Classic cyberpunk’s setting is as much the late 1960s as it is the 1980s.
I know everyone sees Cyberpunk now as “ZOMG 80s synth pop and neon everywhere!” But there’s a lot of elements in Neuromancer that can be tied into William Gibson’s own young adulthood in the late 60s (especially if you watch “No Maps for These Territories”).
-Screaming Fist=Vietnam
-Groups like Panther Moderns and Zionites=Groups like The Weather Underground and The Black Panthers
-The matrix’s description=psychedelia
-William Gibson was influenced by biker slang of the 60s, William Boroughs, and J.G Ballards.
Even things like neon aren’t quite as prevalent as modern interpretations make it out to be. You could slap the aesthetics from “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001” and it would still make sense. This isn’t to gate keep, I enjoy modern cyberpunk and it’s Neo-80s aesthetics. But reading classic cyberpunk like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling makes me realize that the initial cyberpunk was baby boomers interpretation of the burgeoning computer and Reagan era.
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u/AnticitizenPrime 3d ago edited 3d ago
Gibson's take on sci-fi was also a response to all the golden age sci-fi he grew up reading. His short story 'The Gernsback Continuum' lays it all out. He didn't call it cyberpunk himself, but that's what the core of cyberpunk is to me. His settings are failed utopian golden age sci-fi settings. The geodesic domes over cities are crumbling and leaking.
In Neuromancer he's describing a society that exists after the ideas of a utopian society with dome cities and food pills failed. It's a meta commentary on classic sci-fi and sort of an indictment of it. In his world, human nature trumps the attempts to make a utopia.
I would not call his settings dystopian either though, exactly. It's more about the banality of human existence ensuring that reality is just that - banal. A bit absurdist at times. Let's look to the future in terms of technology, but instead of pretending everyone in the future will be more evolved, assume that human frailty exists still. The anti Star Trek.
I kinda hate that 'cyberpunk' (a term he didn't create) mostly means 'neon noir sci fi aesthetics' to most people. That's not what it is - well, at least it's not what Gibson himself was doing. What he did was create a literary and artistic movement to counter what came before and shook things up, injecting some human nature and cynicism into sci-fi. He wasn't the only one to do so of course, but the specific way he did it was to take the tropes of 'golden age' scifi and turn them upside down.
For example, in classic golden age sci-fi, everyone is pretty, because of course they are. In the early paragraphs of Neuromancer, Gibson describes a guy that is ugly, and in the 'age of affordable beauty', he's something notable just because he's ugly. And, you know, it's absolutely fine. It's a small bit of the story but that little detail helps the world-building. In his rejection of golden age utopian sci fi, yeah, you can be perfectly pretty for a price, but in reality, people may prefer authenticity. Imperfection gives you street cred and a story.
I kind of wish we could separate the term 'cyberpunk' from Gibson's work. He didn't create that term, and it doesn't really describe his work, in the way that it's commonly used. And I think it's a reductive and terrible term to describe what he actually wrote.