There's an excellent HN thread on this very topic that I'm sure you'll find value in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304799

Neuromancer is a must read, a true masterpiece.

Tales of Pilot Pirx is another type of sci-fi, also very enjoyable.

Now I want to read Neuromancer again. Great book.

- The Lord of the Rings

- Siddhartha

- Chaos: Making a New Science

- The Death Gate cycle books

- Neuromancer

- Head First Design Patterns

- Valis

- Dune

- The name of the rose

I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones off the top of my head.

Accelerando [1] isn't in the same league as Neuromancer in terms of style and succinctness, but the idea-density is pretty high and it moves along at a nice pace.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

As for recommendations, if you liked his narrative voice you might also like Margarette Atwood, Oryx & Crake in particular

Sadly however, I'm having trouble with The Peripheral (his latest), maybe it'll grab me but it has yet to do so.

I can't imagine a single tech-minded person in 1985 not dreaming of a connected world, and the myriad dangers it could bring. It's the speed with which it has spread and become mainstream that is astonishing.

[0] http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/neuromancer_audi...

Who’s doing that now?

Michael Marshall Smith's early sci-fi books, Only Forward and Spares, have also had many re-reads.

[...]

Gibson’s Neuromancer sets the tone for a vast quantity of cyberpunk in its dealings with AI and simulation, though I don’t feel this alone qualifies it."

Find a copy of Neuromancer if you can & enjoy!

I am not sure these qualify as space epics, but they are all good reads.

This is one of the most powerful statements about the nature of art I've ever read. It's also a cogent insight into why we should teach the humanities.

Try as I might, I can't remember any mocking of Turing in the Cryptonomicon. I'm quite confident Neal Stephenson is not a homophobe.

Origins of Form (Christopher Williams)

Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower)

The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)

Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Bolo'Bolo (P.M.)

Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter)

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock)

Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco)

Neuromancer (William Gibson)

The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)

Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)

I reread Neuromancer and Count Zero this past summer. Still incredible 25 years later. I kept stumbling across tech cliches then realizing Gibson was the original.

Of course, the earlier Neuromancer had many of the same themes. Both are seminal works in the cyberpunk genre.

"Neuromancer" and sequels by William Gibson

"Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut

I've read all of them dozens of times over. Hard to explain why, they speak my language, and help me understand myself and the world around me, kind of like my favorite bands do. Hard to put into words.

Waiting for Godot (play) - Beckett

Neuromancer - Gibson

- Stealing the Network, a collection of short stories. One of those stories was written by Fyodor of nmap and is available online: http://insecure.org/stc/ -- this sort of works like a tutorial for nmap and networking security. :-D

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

- Neuromancer by William Gibson

  * 7 languages in 7 weeks, Bruce A. Tate
  * Coders at Work, Peter Seibel
  * Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
  * Neuromancer, William Gigson

  * The Island of Doctor Moreau, H G Wells
  * Brave new world, Aldous Huxley

  * The Martian: A Novel, Andy Weir
  * Dune, Frank Herbert
  * 2001: A space odyssey, Arthur C Clarke

Dystopian futures aren't really anything new.

Non-fiction;

Slavoj Zizek's Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism

Evgeny Morozov's To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

Fiction;

William Gibson's Neuromancer

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought)

The books have gotten thicker, artier, more self-indulgent, and weaker.

I'm sure he'd like to recapture the magic he had at 34, but maybe it requires the fear he spoke of. And an absolute ignorance about computers and networks.

I think it shares more with The Maltese Falcon than with any SciFi.

Saw WG complaining about GamerGate recently and thought how much he's aged, and how ungracefully, since GG and Operation Disrespectful Nod reminded me of the Panther Moderns.

Yes, it is weird how the world of Neuromancer and his other early novels were dystopian, but many people didn't see it as "gee, we need to prevent this world from coming into being" but rather as "gee, the technology these characters have is amazing".

I guess I'm looking for sci-fi involving grand picture of the universe or 4X-style books, but not necessarily limited to it.

Out of the books you've named, I've read Diamond Age and Neuromancer and while I can't say anything bad about them I still like the Liu Cixin's book more.

"Deepness in the Sky" is on my to read list.

I haven't read Martin Iden, but liked Alaska stories a lot. Remarque is good, but I like Heinrich Böll much more.

Just finished Neuromancer (for the first time! Bad geek! No cookie!), and plan to read Mona Lisa Overdrive next.

I recommend a non-fiction book for a different read: The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank.

However, Neuromancer and the other Gibson Cyberpunk novels came well before Snow Crash.

Also, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings.

Is it just me?

If you are fishing for me to run out of books that are "better" than TBP, honestly, it would be a long list. If you are genuinely interested, tell me what kind of books you like, and I will be glad to give you more.

Now I read it many years after it came out so I suspect a lot of the fawning comes from nostalgia and those who happened to be the right age when it came out to be blown away by his ideas.

There GP had it right though. Cyberpunk was a flash inn there pan and a lot less interesting once you realize it was a thinly veiled expression of xenophobia about the Japanese.

Some works are exceptional because their exceptional. Others are viewed as such because they're pioneering and while credit is due for Novell ideas often the only thing holding that up later is nostalgia over what's really a pedestrian work of fiction.

It's funny, Tron was one of the most memorable movies of my childhood. Later I watched Star Trek with the Holodeck, read Neuromancer and Snow Crash, dabbled with VRML, played with the SGI CAVE at university. I ought to be hugely excited by the progress in VR. But... I'm just not. Because Facebook and friends are not doing it because it's cool or because it will be useful to humanity, to them it's just another siphon to hoover up and monetise your personal data by steering you into purchasing and voting decisions that benefit them, not you. After literally decades of anticipation, I doubt I will bother to participate in VR.

"Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson. It goes from WW2 to modern time.

"Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner - Read it aeons ago so working from long term memory. 3 real world stories of famous hackers and their "crimes" (Kevin Mitnick, Pengo, Robert Morris).

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers

Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers

Off to Be the Wizard, by Scott Meyer

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

The Adolescence Of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan (from when I was just a kid)

(Conversely, by way of making a positive contrast with something in a similar genre that , I really enjoyed A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick).

To be totally clear, I think Neuromancer is probably a thoroughly enjoyable read and I'd recommend it to someone looking for what it is without hesitation. It's just pretty easy to take umbrage with.

- Apex [Nexus 3] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Factfulness (Awesome, most important book I read this year)

- Prisoners of Geography (why nations act the way they do)

- Crux [Nexus 2] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Debt: the first 5000 years (slog to get through but interesting)

- Nexus [Nexus 1] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Digitocracy (super short story, super powerful message)

- Artemis (Not as good as the martian)

- Before Mars (Starts out great, fizzles out)

- Down and Out in Magic Kingdom (How reputation based social currency might pan out)

- Blood Sweat and Pixels (How games are really made)

- Masters of Doom (Awesome story of how the game was made and what it led to)

- Foundation [Foundation 1] (Prescient with where the world is, what might happen in reality)

- Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that can't... (Ok, not great, read it on blinkist)

- Ender's Game (Under rated, most fun I had reading this year, I know...)

