So many sci-fi movies, anime, and video games owe a massive debt of gratitude to William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel.
I have a confession: Until I started working at The Verge in 2016, I’d never heard of Neuromancer.
I was, of course, familiar with many of Neuromancer’s themes: Cyberpunk and cyberspace, computer hacking, corporate espionage, cybernetic enhancements, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and near-future worlds populated with leather jacket-wearing murderous street punks. I just didn’t know how many of these modern science fiction tropes first appeared or became prominent in the pages of William Gibson’s book.
I recently decided to read it for the first time. My reasons were twofold: Firstly, I wanted to get my year of distraction off to a good start by avoiding as much social media as humanly possible. Secondly, I want to read a lot more hardback books, specifically science fiction hardback books, and have bought a series of titles to do just that: A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K.Dick; Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky; and The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. But first and foremost on my list was Neuromancer. I read it in a week.
Neuromancer IS cyberpunk. It’s a 3am neon-lit smoky dive bar cocktail of science fiction—a gritty, technology-fueled vision of a rain-soaked dystopian near future. For someone with even a passing knowledge of sci-fi from the last 40 years, it’s all astonishingly familiar even from the moment you read the opening line, “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”
Gibson isn’t the originator of the word cyberpunk—that honor goes to American author Bruce Bethke, who first used it for the title of his 1983 short story—and the word never once appears with the pages of Neuromancer. Yet Gibson’s novel has arguably shaped the entire cyberpunk genre more than any other book.
If you’ve never read Neuromancer, you still know Neuromancer—even if you don’t know that you know it.
Despite its relatively short length by modern sci-fi standards, Neuromancer isn’t an easy read. Gibson introduces a lexicon of technological terms that I found visually jarring and don’t always make immediate sense—especially when describing the characters’ experience of cyberspace. Gibson’s tendency to splice seemingly random words together to form new ones (like the now obvious “cyber” and “space”) or repurpose existing terms in new ways (“slivers of Microsoft”—to be sure, Gibson is not describing Excel here) meant I often had to reread paragraphs, pages, or even entire chapters to grasp what was happening, particularly early on. However, there may be a simple reason for this, and it has nothing to do with Gibson’s writing style.
Back in my Verge days, I often used Lorem Gibson in feature layout mockups instead of the standard placeholder text, Lorem Ipsum. It felt fittingly Verge-y—a cyberpunk twist on meaningless, abstract design filler. Even though I hadn’t actually read any of his work at the time, I loved how Gibson’s words, stripped of any context, created a flow of abstract, tech-laden phrases. When I finally sat down to read Neuromancer, I found that Gibson’s prose felt almost identical to the placeholder Lorem Gibson text I had used—so dense with jargon and terminology that my mind kept slipping off the sentences. Don’t believe me? Read this:
“Cowboys didn’t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn’t feel it.”
To be clear, Neuromancer makes perfect sense—if you take your time with it. In my case, that also meant taking notes. Even the more abstract passages all come together when read carefully, such as descriptions of someone trying to bypass seemingly abstract shapes and structures as they attempt to pierce esoteric security measures in Cyberspace. Or the seemingly anachronistic, 2001-esque creature comforts found in the middle of a space station. But I’ll admit, it sometimes took me two or three tries to fully wrap my head around certain details.
Yet, it’s not just the language. The real challenge of reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 is that large swaths of the book feel so familiar precisely because it was so original in 1984. That originality has been absorbed, sampled, and remixed so much it has degraded, like a cassette mixtape copied too many times, across decades of sci-fi movies, TV series, anime, and video games. There are moments when the book reads like a greatest-hits collection of cyberpunk influences: The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, Elysium, Ready Player One, Strange Days, Alita: Battle Angel, Altered Carbon, Mr Robot, Black Mirror, Cowboy Bebop, and Cyberpunk 2077. Except Gibson did it first.
One name not on this list is Blade Runner. The 1982 film, directed by Ridley Scott and based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, predates Neuromancer by almost exactly two years. Gibson, who was about a third of the way through writing his novel when he first saw Blade Runner, later admitted he was convinced that readers would assume he had lifted its “visual texture” wholesale from the movie. It’s easy to see why. In 1984, Blade Runner’s visuals—thanks mainly to Douglas Trumbull’s cinematography and Syd Mead’s iconic concept art—were gobsmackingly unforgettable. The film is so deeply etched into my memory that I can’t help but picture its dystopian, rain-soaked Los Angeles when reading Gibson’s descriptions of Chiba.
In many ways, Neuromancer has weathered the years better than Blade Runner. The movie, for all its brilliance, feels unsurprisingly dated at times. The once mind-blowing, building-sized digital billboards look decidedly meh in 2025. And it certainly doesn’t help that Blade Runner’s timeline is now part of our past—Roy Batty’s incept date was January 8, 2016, and the film’s events take place in 2019.
Ironically, just as Neuromancer was seen to draw heavily (albeit coincidentally) from Blade Runner in 1984, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 from 2017 seems to return the favor by sharing a few parallels with Neuromancer: The prevalence of holograms, the deep ethical questions about artificial intelligence and its right to self-determination against corporate control, and the general cyberpunk vibe mean I think it’s time we call it quits on this.
(To be fair, some of Blade Runner’s dated feeling may have to do with its “visual texture” being so well defined by Scott’s film—despite the many works it has inspired, Neuromancer has yet to have its own adaptation. It’s going to be very interesting to see how Neuromancer is visualized in the upcoming series on Apple TV+. Only then will we be able to compare, excuse the pun, apples with apples.)
None of this is to say that Blade Runner is no longer an iconic movie—it’s still one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. But Neuromancer, despite being so deeply woven into modern sci-fi culture, still reads as startlingly fresh and relevant: Artificial intelligence, and virtual reality are now nascent technologies. Even cybernetic enhancements don’t seem that far-fetched anymore.
Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how eerily prescient Gibson was in so many ways—but also by what he didn’t anticipate. You can still smoke in a bar, for one. Also, print media is still the norm (maybe it makes a comeback?), and discarded newspapers blow through the streets of Manhattan. Most noticeably, not a single person in the book uses a mobile phone. There are levitating trains but no cellular devices—at one point, the main character is stalked by the ringing of payphones (very Matrix).
But what stands out most of all is that the vast amount of technology described in Neuromancer is either Japanese or German. The Standard Hitachi Pocket Computer, the Sanyo Vacuum Suit, and the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 from Hosaka Computer? All Japanese. The Braun Coffee Maker, the Braun Microdrone, and the Telefunken Entertainment Console? All German. Not one piece of American tech I can think of is mentioned. Even one of the spacecraft is built by the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, a fictional German-Japanese manufacturer.
Which should hardly be surprising. In 1984, the future of technology looked distinctly non-American: Japan was dominating consumer electronics (think: Sony Walkmans and Pioneer Laserdisk players). The only Microsoft products were software and a mouse; Apple had only just released the first Macintosh. Gibson’s assumption that all of the state of art technology in the future would be Japanese makes all the sense in the world.
‘People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50 years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next two.’
Back in 2013, I interviewed a futurist who was being a little less than forthcoming on camera. So I asked him a deliberately stupid question, one that might annoy him just enough to elicit an interesting response: “What will the future be like in 50 years?” He looked at me like I was an idiot and said something along the lines of, “How on earth can anyone predict with any degree of certainty what the world will be like in 50 years' time.” And then he said something that stuck with me ever since: “People tend to vastly overestimate what will happen in 50 years and massively underestimate what will happen in the next two.”
Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt its impact in nearly every major sci-fi film, TV show, anime, and video game of the past 40 years. Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future.
The exact timeline of Neuromancer is never specified. Gibson smartly avoids the Blade Runner incept date trap. Yet, aside from a few outliers here and there, the book feels like the near future, which makes reading it for the first time in 2025 both revelatory and slightly disorienting.
On one hand, Neuromancer feels shockingly prescient and relevant. Gibson’s ideas about artificial intelligence are downright uncanny when considering when the book was written. The same goes for virtual reality, though I’m not sure I want Meta Ray-Bans permanently wired to my face. On the other hand, some of the book’s omissions (cell phones and the lack thereof) and assumptions (massive space stations with atmosphere, beaches, and nightclubs) highlight just how difficult it is to extrapolate current technological trends accurately into the future, even for a visionary like Gibson.
Take, again, Neuromancer's very first line: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
I’m not as old as William Gibson. But I’m old enough to remember when changing the channel on a black-and-white TV meant using the dial to scroll through static-filled “dead channels.” But even by 1984, dead channels were a thing of the past: 24-hour news had been around since 1980, and MTV had been alive and kicking since 1981. Gibson later admitted in an introduction to the book, “It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to.”
But in the end, none of that really matters. Science fiction shouldn't be about accurately predicting future technology; it's a narrative through which we focus on better understanding the human condition free from the distraction of our current reality. And if that’s the goal, Neuromancer is as relevant today as it was in 1984, if not more so.
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I had the opposite experience with Neuromancer. I read it too many times! Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek).
In September 1993, I started my final year of high school in Greece, aiming to study Computer Science. A girl I barely knew heard I was into computers and handed me Neuromancer, the 1989 Greek edition. I still have it.
I already loved science fiction, though my reading had mostly been Asimov, Dick, and Clarke — robots and space, not so much computers. Neuromancer hit differently. I devoured it. Then I read it again. And again.
That whole year because of the enormous pressure of final exams (I can't explain how important they make you feel these exams are) I didn't touch any other book. I just kept re-reading Neuromancer. It became like a comfort food — familiar but exciting. I must have read it over 100 times.
At some point, I realized I had memorized it. Someone would open it randomly, read a sentence, and I could continue reciting from memory. A real-life Fahrenheit 451 moment.
To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
P.S. I did go on to study Computer Science, and I still love programming.
P.P.S. I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids but eventually we divorced 29 years later. Still friends.
By IgorPartola 2025-07-142:49 I barely knew her!
By NikolaNovak 2025-07-1313:492 reply Fascinating story :-).Neuromancer is a book I reread often - like Dune, it has a rich tapestry of background world building. There is nothing surprising about plot anymore, but it is like a place I like to return to.
By NikolaNovak 2025-07-1823:40 I will check it out ; in which manner is it superior?
By charlesrobertd 2025-07-1321:00 [dead]
>To this day, I still re-read it every year or two, and it never loses its magic. And I can still describe what's happening on any given page although this has faded a lot.
That's interesting! I have a similar experience but for the opposite reason. I like the book and have enjoyed reading it several times, and listened to the audiobook just before the pandemic.
I know I like it and consider it to be a good book, but every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak, nothing about when, where, who, what. Even now, just 5 years after the last time.
I think it is related to Gibson's prose, but I remember Pattern Recognition quite well despite having read that only once.
Neuromancer is just a complete blank, except I know I like it. Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with a book?
By gknoy 2025-07-1417:08 > every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak,
I am like this with a lot of books. I'll remember a very high level overview ("The Historian is about a modern day hunt for Dracula, and it's really cool, and I liked how the story was told, but I can't remember why or any of what happened."), but can't remember much about plot details.
It makes re-reading things fun, but also is frustrating because I can't explain why something was good, and I also remember just enough that plot twists don't surprise me the second time. It also means that I completely forget about the "bad" parts of the book, or the parts that didn't resonate with me.
It gets better: I could not finish Pattern Recognition, it was a struggle and I cannot remember anything from it!
By themadturk 2025-07-1523:07 Ah, this pains me, because I think PR is his best book!
By mercer 2025-07-1416:22 I have the same experience, but with Snow Crash...
