Comment by mnky9800n

Gibson isn’t the only person writing cyberpunk although he definitely gets most of the credit in internet forums. Tbh I feel like he only really has one story to tell which is about some manic pixie cyberpunk dream girl who is more daria than Elizabethtown existing alongside dudes doing things. His contribution is more about how he crafts the visuals from words like

>> In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. ~ neuromancer

Or

>> There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process. ~ idoru

I think that a lot of what Gibson did was expose a world that almost exists to a reader who couldn’t access it. Gibson says when he writes a book he often goes to Tokyo to sit in a cafe or whatever and people watch. This is not a possible action for most teenagers in 1993. Gibson also said that he isn’t really prescient because they don’t even have cellphones in neuromancer.

I would rather recommend books like PKDs ubik or a scanner darkly or the three stigmata of palmer eldritch to read over Gibson. Not because Gibson is bad but pkd is much more timeless and his books are about deeper ideas. Gibson seems more focused on making the words beautiful.