- Neuromancer (classic, must read)

- Pre-suation (interesting and worth reading if starting a consumer facing business)

- The Three-Body Problem (Found it tedious, honestly. Interesting though)

- Radical Candour (A lot of common sense advice we take for granted and could do better with)

- Seveneves (Longggggg, but really worth it. Shame about the ending)

- The Virgin Banker (Really good read, how a bank came into being)

- Why information grows (Great read, could of been half the length, would recommend)

- Babylon Revisited (Meh)

- Money: the Unauthorised Biography (Simplistic history of money before and after coin. Good)

- Hellbent (Enjoyed it, good for a holiday read)

- Snow Crash (Classic, Awesome, read it)

- The little prince (must read)

- To Pixar and Beyond (A different viewpoint on Jobs)

Larry Niven’d Ringworld is a close second.

Philip K Dick has some great stuff.

I really enjoyed William Gibson’s Neuromancer and all of his other books.

I just picked up a 1961 copy of Stanger in a Strange Land but I cannot comment on it yet.

Otherland - Tad Williams

Ready Player One

Daemon - David Suarez

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Shadowrun - ?? there are lots of possibly varying quality, I only read the ones by Nigel Findley which I liked

Snowcrash - Stephenson

Reamde - Stephenson

Der falsche Spiegel - Sergej Lukianenko (not sure about the english name)

Masters of Doom - Story of ID developing the games Doom and Quake - not really a VR story, but it sets the mood.

Pollen - Jeff Noon

Bruce Sterling is great, too, but I don't remember which of his stories are about virtual reality.

I suppose Ian Bank's "The Culture" novels might be a candidate, but I haven't read them yet.

In any case: if the cost was lower, I personally would find this somewhat appealing. A private bed and storage space in lower Manhattan for say, $400 a month, would actually be a decent deal. You'd have to be extremely minimalist, but that would be a feature and not a bug for the right audience. Add a VR system to each pod and you won't even notice the lack of space.

The world of Snow Crash, where a few corporations own the entire world with a very tiny government, is also the basis of the book Jennifer Government [2] by Max Barry.

I found that book a bit easier to read. Diamond Age, I can't get through it yet. Cryptonomicon, also by Neil Stephenson is on my list, as well as Neuromancer by Gibson.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Snow_Crash

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

"Minority Report" was also a pretty forgettable short story, and this time the movie made of it was mediocre.

"A Scanner Darkly" was yet another minor PKD work that was made in to yet another movie. It seems this list of scifi books if partial towards books made in to movies. But just because they've been made in to movies doesn't make the original book good, much less great.

As far as PKD books go (which is quite far, as he is one of my favorite authors), I would recommend "Ubik", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and "Martian Time Slip".

And of his short stories, I'd recommend "Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Woof".

Gibson's "Neuromancer" is alright, but "Count Zero" is better. Avoid the rest of his work.

"Brave New World" is an incredibly overrated, heavy-handed propaganda novel, written without a shred of talent. Avoid.

"Dune" is great, though I prefer the last few books of the original (Frank Herbert) series: "God Emperor", "Heretics", and "Chapterhouse". Definitely skip "Children" and "Messiah".

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is utterly brilliant, and is deserving of a place on a top-10 scifi novels list.

I enjoyed "Foundation" and "I Robot" as a kid. Not sure if I'd still like them now, decades later. Likewise for "Farenheit 451" and "Ender's Game".

I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged", but I did read "The Fountainhead", which amounted to a very long-winded statement of Ayn Rand's philosophy with two-dimentional characters serving as mouthpieces for it. It could have easily been stated in 30 pages, but instead was stretched out over 600.

I tried The Atrocity Archives but I couldn't get past the first half. It felt like a pile of nerd paraphernalia force-stuffed into a story line.

I mean... Neuromancer is a true masterpiece from the story to the concepts to the succinct writing, just perfect. Snow Crash is less perfect, but exceptionally enthralling nonetheless. What would be a comparable read from Stross?

I just reread Neuromancer and Count Zero, and the main thing I was struck by that Gibson didn't predict was today's omnipresent surveillance.

The people in his novels don't voluntarily carry around tracking devices and recoring devices. What they read and watch isn't tracked, and neither are their preferences or the opinions they express. They tend to have much more privacy than most people do today.

In this respect, I find today's society closer to 1984 than to Brave New World. It's 1984, complete with Newspeak, doublethink and Two Minutes of Hate for the boogeyman of the day, telescreens that combine televisions with security cameras and microphones what monitor what you do.

It's interesting that Gibson chose not to incorporate such dystopian themes in his books, and opted for what is in many ways a more optimistic dystopia.

Maelcum was pivotal in the entire story and was a cool bad boy type. And you can't forget the whole crew in the "Marcus Garvey" spaceship.

Quality stuff. That right there was enough to make me a lifelong Gibson fan.

Description:

When you look up and out over the city, does your mind drift towards questions about how the world works? Do you feel like you could do more than what you're doing now? Deep in the vast blue grand planet there exists a voice calling you, growing from a whisper all the way to a roaring rush of inspiration: Build.

We want to do great things too. We want to inspire this driving voice in others. We're a small group inside of Make (makezine, makerfaire, etc), that is setting out on a journey to explore how people interact, share, and publish their experiences online. This isn't code for stealth mode, you'll be shaping a product from its inception, launch, and beyond.

We're looking for critical thinkers that also want to bring smart talent to the pack. If you enjoy building projects from scratch, wearing many hats, and learning a lot along the way, then this is your place.

These are some of the things we're immediately looking for:

- Full-stack developers with startup experience. (Experience scaling is a big plus)
- JS (Front-end frameworks)
- Rails, Node
- Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, etc (Use what works)
- Bonus: Having read Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Neuromancer
- Extra Bonus: Interest in Machine Learning

What we offer:

- Typical equipment you would expect: Laptop, Monitor, Food/Snacks
- Free passes to Make events

Our culture:

- On Fridays, we'll build extracurricular software/hardware projects. Want to learn how to use an oscilloscope, code some microcontrollers, build an autonomous robot, or talk to a satellite? Cool. We'll hack on that.
- We have access to awesome amounts of makers. We'll bring some of them in every month to chat with us.
- We're also right by the Exploratorium: Expect field trips.

Find out more:

Send us an email with some projects you've created. Bonus points for launching and having actual battlefield stories.

Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.

Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.

But, the blue ant books are so boring! I am so genuinely perplexed whenever anybody recommends them. Honestly I can't say anything after Pattern Recognition is any good or not as I never gave it a shot.

I guess I just struggle with what exactly and who exactly I'm supposed to be paying attention to in Pattern Recognition. Too many asides that I only found distracting and not amusing or even interesting.

But I loved the sprawl series so much, I keep trying to pick up Gibson again. I'm just left mystified what anyone sees in his recent 5 or 6 books.

