Comment by jfengel 18 hours ago
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.
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.
On the off chance case you haven't read it, check out Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.
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.
Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi:
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...