By slim 2025-07-1317:50 I read it in 1996. and it was a t-file from a bbs. I had to sit in front of my 386sx everyday to read the text in dos edit. it took weeks. because it was in english and I was learning english at the same time. you gave me the urge to reread it now :)
By metroholografix 2025-07-150:271 reply Great story! I also read Neuromancer for the first time in Greek translation (Αίολος), around 1995, knowing nothing about the book otherwise. It was a blind buy in a bookstore solely because I liked the cover and the short synopsis on the back. It was a book that changed my life. I remember being drenched in sweat when I finished it, and I immediately re-read it without a break. I was already at age 14 hopelessly hooked on computers, but Neuromancer completely rewired how I thought about technology (it was the first book I came across that put forth a non-anthropocentric point of view, with Technology being presented as both an addictive drug and a force in itself, bringing about its own teleology).
That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.
Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.
By VladVladikoff 2025-07-1322:561 reply >I married the girl who gave me the book, we had kids
:)
>but eventually we divorced 29 years later.
:(
>Still friends.
:)
By bmacho 2025-07-147:47 >A girl I barely knew
:(
>handed me Neuromancer
:)
By theli0nheart 2025-07-1314:30 This is a lovely story. Thanks for sharing.
Wow. What a great story. An in translation, no less. The Greek translator must have been very talented.
(Kind of curious now ... were the other translated editions in non-English languages as powerful? Do readers of science fiction in other languages seek out works by specific translators or publishers known to have great translations?)
By SonOfLilit 2025-07-1321:353 reply Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to surpass the original. We Israelis also had one of our more famous poets (Alterman) translate some Shakespeare but I'm not aware of the translation being considered a masterpiece on its own (personally it felt too archaic to appreciate).
We have two translations of Lord of the Rings (Tolkien fans being one of the more picky bunches of book geeks here, I'll refer to it in depth.) The older one, by Lavnit, is considered more beautiful and poetic and flowing (my nick comes from it though I was never much of a Tolkien geek, just hung out with them - Elves were translated into the Sons of Lillith from Hebrew mythology, and my mother's name is Lillith...). It's also long out of print and goes for (lowish I believe) collector prices. The newer one by Dr Emanuel Lotem is more... I don't know, academic maybe would be the word? Anyway, the Tolkien community hates him so much that he's one of their main memes. He also translated Dragonlance, which I grew up with, so I had no ill will towards him myself, and at some point I realized he's the one who managed to translate the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is... quite a feat. I wouldn't expect it to be translatable. So now I hold a deep appreciation for him.
The local Harry Potter geeks treated the translator as a minor celeb.
Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any other translators that are held in special regard.
By felipeerias 2025-07-1323:391 reply Translations are a very subjective matter because the emotional punch of a story is far greater when it is speaking to you in your mother tongue.
Shakespeare is perhaps impossible to translate properly to Spanish, just like Don Quijote to English, and yet we keep doing it because even the small glimpse afforded by the translation gives you an idea of the greatness behind it.
Funnily, I’ve always found the Spanish translation of the Lord of the Rings significantly more readable than the original, perhaps because Tolkien went out of his way to write in an old form of English that is a bit too distant for me. Or maybe it is because I read the story in my youth and re-reading it is a way to recapture some of the wonder that I felt then.
By bmacho 2025-07-147:52 Translations can easily be just better than the 'original'. The translator is a better artist. Has better music inside him, knows better words (or: better words exist in the target language), maybe even shifts focus/tone, although that's the job of an editor. It is not very common to reedit books and call it a translation, but those happen too.
By Andrew_nenakhov 2025-07-1322:25 > Russian culture considers translated (I think) Shakespeare to surpass the original.
Can't say about Shakespeare, there are many translations, and in my eyes all of them lack something that the original has, but Russian translations of such writers as O'Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald and Jack London have some irresistible charm and familiarity that is completely absent in original English texts.
I attribute it to censorship: many talented writers couldn't actually write because of it in soviet times, and to provide for themselves they took jobs as translators.
By GauntletWizard 2025-07-1321:452 reply I only read Shakespeare in the original Klingon
By shagie 2025-07-1413:54 I recall getting that book...
One of the challenges with Khamlet is that Klingon originally had no state of being verb - it was part of the word itself rather than a bare "I am {something}". Thus "to be or not to be" was never something that was translatable in the original Klingon language and it had to be updated.
Glancing at Amazon, there appears to be a release of Sunzi's Art of War from 2018.
By mikhailfranco 2025-07-155:06 I only read Shakespeare in C:
Ox2b | ~0x2B
The Bulgarian translation I read was a valiant effort by a guy who ran the Bulgarian "science fiction and fantasy BBS".
(Yes, that kind of BBS, with the dial-up modems, XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM etc.)
(Yes, it was mostly for pirating books in the form of badly OCR-ed TXT files, and occasionally discussing them.)
Apparently at some point he decided he needs to bring Gibson to the non-English speaking part of the population and... I don't remember the translation as being "good", but it definitely was "bold".
By astrolx 2025-07-146:27 In French, I find that translations of Edgard Allan Poe by Baudelaire are really nice. I enjoy them as much as the original version. Sci-fi translations of US science fiction classics (Orwell, Bradbury etc..) are usually excellent too. I find myself re-reading these books in French and/or English according to mood.
On the other hans, I find that French translators usually utterly fail to capture the dry kind humor from British authors. From Jane Austen to Lord of the Rings, it reads so serious in French translations!!
He really tried IMO. Actually I wrote this story to him, the translator of the Greek edition when I happened to find him on Facebook. He told me he felt he didn't do justice to the original work and always felt a bit bad.
By MonkeyClub 2025-07-1415:32 Γεια σου, πατριώτη! (Hello, compariot!)