I did read the Sprawl books pretty much as they were published, or within a couple years. I think I was in 6th grade when I read Neuromancer the first time.

I suspect people like it for the same reason they liked their first Anime, it’s an unusual style that seems very original unless you have been reading other stuff written in the same vein by say Philip K. Dick.

It's interesting in seeing the print inspirations for many of these movies. The term "The Matrix" was first coined in William Gibson's Neuromancer and considered to be the seminal Cyberpunk novel, even predating Ghost in the Shell.

Definitely a must read for any Cyberpunk fan!

The common denominator in all of Dick’s fiction is a world beset by an unconstrained and monstrous entropy that devours matter and even time

Reference: https://dynamicsubspace.net/2010/05/09/stanislaw-lems-philip...

And also from the linked article:

The writings of Philip Dick have deserved a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized...

Unlike Stephen King, Dick's books aren't very easy to read from cover to cover, but they're filled with rich references of dystopian tragedy.

William Gibson's Neuromancer is a little easier, but leans more stylistic similar to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, who relied on a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat", which takes its name from the Russian suffix that is equivalent to '-teen' in English to inject the character's language with a certain brand of nastiness to go with the subverted plot.

Stanley Kubrick successfully adapted King's The Shining and Clockwork Orange, but failed to wrap his mind fully around Dick, methinks, as he could never bring a Dick-influenced project to its feet, A.I., which Spielberg couldn't do much with either.

Part of the adventure in reading Dick is figuring out what the hell happened before the novel began to have such a devastating effect on the present he so vividly presents.

Since he died, the imaginative powers of Dick have been tapped and retapped by Hollywood, (Bladerunner, Blade Runner 2049, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, Screamers) ...and sometimes the results are even pretty good (despite the esoteric nature of his writing).

There's a lot to be learned about our existential existence from reading Dick, and I associate him more with Kafka and Camus, than his science fiction genre-mates.

Agree. I think one of the reasons is that Brunner doesn't actually precisely describe the technology except in terms like 'the home phone service was tied into the net'. This makes it very easy to superimpose our modern perceptions onto a book that is now 45 years old. It's almost less jarring than the mid-80s cyberpunk classics such as Neuromancer with its no-mobile-phones and line-printers-in-space-stations.

Listening to audio books has allowed me to relax, enjoy the reading, and get to work excited about the day.

I treat the time as a chance to "read" those books which I wouldn't normally spend either my work hours nor my free time hours on. It's a chance to get informed on topics that are only slightly related to work, but expand your mind in ways that will make you a better thinker, and thus a better programmer.

The books I've found particularly good on audio are:

* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

* Thinking, Fast and Slow

* How Not to be Wrong

* Ready Player One

* Neuromancer

> "Operation Screaming Fist," which planned on infiltrating and disrupting Soviet computer systems from ultralight aircraft dropped over Russia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer

I really wish that Gibson wasn't so bored with capital F Future. I would love to see what kind of hard-scifi novel he could produce today.

Everything he wrote seemed so terrible and magnificent at the same time and I strongly believed that it helped shape the direction of technological progress for a generation. You can't capture the hearts and minds of an entire generation of teen geeks and it not leave its mark.

The Dog Stars held up well on my second reading. Neuromancer did not.

* "Alice in Wonderland", Carroll

* "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", Hofstadter

* Either "His Dark Materials", Pullman; or "Illuminatus!", Shea and Wilson

* "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Adams (all of its sequels are also good)

* "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "Lila", Pirsig

* Either "Watchmen", Moore and Gibbons; or "1984" or "Animal Farm", Orwell

* "Neuromancer" or "Pattern Recognition", Gibson

Be wary of anybody who recommends self-help, attitude improvement, psychology, business/management, or similar genres.

Also, I notice that some folks have recommended the official Steve Jobs biography. From my biography shelf, I humbly recommend instead "iCon", by Young and Simon, which is unauthorized and much more detailed.

I quite enjoyed his essay book "Distrust that particular flavor", and I just read The Peripheral and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nothing genre-expanding, but solid, and has good ideas.

And as far as inspiration goes, it's worth noting that Blade Runner came out as William Gibson was finishing Neuromancer, and he almost gave up on it because he was afraid that by the time the book came out people would think he was ripping off the movie.

I don't think the Matrix needs to "credit" Neuromancer as an inspiration, though. The Matrix draws from a lot of sources, but being cyberpunk, inspiration from Neuromancer is a given.

Cyberpunk dates at least a decade before Neuromancer -- Brunner's Shockwave Rider form 1974 comes to mind (and is a pretty interesting and strangely timely read, given that it is almost 50 years old).

Good, you'll know who to avoid in the future.

>In particular, the language used to describe drug states and events in cyberspace (such as the Kuang virus) was just so vivid and disorienting. (Or I guess "hypnagogic", to use a Gibsonian word.) A less talented author would have made it feel rote and computery, whereas this cyberspace felt more like a collective fever dream.

It's because Gibson doesn't come from a technical background (he famously wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and had never even seen a personal computer at the time), but was a hippie deep into the drug subculture of the time.

I think being too into the technical side of things may actually be a hindrance when writing these kinds of books, and that Neuromancer resonated so widely precisely because it wasn't hung up on the details. It didn't need the right descriptions of technology, it needed to evoke the right kind of feeling and look at the right way of interacting with technology.

Now I could see liking those early books and disliking the later output of both authors; they became wordier, softer, more pretentious - while keeping a lot of merit.

Then there is the fact that both video games and books can teach, but there are diminishing returns. When I first read Snow Crash and Neuromancer, they taught me a lot of things. Now there is virtually nothing I can draw from most sci-fi.

The idea that a guy should feel grateful for the opportunity to take a girl who looks down on him out to dinner is pretty far up there if we're chalking up examples of self-entitlement. Makes me suspect the real reason for her reaction was surprise at not being in the traditional position of judging and rejecting the guy first.

Coincidence is seeing this article just after returning from the vacation's, still imagining riding on a Shai-Hulud.

The only true comment that would like to add to this thread regarding Blanch's "The Sabre Paradise" is something that I've heard from an old teacher: most, probably all the books are derived from Homer's Odyssey; which created most of the writing styles, characters constructions and interactions, world creations, etc. After, there's not a single book that brought anything new to the writing, except the way you mix or the characters that you replace.

But even with this idea in mind, we cannot say that reading Homer's Odyssey means that you've read ALL the books, and there isn't not even that this is the best of books. To be honest I like the imagination created by it, but it's real "drag" if you try reading it...

At the end, for me at least, what counts is the mood: I prefer Dune over "The Sabre Paradise", the same way that I prefer J.R.Talkien's Lord of the Rings over "All Quiets on Western Front", even if both are based on the developments of the Great World War (I).

If you have time (and mood) read'em all... But still, keep away from "Odyssey" (there are a lot of more fun versions of the same story)! :)

PS: My next books in line are the (new for me) "Hyperion" and "Three Body Problem" from Liu Cixin. And recommended detours? :)

I read Neuromancer both in English and Catalan, in there there were programs called ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, so a firewall) and the programs to break them were called icebreakers.

