A few years ago I was dating a gal who loved to collect books and she took me down to her favorite used-book store that happened to be going out of business. Scanning the shelves I was drawn to my usual genre choices of sci-fi, horror, and mystery/thrillers and so picked up a few first editions that looked promising. One that I selected was by William Gibson, an author who up to that point I wasn't familiar with but the book jacket's summary of the novel looked promising. Back at home I set my purchases aside and eventually returned to them a few months later. Looking over my Gibson purchase I reread the book summary, about the author, his other titles, and decided that his first book Neuromancer was not only a better place to start getting familiar with his style and subject matter, but also had a more kick-ass title than the one I bought so I went out and got a copy (not a first edition, said to say, too expensive!) and was introduced to the mind that spawned many of the concepts that others have used in books and movies over the years.

    I'll spare you a plot summary you can get from Amazon, but in a nutshell, through Neuromancer Gibson popularized, if not created, the cyberpunk concepts we've come to know and in pop sci-fi literature and movies. What set Neuromancer apart from the others was the way that Gibson presented it: it was essentially a detective story/film noir in the vein of the The Maltese Falcon. Gibson introduced the concept of "cyberspace", the "space" between computers in the wiring or waystations between the beginning and end of a transmission. In this domain people, corporations, governments, and artificial intelligence coexist in a metaphorical state of being that through technology can be explored and attacked much like any physical entity. If this sounds an awful lot like The Matrix movies, it certainly is as Gibson postulated the term "matrix" to refer to the visualized Internet and the Wachowskis (and others) ran with it.

    Another significant difference in the way that Gibson approached the subject matter that became the trademark of cyberpunk novels is the deglamorization of technology, making it a pedestrian and gritty part of the scenery. In Gibson's books, computers and technology ain't cool, it's necessary to survival, and the inhabitants of cyberspace that serve as some of the main characters tend to be drifters and punks that make a living with or try to live "jacked" into it. The term "cyberpunk" itself is used to denote "high tech, low life" to describe the genre.

    A lot of this may not seem to be a big deal to us now since we've had computers, the Internet, and The Matrix with us for so many years, but in the context of when Gibson wrote this, it was quite impressive for him to come up with much of it. Neuromancer was written in 1984. His earlier short cyberpunk story, Johnny Mnemonic, was written in 1981. By contrast, the first IBM PC was mass produced in 1981 followed by the Apple Macintosh computer in 1984. Gibson was a shrewd and creative observer of the interaction people had with video games of that time and envisioned a future where all this existed in a virtual environment. That's quite a leap of imagination for guy that had to write his first novel on a typewriter!

    Despite the huge influence his writing has had on pop culture, there hasn't been any successful translation of his own works to movies. The aforementioned Johnny Mnemonic was adapted to film and released in 1995 and was thoroughly unsatisfying though much of Gibson's concepts were on display there. The movie must have served as training for its star Keanu Reeves as he seemed to get it right recreating the similar character of Neo for The Matrix four years later. All the philosophical whoop dee doo aside, The Matrix was just an appropriated concept turned on its head (nothing wrong with that, all art is just viewing the same thing in a different way).

    The lack of cinematic credit aside, Gibson has created several literary landscapes that can (hopefully) be used in a future production: his first three books (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) comprise his "Sprawl" trilogy of a near future where corporations are more dominant than governments and technology (or its control) is the real power. Mind/machine links, artificial machine intelligence, and the "cyberspace' are concepts he introduces here, if not for the first time, certainly in the most interesting way. The "Sprawl" refers to an urban environment that occupies much of the east coast of the US in this future world, and an underlying theme throughout the books is the restlessness of machine intelligence and its struggle to remove its hardware limitations.

    Gibson's second set of books are known as the "Bridge" trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties) and take place in a post-earthquake California that has been divided into two. It's main characters live or revolve around the San Francisco-Oakland bridge that has been abandoned and now used for shanty housing as they and other entities vie for control of cyberspace.

    Of his other works, The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Stirling, provides a change of pace by proposing a world in which Victorian England develops computers early thanks to Charles Babbage and explores the impact of this technology on its society and the rest of the world as the country rises as a world power. I have a backlog of Gibson books to read but this one in particular is high on my list!

    If you're interested in William Gibson's work I recommend you follow the sequence of books as he wrote them, particularly for the "Sprawl" and "Bridge" trilogies, as he establishes his universe for subsequent books such as Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. The Difference Engine stands on its own so you can fit that in anywhere. Gibson has his own website (www.williamgibsonbooks.com) where you can get an overview about him, his books and what's currently on his mind, but a better resource is Wikipedia where everything is dissected in detail. I've certainly not covered everything about the man and his catalog, just wanted to point the way to the daddy of modern cyberpunk.

Labels: books