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regarding the whole Locke and Demosthenes part of ender's, I am curious how much (if any) influence did William Gibson's invention of a "consensual hallucination" known as the Matrix, help you along the way?
Also I noticed a lot of similarity between WinterMute of Neuromancer and Jane of SOTD, any connection there?
And also, what do you think of his novel in general, as far as what it did for the sci-fi field?
Posts: 340 | Registered: Jun 2005
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What a coincidence. I just started reading Neuromancer. I'm only about 30 pages into it though.
Posts: 1569 | Registered: Dec 2004
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I had already written Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead before I read Neuromancer, so there wasn't much chance of influence there.
I reviewed Neuromancer at the time. An entertaining book - but it's a world where it's hard to detect who, if anyone, is actually doing the work that sustains civilization. And I was irritated that the only characters who actually do anything all want to die. Fashionably edgy, but ultimately not very truthful ...
The influence of Neuromance on the sci-fi field was to provide a rallying point for people who wanted to be edgy and innovative but had no idea how. Gibson himself WAS an innovator, but then his work was labeled "cyberpunk" and many lesser writers wrote derivative stories and novels; basically, it was the intellectuals' version of writing Star Trek and Star Wars novels. Cyberpunk was just ... franchising Neuromancer, without paying Gibson any fees.
It's the opposite of what Bruce Sterling intended when he called for a revolution in sci fi. He urged writers to stop setting their stories in a consensus reality, and to invent new realities. He pointed to Gibson as an example of how it's done. But instead of other writers following Gibson's example and inventing new futures, they just used Gibson's future - and his style.
And since what Gibson was doing was essentially transplanting noir style and sixties drug culture into a romanticized computer future, it wasn't exactly breaking new ground to have everybody else follow him down that road.
Not Gibson's fault. Neuromancer is a strong novel, and it can't be blamed for the shallow work that others did in imitation of it.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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