The catalan translator (Joan Fontcuberta i Gel) managed to translate ICE to GEL (I don't remember what the acronym mean, but it made sense). "Gel" is "ice" in Catalan, also is one of the translator's surnames. And so we could have "trencagels" as "icebreakers" (literal translation).

So, yes, most things are not easily translatable, so when they are they stand up and show us the craftmanship of the translators.

I no longer have any working 3.5" floppy drive nor a copy of HyperCard. I still have the ebook floppy in its original cover, but I can no longer read it.

I remember working with Silicon Graphics gear back then and the 3D guys were quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, we had all devoured William Gibson’s novels like Neuromancer so we were naturally attracted.

We even built some 3D desktop apps as portals to the wider internet. They were too static and too hard to build so the Internet with HTML had much more pull for producers and consumers as well.

In practice, I think the 3D stuff that really worked at the time was more games like Quake and avatar-based web apps like Habbo Hotel.

It would still be fun to go back and read Jaron Lanier’s writing from that era.

The whole Sprawl trilogy is fantastic, and while I agree with other commenters here that Gibson's subsequent novels have become somewhat less awesome, it's hard to complain too much about that if you believe, as I do, that the author in question's first attempt resulted in the best novel of all time.

Still, Neuromancer is indisputably dated, as any such work would inevitably be, so I am glad to have originally read it in the 1980s.

"In his afterword to the 2000 re-issue of Neuromancer, fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the Internet developed (particularly the World Wide Web), after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks "[w]hat if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?" (269)."

BTW, all three works you mention has been translated into Japanese (including Finnegans Wake!) The translation for Neuromancer is also something to behold; Hisashi Kuroma, the translator, invented a literary "cyberpunk style" which can only be done with an Asian language. Words in Kanji are sprinkled with ruby text [1] which, instead of annotating the pronunciation of the word, fills in the romanized equivalent English neologism, eg. "接続" would be annotated not as "せつぞく" but as "ジャック・イン" (jack in).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character

Some other books that I find deserving of the at least occasional re-read (if not yearly)

The Soul of a New Machine - Kidder

Hackers - Levy

False Memory - Dean Koontz

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

I've heard good things about it (along with that it won't be an easy read as you say) however I don't want to torture myself reading boring stuff for like 1000 pages until something interesting happens.

There are much better books to read and too little time.

Actually, that's more or less a rule I try to follow: If the book can't hook me after some pages and I keep feeling bored and not interesting I just put it away. Other books that I have started but found way too boring to keep reading them:

(* please don't downvote me for this. I know that some of these books are considered classics and many of you won't like this but remember that this is just my personal opinion; I tend to get border easily *)

- The orphan master's son
- The man in the high castle
- Metro 2033
- Neuromancer
- Catch 22
- Digital Fortress (this wasn't so boring but I hated the smart-ass characters)

Thank god I discovered literary science fiction, and soon thereafter Phillip K Dick. I found reading "unhappy" literature was comforting, and U.K. post-punk bands like Joy Division also lent a sense of not being completely alone. Also reading Malcome X was hugely uplifting, as a white Iowa boy. And the cyper-punk authors were just starting then; I remember reading Neuromancer when it first came out and feeling completely at home in the reality painted by that novel.

About the only "good" thing that came out of my elementary school teachers only allowing me access to "gifted" activities was their taking me out of math class and leaving me alone with the school's first computer (this was the late 70's) for 2 hours every day.

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Red Storm Rising - Tom Clancy

On style/tone, Snow Crash is a bit zanier, more satirical, and boisterous, while The Peripheral is by and large sharper, more grounded, and spare (typical Gibson).

In terms of story/plot (spoilers, obviously), while Snow Crash revolves primarily around a world-domination plot and a world-spanning chase to unravel that plot and the development of a seekrit cyber-weapon, The Peripheral focuses on a much more mundane, chance encounter that spirals out (unraveling much more like a whodunit, including the reveal) that takes place primarily in 2 "locations" (with the central conceit/twist described in the linked article about a historical/simulated world and the future-present) - so in other words, they're totally different, and I'm surprised you'd make any sort of plot connections from the article's description!

While it wasn't perfect (I also reread Neuromancer last year, so maybe The Peripheral suffers in comparison), it was a pretty fun read and had a bit to chew on so I'd certainly recommend it if you're an SF fan.

Some books should just remain books, and both Snow Crash and Neuromancer are in that bucket. If Gibson wants to be a screenwriter, then he should write a story for the screen.

Shakespeare's work is missing also.

I'm of the opinion that broad spectrum exposure to programming is a good thing, much like exposure to foreign languages in high school.

I don't expecting everyone to take to programming, or German, but without some exposure, you may never know this wonderful world exists. And without knowing, your latent talents might go to waste.

My sister and I had the same exposure to computers as children. I learned to program shortly thereafter, and she never did. I think the main difference there being that I am a self-learner, and she was an other-learner. Meaning she did better in a teacher/student environment and I did better figuring stuff out on my own, asking questions only when I was ready for the answer.

If a brief course in programming had been taught in school when we were growing up, she might have discovered a knack for it. Who knows. Maybe not. She's a doctor now, delving in that messiness that is people, so maybe programming wouldn't have been attractive to her.

I couldn't not program though. I read Neuromancer in 4th or 5th grade, and while I had been programming before then, that book sealed the deal for me.

I highly recommend them both.

-Dune

-Hyperion + The Fall of Hyperion

-The Book Of The New Sun

-Ilium + Olympos

-Takeshi Kovacs trilogy

-The Culture Series (meh..)

-The Demolished Man

More dev-oriented:

-Reamde (which I hated, but I seem to be in a minority)

-Neuromancer

I'll always have a special place in my heart for Calculating God (not science fiction), because its the book that got me into reading seriously.

Still... reading "virtual light" last summer I got confused by the embedded fax machine everywhere (even in the back of car seats if I remember correctly...) trashing out some papers for reading... How did he miss e-mails or "text on screen" for these scenes ?

I could see Martian colonization and other difficult endeavors being undertaken by those who see this existence as empty and pointless and who actively desire a real challenge... possibly led and capitalized by factions of the ruling class who share this sentiment.

Wait... are we even talking about fiction here?!? :)

If on the other hand problems like fossil fuel depletion cause us to fail to reach anything like post-scarcity, I could see a scenario very much like William Gibson's Neuromancer. I think Gibson's "sprawl" 'verse is a world where the singularity failed to reach orbit so to speak. Going even more extreme I could see The Hunger Games -- tiny ultra-urban enclaves of super-rich surrounded by and served by feudal peasants. The Hunger Games (as opposed to Mad Max) is probably the most accurate picture of what a worst case scenario peak oil collapse would look like.

