Posthuman Blues

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.





The 20th anniversary edition of William Gibson's "Neuromancer" is out. It seems like last month I was buying the 10th anniversary edition.

I read "Neuromancer" my junior year in high school, before the Internet existed in recognizable form. I wouldn't send an email for two entire years. Experiencing Gibson's world was a jarring experience, a literary epiphany that totally altered my reading habits; although I had encountered Philip K. Dick, I had yet to read Burroughs (or Sterling or Rucker or Delany or Shirley). Although I was very much a science fiction reader, my diet had consisted primarily of classics from an altogether different era -- Clarke's "Childhood's End" comes to mind. I was drunk on the dying promises of the Space Age, virtually unaware that the Information Age was beginning to cast its first portentous shadows.

Gibson changed all that. I even remember the bookstore where I bought my copy of "Neuromancer," a modest store along Florida's Space Coast -- the slowly fossilizing turf so knowingly visited by protocyberpunk J.G. Ballard, a writer I wouldn't encounter for several more years.

I cite Gibson as my single-most important creative influence -- despite the fact that I've only written two books, and of these only one is fiction. This is far from an original claim; Gibson has become a sort of god-king among those aspiring to write "literary" science fiction, a force as omnipresent -- and unremarked -- as today's consumer ecology of software-packed cellphones. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. For better or worse, our world has taken on the texture -- if not the historical trajectory -- of Gibson's prophecy.

I admire a lot of authors, many of them fabulously prescient. But the early 21st century belongs to William Gibson. We are the unwitting offspring of his fictional zeitgeist. We are all cyberpunks.