On March 17th, 1948, William Gibson was born in South Carolina. Wired has an excellent overview of Gibson's life in their article here.
Just the thought of William Gibson makes me feel both nostalgic and very old. How could something I once considered so cutting edge be so fusty? Kids these days, most of them have never even heard of Neuromancer, much less read it. And I no longer recommend it to them, because I'm sad to say, it has not aged well.
Pictured with this article is my own tattered copy of Neuromancer, which I bought at the Chicago O'Hare airport in 1984 at the age of 12, when I was traveling back home from a visit to New York State. The visit had not gone well. I dove into the book on the airplane to escape from my life. What I found in Neuromancer blew my little twelve year old mind. When I finished it, I flipped back to the first page and started again.
Unfortunately, as time passes, that experience is less and less likely to occur. In fact, I would almost say that in order for Neuromancer to have an impact, you would have had to read it when you were twelve years old, and it was 1984. Reagan was president, and the Cold War was full steam ahead, and you had just learned how to make an Apple ][ E draw a kitty face on the computer monitor by giving it the precise coordinates of the start and end point of each line.
Neuromancer suffers the (perhaps enviable) fate of having been far too accurate. In a world suffused with text messaging and Facebook and mash-ups created with Google's open API and online banking as an everyday occurrence, Neuromancer seems downright quaint. The future has swallowed Neuromancer up, with hardly a burp.
Gibson's later books were more thoughtful, more measured than the all out drag race of Neuromancer. Many people dislike them for this reason, but they are by every metric better books. It's not Gibson's fault that his subsequent books failed to set the world on fire.
I recently had to stop reading Spook County because I realized that Gibson was revisiting the characters and events of Neuromancer, and dragging them into real life. What he had portrayed as edgy and sharp would be, in real life, bleak and sad. Everyone in Spook County is scrambling after crumbs, often ineffectively. Case isn't an antihero who sizzles with lust and a fierce desire to live. He's just a sad man with a drug habit wearing week old clothes. He's there not because he's the best, but because someone has to be there, and he will do as well as anyone else. Pawns aren't chosen because they are special; they are chosen because no one cares what happens to them.
Spook Country is very real, and very pertinent, and very bleak, and I confess that I didn't have the guts to finish reading it. Welcome to the future, indeed.