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

The Ultimate Question 2.0 - Fred Reichheld‎

The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

Moonshot! - John Sculley

Zero To One - Peter Thiel

Republic - Plato

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema

False Memory - Dean Koontz

NOS4A2- Joe Hill

Revival - Stephen King

Barbarians At The Gate - John Helyar and Bryan Burrough

Into Thin Air - John Krakauer

How To Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

and any collection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cunningham#Neuromancer

TV or film, really. The distinctions between the two have been greatly blurred these days, for better or for worse. Film, I suppose, is still considered a purer medium, though. Unfettered by commercial interruptions, and syndication or serialization concerns...

- Douglas Hofstadter's GEB: An Eternal Golden Braid

- Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

- Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest

- Propaganda by Edward Bernays

- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

- Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States by Herfried Münkler

- Smedley D. Butler's War is a Racket (more of an exposé)

- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (ditto)

- Neuromancer by William Gibson

I've read Neuromancer multiple times, because I just love Gibson's style, high tech low life has never been done better.

The multitude of ideas in each paragraph is simply stunning. There are thousand short sci-fi stories hiding behind each allusion.

That said, I have to agree, it is not very accessible to someone new to science fiction.

At the risk of going way out into tangents: Gibson's books had a fascinating mix of tech mega corporations, not just Japanese, but some of the big players were European in origin, and a share of US tech mega corporations.

Gibson absolutely has a kawaii bug about Japanese culture, though that's not his only over-fascination (arguably more of the Neuromancer trilogy is bound to voodoun fascination than Japanese culture fascination), but the important point at the time, and still a useful timeless quality to Gibson's books was how much Gibson got right about the increased weird of a global mega-culture. Much more so than most of his contemporaries, Gibson's cyberpunk much more accurately captured the feeling of the internet before the internet: one minute you might be watching K-Pop on TikTok and then some dude with a Voodoo-based handle sends you some weird files on Discord, before you hop over to Facebook for the latest Eurovision memes.

Gibson used the prominence of Japanese mega corporations not just because a lot 80s tech stock pundits (possibly wrongly; though Sony et al still have a large market presence) thought the Japanese would dominate the future, but as a part of a larger cross-cultural package that the future of "punk" wasn't just white-bread American but a stew waiting to be stirred of global culture. In that Gibson is an interesting comparison to pick when comparing timeless versus time-bound components of cyberpunk, as Gibson's Japanese focus I think was by far one of his most timeless additions to the genre.

No, it doesn't. Proto-cyberpunk ideas existed, certainly (and more than 10 years before Neuromancer; you can trace the roots back to 60s New Wave SF), but the word itself only predates the book by a year. Neuromancer was very much a crystallization of ideas that had been floating around the zeitgeist.

I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I am more a fan of Cryptonomicon and Anathem. I stumbled upon Cryptonomicon in the bookstore, because of the intriguing title. That and the Perl script for Solitaire in the back of the book.

I wish Cryptonomicon had been made into a movie pre-Bitcoin and Snowden; I hope they still make a movie of it.

Travel books can be a good fit for the summer, and Keri Smith's Wander Society is a fun pick.

I also like to make a random pick or two that I'd never normally choose for myself. My next random pick may be off this thread...

Z

And when I refer to Foundation & Ringworld I meant that they are from the 60s and so have some weird cultural ideals as well as some (unintentional) misogyny & racism in the foundation series.

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins

A New Kind of Science - Wolfram

The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter

Atlas Shrugged - Rand

The Fountainhead - Rand

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Neuromancer - William Gibson

The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'd recommend Altered Carbon and it's sequels. There's also a Netflix adaption with a solid first season (although s2 went a bit off the rails)

A personal favorite of mine is Snow Crash. It's a very self aware cyberpunk novel (could maybe even be considered a parody, at least in part). If you're not familiar with Stephenson's writing style, be aware that you won't miss too much if you skip the 10 page infodump on Sumerian grammar that pops up in the muddle of the book.

So I wrote "Mother" on my Post-It note. I was curious how the author would react.

I get to the front of the line with my dog-eared copy of "Neuromancer". Mr. Gibson takes my book, reads the Post-It, looks at me briefly, gives a tiny smile and starts writing. Hands me the book. I say "Thank you very much" and get out of the way.

I open the book: "To Mother: Come home. All is forgiven. William Gibson. Summer 1992"

That book was a treasured possession for years. =)

Right now, as late night reading, i'm in the midst of the sprawl trilogy of Gibson, i read Neuromancer more than a few years ago and now i'm checking out the rest.

Other than this, i started "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", but i'm quickly getting bored.

At first I was a bit mad -- it seemed to me that he left out a lot of detail regarding the scene and the characters -- he just seemed to give the reader a few hints, and left them to construct the rest of the scene on their own. Dialogue often unfolds without explicit reference to who's speaking, leaving you to infer it based on speaking style and content. He'd also provide you with a couple sentences about a city or a structure and then move right on along with the action, movement, and interaction characters have with the environment.

Since I then have to rely so much on my own mental construction of the characters and the story, I end up surprising myself later on in the novels with how vividly I picture things as I'm reading, and the level of detail I can see. It's as if the reader takes as much of a part in constructing the story as Gibson does.

The Hyperion cantos (Simmons) is sadly not taken seriously by very many authors of top-100 lists. It's usually Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land or Ender's Game or Forever War. And heaven forbid they include Neuromancer or Snow Crash or Altered Carbon, or an eco-scifi book like Stand on Zanzibar or Zodiac.

Dune could be a nod to the classic science fiction aficionados who don't care for any of the newer stuff, who love Asimov, Niven, Clarke, PKD, Bester. Is Heinlein too politically charged, perhaps?

I read it when I was about 12ish, so nearly 15 years ago. Reading it at that point in my life, in that point of human history as computing was starting to become an incredibly large part of daily life made it a lot more interesting, but society and science and fiction have come a long way since this, so it feels quite anachronistic in it's own way.

I'll have to read Neuromancer again. At the time I read it I was skeptical that hacking decks and exploits would ever exist, but that was before JavaScript, internet connected critical systems, rop gadgets and nation state 0day exploit chains. The need to do scene setting for these concepts perhaps weighs on the story.

Tagging - an ugly pointless form of graffiti is popular for similar reasons. It's easy to do, and more tags == more credit among a small group of peers.

It's a good thing that people want to deface websites rather than hunker down and learn the long game. We'd be in real trouble if all the people doing minor stuff turned to major cyber[1] crime.

[1] "cyber" feels so old to me. Neuromancer was written in 1984.

I think of cyberpunk, and an awareness of what it talks about as more of a tool for understanding the changing world, in a similar way that 1984 helps provide mental tools for understanding the world.

Just the other day I was reading some early Neal Stephenson, and it made reference to 32-bit personal computers as being on the cutting edge. I guess you could read it as a period piece. Similarly, a novel about a computer that was written in the 1950s describes a machine a city block on a side, cooled by Niagra falls, with 1000 bits of storage, that somehow still forms the pillar of a surveillance society.

Novel writers are not the best predictors of technology, it would appear. That's okay.

I re-read it last year, and it still works for me.