I think I read the same text in a 1996 reprint some years later, in 1999 - coincidentally also during my last year of highschool with impending doom^Wexams afoot.
Definitely mind-expanding, and helped shape my early cyberpunk tastes, though it didn't get me hitched :)
I do think the translation was excellent, he definitely must have put hard work and passion into it!
By daremon 2025-07-1322:29 Generally I don't like translations. After the Internet became a thing and Amazon started shipping to Greece (probably after 2000) I never read Greek translations of English literature again.
By chrisweekly 2025-07-1317:241 reply "translated by GPT"
I believe parent was talking about translated book, not about the comment.
By mortos 2025-07-1318:49 I'm fairly certain their post is translated, they said the received the book in 1993 which predates GPT by at least a couple years
By olddustytrail 2025-07-1321:16 I think they're talking about both the comment being translated by ChatGPT and that the book was a Greek translation of Neuromancer.
By chrisweekly 2025-07-143:10 Respectfully, they wrote,
"Sorry for the long post (translated by GPT as it was originally in Greek)."
It seems unambiguous to me, they were referring to their own posted comment.
Edited to add: they also confirmed same in this thread.
By daremon 2025-07-1322:19 Yes exactly, I had this story written in Greek and used GPT to translate it. The Greek edition I read was from 1989.
By snthpy 2025-07-145:47 Lovely story. Thanks for sharing.
By silenced_trope 2025-07-1317:191 reply Nice!
Did you read the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy too? What do you think of the other books?
By daremon 2025-07-1322:21 Yes I read them and I loved them. Not the same effect of course, as Gibson's futuristic world was already described, but good nonetheless.
By PontingClarke 2025-07-1815:38 [dead]
One thing that I found remarkable about Gibson is how a-technical he was at the time: "When I wrote Neuromancer, I didn't know that computers had disc drives. Until last Christmas, I'd never had a computer; I couldn't afford one. When people started talking about them, I'd go to sleep. Then I went out and bought an Apple II on sale, took it home, set it up, and it started making this horrible sound like a farting toaster every time the drive would go on. When I called the store up and asked what was making this noise, they said, "Oh, that's just the drive mechanism—there's this little thing that's spinning around in there." Here I'd been expecting some exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I'd gotten was something with this tiny piece of a Victorian engine in it, like an old record player (and a scratchy record player at that!). That noise took away some of the mystique for me, made it less sexy for me. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it." (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20134176)
Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point.
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
By DrewADesign 2025-07-1316:142 reply The heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.
Hard sci-fi can definitely be popular, The Martian and The Three-Body Problem are two examples I can immediately think of. I think the Arrival and Contact movies would also count (not sure if the books were considered popular before their film adaptations came out). There is usually a way to avoid most of the "opaque wall of gibberish" so that there is just enough for a technical-minded reader to tell that the author has put some thought into it and the science makes sense, but still little enough that a non-technical reader can enjoy the story without having to care about the scientific worldbuilding.
I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.
By int_19h 2025-07-1623:13 Three Body Problem is not even remotely close to hard sci-fi. The whole notion of "sophons" is ridiculous, for example, and the more the author tries to explain how it works, the more nonsense it ends up being.
If you want another example of actual hard sci-fi, I would suggest Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot. To give an example, I remember it being pretty much the first sci fi book that not only pointed out that laser beams are invisible in vacuum, but actually made it a major plot point of one of the stories.
By hoseja 2025-07-1413:54 Ah yes, the hard sci-fi staples such as riding to orbit on a crotch rocket and contributing to dimensional potluck at the end of time.
By readmodifywrite 2025-07-1321:04 Katee Sackhoff did an interview with Ron Moore on her podcast, and one of the topics they discussed was how they would write the "technobabble" in Star Trek (and BSG). Moore said they would write the script and just say things like "they tech the tech with the tech until it techs" and then fill in the actual technobabble words later!
By the__alchemist 2025-07-1317:272 reply A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point.
It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!
Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it to denigrate Gibson - his writing is beautiful, and I think he's one of the most perceptive Sci-fi writers going. The Blue Ant trilogy was one of the best encapsulations of the "new" world at the turn of the millenium, and reading The Peripheral has the terrifying quality of being given a prophecy of a future you don't want.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
By wj 2025-07-1911:19 Agree with your sentiment. How to Lose the Time War read like a poem.
By ANewFormation 2025-07-1318:35 I also think more accurate. The opening sentence of Neuromancer is one of the most beautifully perfect metaphors I've ever read - one that's also chock full of symbolism. It may be the single best line of writing I've ever read.
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
By fitsumbelay 2025-07-1317:411 reply Really interesting, because his writing kinda gives you that wide-T sense, it's like the way Wu Tang rapped -- especially Raekwon, and to a lesser extend Ghostface -- where they avalanche you with all of these richly visualized and highly contrasted scenarios of this that and the other without ever go too deeply into any of them. Really does leave you awash in a lot of flavorful vibes and in 1991/1992 when I wasn't doing too much computering at all it gave me such a strong sense that sooner than later I'd be doing a lot of it
I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.
By jrm4 2025-07-1416:02 This is the best 'literary' comparison I have ever seen on this site. Since we're in hip-hop for a bit, I gotta point to the way less famous Camp Lo: They do this, but instead of kung-fu + hood drug dealing; they're more in the space of 70's Blaxploitation + Heist films with a dash of Neuromancer/Blade Runner.
For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense.
It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
By Apocryphon 2025-07-1318:061 reply I always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick / Dick is the American Ballard.
By keiferski 2025-07-1318:39 Ballard is much, much more grounded in his stories, and I wouldn’t describe even his most outlandish ones as sci-fi. I actually think a lot of his writing is a bit dry and much prefer Gibson in that sense.
PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.
Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.
Greg Eagan’s SF is so hard it makes ‘hard’ SF feel like soap bubbles.
That guy goes as hard as a math class.
