Neuromancer

William Gibson often gets credit for inventing the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. This subgenre seeks to tell a gritty story from the point of view of people who don’t fit into the mainstream. It often focuses on antiheroes operating outside the law who have well-justified suspicions of authority and the power of corporations. As a result, the future imagined in cyberpunk is often dystopian, and the question becomes how the protagonists can preserve their humanity in such a society. Often their quests parallel the experiences of marginalized people in 20th- or 21st-century society. Instead of shining cities of futuristic materials, cyberpunk cities are worn-out and illuminated by the harsh, artificial glare of neon lights. In these settings, technology can serve both as a tool for augmenting humanity and for dehumanizing individuals, raising questions about Personhood and Embodiment and The Artificial Nature of Modern Reality. Case, for example, has his brain tampered with by a corporation that used him for illegal spying. Molly was sexually used by men as an unconscious meat puppet and then programmed to kill for their pleasure.

Gibson doesn’t offer simple solutions to or blanket condemnations of the future he imagines. What motivated him to create this kind of world was discontent with the science fiction genre—a sense that “midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism” (Wallace-Wells, David. “William Gibson, The Art of Fiction.” The Paris Review, issue 197, 2011). He wanted “elbow room” to question the assumption that the American capitalist system represented progress and would continue to dominate the globe for the good of everyone. His hero—or rather “antihero,” as he says in the same interview—exists on the outskirts of society broadly and the US in particular. Though American, Case lives in Japan because Japan and China have taken the lead in cyber- and biotechnology. The cast of Neuromancer also includes descendants of Jamaicans, French Moroccans, Armenians, and more, further highlighting the US’s fading status as a world power.

Suspicion of authority and corporations also plays an important background role in Neuromancer and is a theme that Gibson develops more fully in his other cyberpunk stories. Case reflects that “[t]he zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality” (203). He explicitly compares these corporations to nests of wasps that seeks to perpetually reproduce without respect for individual humanity. If they are an organism, they are, in a word, “parasitic”: They take without producing. Case’s mentor, Dixie Flatline, is captured as a virtual recorded persona by the Sense/Net corporation. When Case protests in shock that Dixie would never let Sense/Net do that, he learns that Sense/Net promised an unbelievable amount of money. However, if Dixie sells his humanity, Case was in a sense doing the same thing when working for the corporation that burned him.

While Gibson’s writing set the literary stage for cyberpunk, he cannot take sole credit. A number of young authors in the 1980s experimented with narratives that similarly questioned the old norms of science fiction. Beyond literature, the movie Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and released in 1982 as Gibson was writing Neuromancer, has much the same aesthetic and worldview: A protagonist living in a morally gray world navigates questions of humanity and technology in a gritty city influenced by an Asian culture and lit by neon. Nonetheless, the widespread acknowledgment of Gibson as the godfather of cyberpunk and the slew of awards won by Neuromancer testify to his formative influence on this socially aware approach to science fiction.