I think Shockwave Rider captured the sense of accelerating change and what Toffler called "future shock" (modeled on "culture shock" it's the discomfort from finding yourself embedded in the foreign culture of the future). Vinge anticipated privacy issues (and may other important considerations in his other works like "Rainbows End") and Dick is exploring the nature of what it means to be human.

Gibson's Neuromancer shows a world where extensive body modifications are commonplace, but it does not seem to affect anyone's self-image or concerns about identity. So at some level "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is more philosophically and psychologically profound.

We have titanic businesses with almost superhuman like abilities to get under our skin at an algorithmic level. Tech companies can literally, for all intents and purposes, make people disappear from the internet. A small group of companies can casually destroy your life with a small code change and you wouldn't even know it. Everyone's data is being sold, stolen, sold on the black market, and intercepted by governments both local and foreign. An internet outage now means that your thermostat or fridge could go out and you're going to spend the night cold.

I mean, there's a reason that Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hyped games of the last 5 years. The anxiety resonates. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in tech/cable who grew up reading Neuromancer or Snow Crash and thought "Cool! Let's make it happen!"

But seriously saying Technology is Heroin is like saying Obama is Hitler.

Heroin is a serious fucking drug that will destroy your life. If your a heroin addict you can't just stop doing heroin and go back packing in the forest for a week.

Yet people take breaks from technology and the internet all the time and are perfectly fine. Theres plenty of technology to be afraid of; dying in a car accident, sitting in a chair too much, but Instagraming every meal you eat is not one of them, thats just a little weird.

One thing immediately apparent when creating the account is the lack of "search" functionality when asked to select books I already like. Maybe I didn't find it? I tried the "Apple idiom" of pull down to search. The book selection was iffy so I skipped it -- it looks like 10 'recently published' titles instead of stood-the-test-of-time type novels (eg: no Dune, Ender's Game, Neuromancer, Foundation Series for Sci-Fi). Also the "skip" in the top right corner on that page is so super light grey on a white background that I almost didn't see it -- if I am using this app to read the last thing I want to encounter is anything remotely tough to read on my eyes. Especially when goading me into signing up.

Also, when clicking "create account" there wasn't any feedback it was happening (spinners, greying out of the button, etc). My phone is an older generation (4S) with a lifeproof screen protector so it will occasionally hiccup and not register my touches. I kept thumbing thinking it was hiccupping, not realizing it would later create many "Error: Username already taken" dialogs I had to thumb through.

A question I do have is how spoilers are dealt with in annotations. I haven't tried reading a book and using that particular feature yet, but it would be a concern of mine.

I look forward to playing around with it more!

Anything by Haruki Murakami

As a long-time neuromancer and Gibson fan, I can say his writing has changed and approached the modern day just as it should. Neuromancer made sense at the time it was published - the net wasn't around, it was a far out concept - lots of room for imagination. If it were only released today, it would just seem like really bad sci-fi because the net exists, now, and it's not quite what Gibson wrote about.

I'd the pattern recognition/spook/zero set are not so much current day as very near-future. They're entirely plausible with current technology, with a few inventions along the way that don't currently exist, but probably could.
PLus they're a good read.

Audiobooks are amazingly convenient and you can definitely find time to fit them into your life. You can listen to them while walking around, on the bus or subway, while grocery shopping, while cooking, and even in the bathroom.

I also think that audiobooks might be a good way to practice your focus, in the way that mindfulness meditation teaches you to do. You try and pay attention to the audiobook as best as you can, and if you're prone to anxiety and rumination, this will at the very least help provide a useful distraction and quiet down inner chatter.

Thumbs up for audiobooks, helping me get more culture into my life.

They are still good books (I finished Neuromancer a few days ago) and I'd recommended them to people who are already into science fiction. Having said that, I hope you'll understand when I say that I also consider them the worst that science fiction has to offer. They aren't only inaccessible but actually off putting to anyone but a dedicated reader.

I'm not a fan of it, but Ender's Game is the exact opposite. Not great science fiction, but very accessible. Whatever your thoughts on SciFi, you'll fall in love with Ender and take a very deep interest in his story.

-- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. (In an intentional homage to Neuromancer.)

On another tangent: Gibson wrote, in an afterword in an early-1990s digital edition of Neuromancer, that he had never owned, nor even used, a computer until some years after he wrote the book. He noted that:

> Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer.

I'm not speaking of cyberpunk in general. Note that Gibson himself has stated the modern "cyberpunk" genre largely misses the point, mistaking a novel counter-cultural idea for its visual trappings.

* TCP/IP Illiustrated (Volumes 1,2 & 3) - W. Richard Stephens

* The Web Application Hacker's Handbook - Stuttard, Pinto et al

* The Shellcoder's Handbook - Kozoil, Aitel et al

* The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

* Neuromancer - William Gibson

* ARM System-on-chip Architecture - Stephen B. Furber

* Operating Systems Design & Implementation - Tanenbaum

* The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System - McKusick, Neville-Neil

These are just a few, and I'm sure there's plenty of others, even better ones. But to truly round yourself out you need to know more than programming a few languages - you need to know the low-level end of things and the high-level view of the world.

but the books really do feel like Japan is the dominant economic power, in a way that seems very stuck in the 1980s (the Nikkei still has never recovered to its peak in 1991). the way this gets translated is always rainy city streets with neon signs in kanji, and synthesizers. a lot of work that is heavily derivative of Neuromancer just copies these choices blindly rather than trying to convey the same spirit as it tells the story. i liked Void Star because it did the opposite.

another thing underappreciated about Gibson is that much of his world is not particularly futuristic. there's implied to be plenty of buildings left around from the 21st century. the bars, hotels, motels, and restaurants are mostly described as being like normal restaurants today. stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 seems to miss this.

[1] "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut - imagines a future where mechanical automation and IQ-optimized hiring leads to mass unemployment, but extensive welfare systems keeps the mediocre masses well-fed, just demoralized and without dignity. Combination of Huxleyan with Kafkaesque?

The Handmaid's Tale - Orwellian with a pronounced patriarchal-religious emphasis

Anthem by Ayn Rand - generic Orwellian with a primitivist/preindustrial Luddite version of Phildickian.

(Actually, we run into a convergence there. Isn't Orwellian thought control simply the overt forcible version of Phildickian thought control, the latter is more indirect, subtle, and possibly not even enforced by the state but private actors and individuals? Both involve rewriting your mind to reject liberty.)

Fahrenheit 451 - similar Phildickian rewriting of reality through both Orwellian (the firemen, the unspecified war in the background) and Huxleyan (parlor walls, overload of useless factoids) means.

Atlas Shrugged - world/U.S. in the beginning is not totalitarian, but a generic degenerate socialist bureaucratic state in decline. Whether or not Galt's Gulch is totalitarian, and what type it is, can be left as an exercise to the reader.

Neuromancer, Snow Crash, other classic cyberpunk works- not totalitarian, but heavy on the Huxleyan decadent consumerist society coupled with Phildickian distortion of reality themes.

Brazil by Terry Gilliam - perfectly Kafkaesque.