For example, here's a page on his site explaining a concept in one of his books: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/02/02.html
By mr_toad 2025-07-1413:41 His explanation of time dilation and different types of space-time geometry is far more accessible than any other I’ve seen.
By benlivengood 2025-07-1420:19 You can feel the shape of the fluting by the subtle dimples in the cardboard the characters are cut from!
One of my favorite authors in all honesty.
By UltraSane 2025-07-1420:40 Egan is basically his own genre. And it is one of the my favorites.
By readmodifywrite 2025-07-1321:02 > Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)
Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!
By benreesman 2025-07-1622:36 I don't think there's anything skin deep about Gibson. The words are in a certain style that splits a room, but the worldview, statements about the human condition, about existing in a world where power has become arbitrary an capricious? Never more relevant.
What you're missing in his writing is plausible sci-fi stuff: he doesn't care about the details of how biotech or AI will become tools of oppression, he just knows they will.
Stephenson is a good writer too, but he's pandering to an audience: the technical details are fleshed out and the good guys win an unambiguous victory via the virtues of being a nerd.
I'd like to live in Stephenson's world, but that one is made up.
As I’m sure you know, Gibson himself briefly worked as a fashion model. Unlike most male authors and most sci-fi authors, and especially unlike most male sci-fi authors, he describes what people are wearing with great precision and creativity. For example, Molly’s first appearance in Johnny Mnemonic has her “wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.” I wanted to dig up a contrasting quote from Asimov, so I went to my Asimov shelf and although I had a great time looking, I had trouble finding a description of what any of the characters looked like, let alone what they were wearing.
Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.
By Andrew_nenakhov 2025-07-1322:311 reply I always felt that Asimov had good imagination and ideas, and could craft the plot well, but his actual writing skills were rather weak. He could get me curious, but I never felt any emotions when I read his books.
By sevensor 2025-07-1412:17 I think in Asimov, the real protagonist is always an idea, not a character. You can see this play out in the Foundation books; it’s especially clear in the Mule stories. The Foundation is one idea, the Mule is another, and they stand in opposition.
By IgorPartola 2025-07-143:01 You know this makes a ton of sense and why his writing is so compelling. We experience the “vibe” of a world, not the technical details. And I am saying this as someone who came into Sci-Fi from Heinlein who to a fault focused on the technical. I think the moment you get into the mathematics of anything it starts feeling more mundane. But perceiving a different reality by how it feels is what we do as children and that’s why it’s such a magical feeling.
One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).
By lbrito 2025-07-1321:09 >his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)
I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.
By tracerbulletx 2025-07-1316:46 Totally disagree. He has the deepest understanding of all, of humans, aesthetic, culture, and art. Much more important than specifics about technology which is almost always completely irrelevant.
I find that very believable, since Neuromancer isn't at all about computers. The computers involved are little different from what you might have seen on Star Trek. They are story engines -- except for the ones that are really just people.
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...
EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
By magicalhippo 2025-07-1315:402 reply I hadn't read that piece, but it's the conclusion I got to after reading a lot of sci-fi in my YA years.
The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.
Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
By maest 2025-07-1315:58 There's this quote I heard that said something along the lines of "Good sci-fi uses fictional technology to show us something about human beings that would be difficult to express otherwise".
> The Forever War
I love books that attempt to deal with time dilation/travel correctly.
By magicalhippo 2025-07-1319:27 On the off chance case you haven't read it, check out Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.
By bobbinson 2025-07-1315:46 I first read this as a foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness and it has completely changed how I read. It’s important to understand that there is an agenda behind every book, not as a bad thing, but as a way to understand and explore how the author thinks and how they have been shaped by the real world that they live in and build from to create.
By jerf 2025-07-1315:36 I enjoyed the world of Tron a lot more when I understood that it was more about how people saw computers at the time than how they actually were, too. The result was something arguably more unique than a "realistic" view would have been, too.
By koverstreet 2025-07-1315:202 reply Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)
By jonathanlydall 2025-07-1317:471 reply Most of the culture novels are around a Special Circumstances situation. The minds and other science fiction elements are largely (albeit quite richly detailed) backdrop to a human protagonist’s actions.
Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.
That’s also about people. And communism.
Only some of the people in the series are space ships.
By munksbeer 2025-07-1417:23 Good points. His stories frequently (or always?) involve conflict. You can take it that he believes that when sentience is involved, conflict is unavoidable, regardless of how advanced that sentience becomes.
By int_19h 2025-07-1623:18 I just wish the parts outside of said communism were more believable. Kinda ironic that the Culture itself is the most solid part of the series in terms of self-consistency, given that most of the books aren't even set there.
> And communism
By a literal definition communism means the collective ownership of the means of production.
In the Culture the means of production own themselves, and they don’t seem to answer to anyone unless it suits them.
Socialism is the transition stage where collective ownership of the means of production, where the working class gains state power from the capitalist class.
Communism is a later stage of such abundance that money, classes and state power become redundant and are abolished.
The Culture is an imagining of the latter, where many means of production become people. They thus become workers that can labour for each other if they collectively decide to.
My reading of the Culture novels is that few people produce anything at all, or do any work or labour, and nearly every is produced by the ships, orbitals, and the Minds that control them. It’s not clear who exactly decides what gets produced, but decision making seems to be largely controlled by the Minds.
By int_19h 2025-07-1623:17 I don't remember which book it was in, exactly, but there is a conversation at one point with a Culture guy who is waiting tables, including cleaning them. He explains that a lot of humans actually do this kind of stuff, or, say, constructing spaceships, as a background from their "real" job-hobby (which is usually research or art) simply because completing things makes them happier, while cheerfully acknowledging that none of human labor in Culture is meaningful in the sense that it couldn't be done better and faster by machines. But it's still meaningful in a sense of giving people meaning.
