William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published on July 1, 1984 and accurately predicted the world wide web and cyberspace, but what else did he get right?  What did he get wrong?

Gibson’s cyberspace also turned computing into an experience that involved all of the senses. Instead of interacting with the network visually by using a computer monitor, Gibson’s characters “jack in” and navigate an enveloping 3D world. Each user is “connected” to the computer via a system of electrodes and neural interfaces emerging from a laptop-type thing called a “deck.” Once hooked up and inside cyberspace, the user can experience intense beauty, such as the sight of the huge, shining cities of data that Gibson describes.

Here’s how Gibson describes it in the early pages of Neuromancer: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

On the other hand, if something goes wrong, as during Case’s risky hacks of corporate databases, the user can feel actual pain and even die (or “flatline,” to use Gibson term).

Even what Gibson got wrong is still pretty cool.  Simstim is an interesting idea even if it’s not true today.  Also, even if we don’t have our own evil AI, the very idea of Wintermute is possible in the  future.  The idea of a Construct is quite scary and, to this day, I’m not sure if it would be a good or bad thing to actually have.

If you haven’t read Neuromancer, you can start your journey reading by either reading the wiki, reading the book, or listening to the audio book, read by the author himself.