Would appreciate classification of some other classic dystopian totalitarian works, such as We by Zamyatin or even Animal Farm. Do any of them express totalitarianism in a way that breaks the four-type classification system?

Neuromancer - William Gibson. 6th or 7th time through. Coming to it now after having read Delany's Nova, and the influence is clear.

Little Heroes - Norman Spinrad. All that's good about Spinrad and all that's bad. He does write well about Hollywood.

History Of Film- David Parkinson. A short survey text, sort of a review for me.

When reading Neuromancer and Count Zero, the cumulative sum of the evocative description of "the sprawl" and the post war environment led me to form a fairly bleak mental picture of the place. And floating above all that an ultra elite class of the 1% of the 1% (sensenet stars, the tessier-ashpools, etc).

Islands in the Net also paints a picture of radically even more unequal wealth distribution, coupled with massive economic disruptions and civil wars in developing nations.

Books that I've started but haven't finished (primarily due to W&P):

- Dune (Frank Herbert)

- Men At Arms - Discworld (Pratchett)

- The Diamond Age (Stephenson)

- Neuromancer (Gibson)

- The Shadow Rising - Wheel of Time (Jordan)

- Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)

Books that I plan on reading in 2020:

- Little Women (Alcott)

- Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Evans)

- A Walk in the Woods (Bryson)

However there have been similar ideas in earlier works, as acknowledged by the author himself. And if you asked the authors of those earlier works I'm sure they'd say they first thought of it when reading someone else's work - it's how it goes.

For what it's worth, the idea is similar to the deadliest joke sketch from the Monty Pythons, that predates most (but not all) the authors cited by Langford as influences:

Langford's later short story comp.basilisk FAQ, [1] first published in Nature in December 1999, mentions William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957), J.B. Priestley's The Shapes of Sleep (1962), and Piers Anthony's Macroscope (1969) as containing a similar idea. Examples not mentioned include the short story White Cane 7.25 (1985) by Czech writer Ondřej Neff, A. E. van Vogt's War Against the Rull (1959), and John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century (1996).

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_%28short_story%29

I'd also read Neuromancer the previous summer and me as a twenty-year-old thought this was all rather exciting...

And that makes this exercise impossible for me. The books I would tell the younger version of myself to read wouldn't resonate the same way (or not at all) with that other person I used to be. Picking books that might have appealed to the younger version of myself accurately would mean picking the books I actually read -- e.g. The Fifth Discipline -- and not books that the younger version of myself tried to read but couldn't but that I read and recommend today: e.g. TAoCP.

Part of the complexity is that the world in which I read books today is radically different from that of my younger self. Today I can get a MIX interpreter from the internet [1]...there's even help on StackOverflow. My younger self couldn't because even in the time when there was an internet bandwidth was low and Google didn't exist.

Like I said it's great to pick up a good book and realize it is better than I remember when I remember it being really good, but it's hard to see how it could have been better for my younger self.

1. Neuromancer

2. Blood Meridian

3. A Pattern Language

[1]:https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/precise/mixal/

In the immediate future (e.g. in 2007 when the iPhone appeared) no. But everybody though mobile phones will ultimately be little computers -- even MS had Windows OS version (a crappy one) for smartphones.

>* In the 1950's the President of IBM supposedly said there was a market for maybe 5 computers in the world.*

And he was right. Though he never really said it, it was more of a misattribution of a quote by another, "Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country."

Which, if you think of it, is how Cloud computing works. Sure, there are not 5 computers -- but a huge part of the internet traffic is from 5 services and their data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc).

>In 1990 no one thought there would be a global network for anyone and everyone that would change the world a few years later.

People expected and talked of such a thing since the 50s and communication satellites.

Heck, it was the main theme in books like Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement.

Regarding Gibson, I only read Neuromancer, and enjoyed the writing. Obviously the concepts were ahead of its time, so reading it much later didn't have the same impact. But neat story.

* The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition (Bjarne Stroustrup)

* Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 (Scott Meyers)

* Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with WebGL (7th Edition) (Edward Angel & Dave Schreiner)

* Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (David Kushner)

* Neuromancer (William Gibson)

I most recently finished:

* Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know---and What to Do About Them (Cynthia Shapiro)

* C++ for dinosaurs (Nick Economidis)

I am highly anticipating the final(?) book of the Ender's Game Series by Orson Scott Card titled Shadows Alive.

I just learned about and probably will buy:

* The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)

My experience is that it’s a fun game with some minor problems. If you like cyberpunk books or media, you’ll love it. The writing team put a lot of effort into crafting a backstory of the world.

Overall it reminds me of the original Neuromancer novel; moments of sheer brilliance mixed with moments of tacky, embarrassingly bad writing. That specific quality is part of the genre’s history, to me, and I think a lot of the criticism toward 2077 is from people who haven’t read much of the previous books.

I miss those moments I had when I was younger, reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Diamond Age for the very first time. Certainly they all played a driving role in orienting me toward what I ended up spending my life doing. The stories and the characters mattered, but the technology drowned it out.

Foundation's Edge is possibly the least literary book I've ever read; I don't think Asimov wrote a deeply-characterized human in his life. The same applies to most Heinlein, a lot of Dick, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and IME most Clarke (though it seems I haven't read either of his Hugo-winning works); it's true of David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson and Vernor Vinge. I've heard Neuromancer described as an "obvious first novel", and while there's something distinct about the Ender series, I certainly wouldn't call it literary.

This was always the colonial view of the future, perhaps adapted up to the Eisenhower era. Like everything else, science fiction writing has adapted to post-colonialism. The watershed was probably somewhere around the 60s-70s:

> Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty.

i.e., the present western milieu from about the 1970s: acid rain, nuclear rain, superfund sites, New York as "no go area". Many of which have actually improved since then but survive as tropes.

Remember that the "cyber-" prefix relates also to control systems, both in the sense of industrial control like PID loops and by analogy social control systems through feedback. Look for the control systems. Neuromancer (1982) provides lots of great examples of this; almost every character including the AIs are labouring under external control which they are trying to shake off.

Author glosses over Watchmen, Stranger in a Strange Land, Neuromancer, The Stand, Snowcrash, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Left Hand of Darkness, and several others that actually had some very interesting things to say on gender roles and treatment of minorities.

Author also ignores entirely the actual depiction of homosexuality and gender roles in The Forever War, and the various ways the protagonist treats (and is treated by!) them.

Author was clearly looking to be offended, and in their zeal ignored both things that countered their position (not surprising) and things that would've substantiated it!

Lucifer's Hammer, for example, can be read to literally depict African Americans and urban youths as savage cannibals. It's a good story otherwise, but there is certainly some facepalming in there.

For more recent works, you might like:

  Vernor Vinge
    "Rainbow's End"  -- more near term and what you describe
    "A Fire Upon the Deep" & "A Deepness in the Sky"

  David Brin
    "Earth"  -- again, more near term, although with a fantastic ending
    The Uplift Trilogy (a bit more fantastic, but very well done, particularly the 2nd and 3rd novels)

  Arthur C. Clarke
    "The City and the Stars"

And I guess I really can't pass up suggesting Carl Sagan's Contact. Superb.