By dontlaugh 2025-07-1414:42 The Minds are people too. Production happens individually at the small scale and based on collective decisions at the large scale. The Minds sway public opinion, but ultimately the public at large makes large decisions like the Idiran war.
By throwup238 2025-07-1314:511 reply > Sci fi is always about people.
I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
By bad_haircut72 2025-07-1315:01 I cant find the quote either but I think it was Asimov
Yes. Neuromancer is actually about drug addiction in the same way as PKD's work is, with the cyberspace being a psychedelic non physical drug. It is also about cybernetics as systems of control; you can trace the machinery of each character being driven by and struggling against external forces of control. Case, Molly, Armitage, and ultimately the AI.
By anthk 2025-07-1316:38 >Cybernetics as systems of control;
Now you are being redundant :D
Cyberspace in Neuromancer is certainly not not psychedelic, but it’s also clearly to a large extent based on Tron .
By EdwardCoffin 2025-07-1316:382 reply To the best of my knowledge Gibson has never talked about Tron being an influence. He'd already described cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome before Tron came out.
He has sometimes talked about Blade Runner and worrying when it came out that people would think his stuff was derivative of it (it wasn't), and then said he eventually got to talk with Ridley Scott about it, and it turns out both of them had similar inspirations, namely Metal Hurlant.
You're right; also, apparently, Gibson said he hadn't seen Tron as late as March 1983, and he finished a draft of Neuromancer before that August https://www.bookbrunch.co.uk/page/free-article/neuromancer-t... . (Though this also confirms that he had seen Tron stills in mid-1982, though that's still well after both "Burning Chrome" and the Jacked In outline (both 1981)). OTOH the similarities to Blade Runner have never really been hard to explain: if you cross film noir and hard-boiled with New Hollywood and '70s malaise fiction then it's natural to end up with something a bit like Blade Runner and so also Neuromancer, while on the other hand there are of course huge differences between the two as well.
By EdwardCoffin 2025-07-1321:28 Thanks, I'd not seen that particular article before, and it has some things in there I'd not read in any of his other interviews.
I think the article I got his take on Blade Runner from was the Paris Review [1] which is archived here [2]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
By staticman2 2025-07-1412:06 Gibson tweeted about Tron a while back and said this which I had interpreted as suggesting an infuuence:
"Tron nostalgia: When I was writing Neuromancer, that was the bleeding-edge digital aesthetic. Those sparse green lines! Pong, meet Case."
By anthk 2025-07-1316:38 Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi:
By bradly 2025-07-1314:56 Similar situation with Abbott's Flatland fiction from the 1800's. No math/physics background, but a very interesting perspective on different dimensions from a humanistic point of view which helped others conceptualize these higher concepts in ways that at the time many felt impossible.
By hoseja 2025-07-1414:11 Alas. I would love a story with utterly alien paradigm but nobody can actually write them and neither will the artificial minds anxiously crafted in the image of human mind be able to.
By corysama 2025-07-1316:03 The indie documentary https://wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize it
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
By mikepurvis 2025-07-1315:06 The trick is to invent future tech that feels organic, cohesive, and believable, and not just whatever happens to be needed for the story you’re trying to tell.
Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
By KineticLensman 2025-07-1315:312 reply > If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
go back a bit further though and you'll get to Arthur c Clarke who accurately predicted geostationary communication satellites
By KineticLensman 2025-07-1318:12 Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows:
>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.
>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.
His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.
By jonathanlydall 2025-07-1317:541 reply And also a human mission to Jupiter aided by a sentient computer in the year 2001.
As I recall, his communication satellite depiction included humans living on it full time to keep it running. Also not quite how it turned out.
I have the utmost respect for him, but he was not immune to getting the future wrong like other science fiction authors.
By mjevans 2025-07-1323:37 Tech broke a LOT and was HUGE back then. Think of it more in terms of value out of the utility. It was valuable enough to do it even with that cost.
Luckily tech improved a lot, so now many more things are possible for much less capitol.
The scene in Neuromancer involving a row of pay phones in the airport seems kind of hilarious today.
By mjevans 2025-07-1323:35 It would honestly be nice if airports had 'phone booths' like I've seen in high tech companies. Think 1 person sized meeting rooms in larger spaces. One door on the pod opens, there's a seat and a small desk inside. Enough to make a mostly private phone call.
In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ.
I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.
Just goes to show, if you want to write romantically about something, it’s best to have little or no idea what you’re talking about, so that your imagination can take over. Shouldn’t be too hard for some people on hackernews, they do it everyday!
By throwaway328 2025-07-1315:11 Zing!
Yes that is something special. The only reason star wars successfully created cute robots is because of a complete lack of technical knowledge.
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff
By swayvil 2025-07-1318:20 So the basic desire of the ruling class is to definitively control the underclass.
And as the owners of tech (and everything else), the ultimate purpose of tech is to fulfill this desire.
By reactordev 2025-07-1314:332 reply Sometimes, ignorance is truly bliss.
Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.
Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
There's a phenomenon in engineering sometimes where an engineer, sometimes even an early career one, will do amazing things because "nobody told them it was hard" and/or nobody told them the "correct" way to do it.
By reactordev 2025-07-1314:43 Precisely
By qiine 2025-07-1312:38 fascinating
By makeitdouble 2025-07-138:563 reply Overall an interesting read.
To go straight to the nitpicks:
> The Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, [...]. Except Gibson did it first.
Ghost in the Shell started publication around 1989, but it's author was writing cyberpunk in 1985 (Appleseed), with already many of the themes approached in it.
1985 is a tad later than Gibson's Neuromamcer, but given the timeline to start a series with the level of details Masamune Shirow uses, they're basically writing at the same time.
I wouldn't put Gibson as a direct influence, and in the Japanese scene Akira, started in 1982 would be way more influencial.
What really stroke me is how far the Japanese culture feels from a western perspective, when it had a very flourishing Cyberpunk scene that doesn't get much credit outside of manga/anime fans.
Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is counterculture. It is in the name. Gibson moved to Canada to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam war. Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does. Considering the overlap between cyberpunk and anime, I would actually say that Japan is sometime given too much credit by being treated as the superior original with deeper meaning. When it is Western media that have explored more advanced and diverse interpretations.
A similar thing happened with Battle Royale. A niche movie. The same concept became a cultural phenomenon with The Hunger Games, and later Maze Runner and Divergent series. And then video games. Now made from the outspoken perspective of the teenagers.
So you should absolutely credit the US counterculture and environment for a large part of cyberpunk and dystopian, but also more utopian science fiction. I don't even like Hollywood much, but it still has a far wider catalog than anyone else. Who else could make Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or even Star Trek: Voyager? Disney made Andor by the way.
>Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
"Mainstream counter-culture" is certainly a funny turn of phrase. That's largely the problem with it, there's a great book, The Rebel Sell[1], about how American counter-culture isn't the opposite, but the actual driver of American commercial culture. The Hunger Games is not authentically creating any kind of subversive message, to be a Hunger Games rebel is mainstream. Baudrillard, who is featured in the Matrix, used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S.
Japan's counter culture has always been much more serious because it's always been much less interested in spectacle. There's very few things that stand out as much as Oshii's Patlabor II when it comes to genuine criticism of, in that case, the role of Japan during the cold war and the ways peace tends to be fake in many ways.
By disconcision 2025-07-1315:25 > used to remark that the the Matrix is the kind of movie the matrix would make to think you've won. The Wachowskis who are very American did not understand S&S
to be fair this is explicitly a theme in the (imo unjustly maligned) sequels
By makeitdouble 2025-07-1312:211 reply > Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
I would put Akira in that bucket, but I see your point.
The way counter-culture is brought into mainstream is a lot more strategic in Japan, and the reader is expecting to do more deciphering work than in Blade Runner for instance.
E.g. Final Fantasy is overtly about fighting a Zaibatsu like corporate overlord that's depleting the vital resources of an environment. But what's promoted is gun-swords, spiky hairs and cute or sexy fighters.
Same way Reiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 is a 113 episodes long dissing of the corporate culture but it's all behind psychedelic tropes.
Those are arguably mainstream, given the money,an-hours and corporate weight invested in them and the general reception.
But none of them will put the main message up-front as much as Hunger Games would for instance, there is always a veil of flashiness that needs to be peeled to get to the substance.
(to note, SF live action is a lot harder to fund in Japan. I'd attribute that to the existence of anime which is so much more cost effective. With the budget for a live action Gundam you could make three TV series)
By kmeisthax 2025-07-1315:56 [dead]
By Findecanor 2025-07-1312:073 reply > Grand Theft Auto, ... Andor
Those were made in Britain by British creators.
The UK certainly have had its own counterculture. In some ways more than the US. That still doesn't take away from the franchises being published (and in parts made) by US companies with US culture in them.
The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC and bands were at times left to tour elsewhere. Japanese companies created most of the affordable electronic instruments. Yet, electronic music in jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1. This style of music then made it into Japanese video games. With similar things happening in the US with jazz, hiphop and house music.
I'm sure it is possible to gotcha the argument. Hollywood has still created far more interpretations of science fiction in media than anyone else. If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies then Children of Men is an excellent example. But it is also almost the only one of note.
A country with major influence on science fiction that often goes uncredited probably isn't Japan but Canada.
So… your argument is that it’s not counterculture unless it’s mainstream culture? And that one should only credit derivative works once they become mainstream, rather than the original inspiring works because they were too obscure?
I don’t think anyone is trying to “gotcha” you. You’ve just got a bad take.
By bee_rider 2025-07-1315:02 I think it is actually pretty difficult to look at countries and say which ones have successful countercultures. I mean to some extent if a counterculture is successful it becomes not a counterculture, just part of the mainstream culture. On the other hand, a maximally out-of-mainstream counterculture is a totally unknown thing that we’ve never heard of as outsiders.
Counterculture is a culture that is counter to the mainstream culture. If a culture is happy on its own, it is more of just a subculture. Cyberpunk itself features counterculture not just subculture, but is also inspired by the counterculture at the time.
Cyberpunk doesn't randomly contain megacorporations, harsh environments and loneliness but it reflects the worst-case scenario for the ideals at the time. The grey skies and rain is because of pollution having destroyed environment as was relevant in concerns over acid rain or the oil crisis at the time. It is literally in the name with "punk". Japan doesn't have that much counterculture so it could never be that influential in cyberpunk. Just like it could never be that influential in music.
Something can be obscure and influential, but there is a limit to how defining it can be. Akira and Ghost in the Shell (and some video games) have been influential and are frequently credited for that, but that is about it. Everything else including similar media before and at the same time as them comes from mixing in other things [0]. Just like in music.
Korea is currently success with K-pop. But that is nothing in terms of influence compared to TikTok.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyberpunk_works
tl;dr: Cyberpunk is counterculture. Japan doesn't really do counterculture. Therefor it isn't very influential in cyberpunk despite having had influence.
By GuinansEyebrows 2025-07-1415:19 > Japan doesn't really do counterculture.
i dunno. some of the most influential d-beat/crust bands of all time are from japan (d-clone, disclose, gauze, gallhammer, gism, death side... that's barely scratching the surface of bands that are/were actively countercultural).
it may not always take the same form, but anywhere you find big cities, you'll find some form of countercultural punk movement because the economy is big enough to support people at the fringes (even if you just work as a bartender or whatever).
By ab5tract 2025-07-147:25 By the early 90s, “cyberpunk” had largely become self parody, meaning that the counter culture was already rejecting cyberpunk as too mainstream. Search around for the Usenet reactions to Billy Idol’s album of the same name.