As for films, I'm not the most versed, but the following, more "real" science fiction films come to mind:

  GATTACA
  Blade Runner (yeah, yeah, but I just re-watched it)
  And I'll mention that Star Trek (particularly, for me, The Next Generation), is now on or coming to Netflix

And as for a certain pragmatic perspective on human psychology, behavior, and possible near term societal/political developments, the classic Heinlein ouvre, while perhaps sexist or interpretable as such, and also in other ways somewhat "archaic", is nonetheless insightful.

Probably not what you're looking for, but now that I've rambled on, there it is.

P.P.S. I found Asimov's original "Robot" trilogy a very insightful allegory for the competing demands of public knowledge and privacy in the modern world. Set aside the robotic aspect, per se, and look at how the different societies lead there lives and social conduct.

"Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too." - Ender's Game

If you don't know what Ender is referring to, this quote loses almost all of its power. If you've read the story, though, this line is killer.

"The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there." - Neuromancer

You don't need to have read the novel to appreciate the quote. Beyond the novelty and aesthetic beauty of the writing, it's very information-dense: You can get an excellent sense of the novel's setting, themes, conflict, and main character just from these three sentences.

I read Neuromancer as a teenager, and it had a profoundly transformative effect on my life (probably more than any other book). It first introduced me to the idea that a person like a hacker existed. That it was a viable thing to become. I may have discovered this at a later time on my own, but I'll never know.

I was so enraptured by the ideas contained in it, that I was able to look past what was mechanically, a style of writing that I really didn't like (the prose felt very disjointed).

When I moved on to Count Zero, I found that the story wasn't sufficiently enthralling to make up for the issues I had with the style, so I could never get through it.

About ten years later, somehow or another I came to find myself in possession of Gibson's Pattern Recognition (I don't remember if I bought it because of a good review, or just wanted to give him another shot).

For whatever reason, I found that I didn't have any of the issues with his style getting in the way for me. I don't know if his writing actually changed (a possibility, as it was his 7th novel), of if I was just a different person by that point, and now more able to appreciate the way he writes.

I ended up liking Pattern Recognition immensely (and both of the other novels in that trilogy), even though people have made valid complaints about the actual plot of the novels.

I then went back and re-read the rest of the Sprawl trilogy, and found it easier to digest this time.

So you might also find that his later work is less confusing.

I don't really have an opinion as to how it relates to SciFi as a whole, as I really don't like SciFi as a genre in and of itself (as a contrast, I actually hated Enders Game when I read it as a kid).

Also, the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, but I would recommend not starting with the first published book, Consider Phlebas. YMMV, but I personally found it hard to get in to and almost didn't continue the series. Later I read lots of reviews of the second book, The Player of Games, and decided to give it a chance and have since read most of the remaining books. I have now gone back and re-read Consider Phlebas and love it now that I have a better handle on the setting, universe, and concepts from the series, but I definitely feel that The Player of Games is a much better intro into the series.

For those of us who grew up reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and other cyberpunk yarns: that is today, we are living in that world at this moment.

I was surprised by how strongly it evokes this sort of late-80s oppressive paranoia though. A reminder/argument for science fiction as a lens on contemporary society I suppose.

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson

2. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

3. Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

4. How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

6. The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

7. The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

8. Code - Charles Petzold

9. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

10. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
Book - Peter Morville

11. Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

12. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks

14. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Ed Yourdon

15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

16. The Philip K. Dick Reader

17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates

"Thirty years after the novel’s publication, it’s difficult to tell whether Gibson foresaw the future or whether the future, designed by technologists who idolized Gibson’s novels, self-consciously imitated his novel."

When I first read Neuromancer it (obviously) didn't feel dated. I think going back and correcting things would make it bland. At the time the bit with the payphones was eerie, but now if you did that with cellphones and GPS it feels like less of a deus ex machina is messing with me and more the gov't is overstepping again. sigh. Which is really not the right vibe. I don't expect a youth to pick up Neuromancer today and comprehend it, no matter what you do to it.

More than anything Gibson writes culture. He once said he writes descriptions, but he's focusing on describing people and subcultures. I think the cultural era which he wrote his first trilogy for has past. The cultural era he wrote the second trilogy for is waving goodbye, but I think it's still very accessible to youth. His following books practically document the very era they were written for, which is a fun consequence of writing science fiction set in the plausible present.

The gushing letter he wrote predicted it's going to be a commercial success. I like the movie too (well, not the terrible theatrical release) but that doesn't mean that letter isn't somewhat nuts.

Heck, it changed the direction of WRITTEN science fiction

Except it didn't. Science fiction was already going there anyway. William Gibson on Blade Runner -

"
BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I'd copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film.
"

I don't want to sound like a fanboy

Well, you're not doing a very good job of avoiding it. While you're sputtering at me and using all caps you somehow didn't notice I wasn't even talking about the movie. Simply pointing out it's a crazy letter written by a mentally ill person who hadn't even seen it. This fact is quite independent of the quality or cultural impact of the movie.

  The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
  Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
  Gridlinked - Neal Asher
  Neuromancer - William Gibson
  The Reality Dysfunction - Peter F. Hamilton
  The Dreaming Void - Peter F. Hamilton
  Fallen Dragon - Peter F. Hamilton
  Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
  Market Forces - Richard Morgan
  Blindsight - Peter Watts
  The Electric Church - Jeff Somers
  Tunnel in the Sky - Robert A. Heinlein
  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
  1984 - George Orwell

The Emperors New Mind - Roger Penrose

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglass Hoffstadter

Brocas Brain - Carl Sagan

The (mis)Behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot

The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassem Taleb

Fiction

Gates Of Fire - Stephen Pressfield

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

Hardwired - Walter Jon Williams

Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

Space - Stephen Baxter

Enders Game - Orson Scott Card

Skeleton Crew - Stephen King

I've given away a lot of books. I'm old.

I'm not really seeing why this (or the fedora squad) is something to be welcomed.

While the idea of cellular comms dates to the 1950s (if not earlier), and some limited analog cellular service existed in some parts of the world (notably the Nordic countries from 1981), the UK didn't get analog cell service until roughly 1985; digital (over 2G GSM) didn't come along until roughly 1991. In Canada, cellphone service wouldn't have started until around the time the book was published, if not later. And, uninformed rumor to the contrary, SF isn't actually about prophesying the future.

It was Gaiman in his series introduction to the Penguin Galaxy [1] reprint in hardcover of Neuromancer, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Once and Future King, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Stranger in a Strange Land.

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGX/penguin-galaxy...

* Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

* Influx (Daniel Suarex)

* Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami)

* Apex (Ramez Naam)

* One Second After (William R. Forstchen)

* Anna Karanina (Leo Tolstoy)

* Neuromancer (William Gibson)

* A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

* Crux (Ramez Naam)

* A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

* Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World (Haruki Murakami)