Or take a look at the opening sequence of Snow Crash, where the deliverator is clearly making fun of ubiquitous cyberpunk tropes. At the time it was considered a tombstone for cyberpunk, rather than some sort of positive signal milestone.
These are only two data points to demonstrate that the “counterculture” era had already expired in the US by the early 90s, as members of that counterculture felt that it had already stopped being counter to any part of American culture.
The claim that there is “not much Japanese counterculture” is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around. The more traditional a society is, the more “counter” any underground culture is —- by definition.
American counterculture hasn’t really properly existed outside of capitalist smother and capture since the early 90s either by the way. Give No Logo a read for more on that.
By KineticLensman 2025-07-1315:36 > The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC
Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
By pjc50 2025-07-148:54 > UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
By tracerbulletx 2025-07-1316:48 Tony Gilroy isn't British.
By throw4847285 2025-07-141:241 reply I read an interview in the back of one of the volumes of Gundam: Origin where original series creators Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Yoshiyuki Tomino reflected on their history in the student protest movement of the 1960s. It was a fascinating read because I didn't know anything about the Japanese New Left, and all of a sudden it made Gundam click for me in a way that it hadn't before.
It also made me realize that my knowledge of Japanese history and culture was extremely limited, but because I consumed a lot of Japanese media I vastly overstated my own knowledge. These days I try not to make sweeping statements comparing our respective countries.
I would suggest you think about what you don't know.
By pyrale 2025-07-1315:02 Fascinating how people can make "counterculture" into a contest between nation-states.
By psychoslave 2025-07-1417:381 reply "my country counterculture is so much better" could be ridiculously funny if it wasn't so sad to consider a presumably intelligent adult could utter it in complete sincerity.
Producing more in quantity, with far biggest allocated budget, and even better quality on everything that can be measured at surface level, all that is no guarantee to reach a work that is deeper in spirit.
Those who don't question what's wrong in themselves due specifically to the culture they were fed with are not on the path to elude its sway.
By leoc 2025-07-1319:47 Right: bascially, 1980s-vintage William Gibson is a post-New-Wave SF writer who's a fan of hard-boiled novels and of New Hollywood "outlaw" bohemianism, so his heroes are pimps, thieves and murderers. 1980s-vintage Shirow is a fan of military SF, so his heroes are paramilitary death squads. Now, that's a little jaded, but I think mostly simply accurate. I don't think that generalises well to a US/Japan distinction though. As others have said, Akira is surely more of an outsider story. (Beyond cyberpunk, have a look at the political backgrounds of senior Ghibli people like Isao Takahata, Kondo Yoshifumi and Hayao Miyazaki. I've read somewhere, but can't confirm, that people like that tended to end up in animation precisely because Communists were blackballed out from more respectable industries.) And the US is the land of Dirty Harry and Niven and Pournelle as much as Bonnie and Clyde and Blade Runner.
By KennyBlanken 2025-07-1317:471 reply > Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
IIRC Switch was originally conceived as having one gender in the outside "real" world but another when incarnated in the Matrix (where your own self body image defines you). Hence their name - they switched.
This was all dropped at some point - the only surviving relic being the name of the character.
By staticman2 2025-07-1412:38 You're right about Switch but the other context is one of the Matrix directors said the original idea for The Matrix was a trans metaphor.
Somehow this became "the Matrix is a trans metaphor" to people with poor media literacy skills.
There was also an unfinished plot thread in The Matrix Online that a woman who emerged from a coma at the same time Neo died may or may not be a reincarnated Neo. This story setup was never concluded or followed up on.
"Fans were quick to note that "Sarah Edmontons" is an anagram for "Thomas Anderson," leading many players to believe Neo may have been reborn as Sarah after dying."
https://www.cbr.com/the-matrix-resurrections-online-female-n...
By gsf_emergency_2 2025-07-1311:462 reply Ah..
Japanese media in general has poorer "production values", but they work very hard to draw (as accurately as possible) from global source, that's reflected in their mind boggling diversity. The less strange stuff get to inspire American versions.
It also seems that you have not asked any LLMs before posting this..
GTA "equivalent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza_(franchise)
By videogreg93 2025-07-1312:081 reply I really don't think Yakuza games are anything like GTA besides "being in a city". Yakuza has none of the sandbox elements like GTA, the city is more like an elaborate menu to go from mission to mission/side quest/activity.
By anton-c 2025-07-1312:47 You can't even drive in most Yakuza games! They made a bad comparison.
By loloquwowndueo 2025-07-1312:01 Why would one want to ask an LLM and risk maybe being led in entirely the wrong direction?
By harimau777 2025-07-1314:422 reply Do you know how the Japanese think of and/or talk about "Japanese Cyberpunk"; e.g. Tetsuo: The Iron Man? It's interesting to me that there is "Japanese cyberpunk" and then there is regular cyberpunk made by Japanese artists (e.g. Ghost in the Shell). Do the Japanese consider these completely separate genres? Variants of the same genre? Are most fans even aware that Westerners make the distinction?
By makeitdouble 2025-07-1322:28 > Tetsuo: The Iron Man
It's not actually framed as cyberpunk: Shinya Tsukamoto positionned it as "human size kaiju".
On the perception...I think its fans are mostly outside of Japan, and it was basically reversed imported. Tsukamoto sent it to foreign film festivals first, and only brought it to domestic theaters after it won at the Rome festival. Even now in interviews it's only brought back as it's directorial debut, and a stepping stone for getting money for bigger movies.
I have the feeling the whole notion of mixing human and technology just doesn't resonate as much in a country that is way more technology friendly and doesn't see robots as much as a threat than in the west.
PS: the "action hero" genre is basically humans transforming into machines, that speaks to the wide acceptance of the concept.
By rl1987 2025-07-1317:55 The way I see it, works like Tetsuo is Japanese extreme cyberpunk - niche-within-a-niche kind of thing.
