William Gibson is the author of such notable works as Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition. He is thought to be the trailblazer for the so-called “cyberpunk” subgenre of science fiction. In his 1988 interview with Larry McCaffery, he spoke about the influences present in his writing, and how he started down his career as a writer. Before writing Neuromancer, he was relatively unknown, having only published six or so short-stories previously. Thus, Neuromancer was a “major imaginative leap forward for Gibson” (McCaffery & Gibson, 1988, p. 217). However, the thing that made Neuromancer stand out from the science fiction literature of its time was, according to McCaffery, its vision of a completely new, virtual kind of reality.
Gibson was inspired by the media presentations of art, music, and pop culture when he wrote Neuromancer. But Gibson chafes at the question of what “influenced” him, responding that everything in our environments has more or less of an influence on us. Instead, he says that the thing that “specifically got him going with the book” was “Panic. Blind animal panic” (p. 221). Having attempted, and failed, to read the first chapter of Neuromancer myself, I can say that I can see the evidence of the state of wild, discordant agitation that Gibson must have been in while he was writing the book. His writing style has been praised as “eccentric,” but I think that is a euphemism for stupefying. Neuromancer is almost completely impossible to understand. Gibson admits that he was afraid of losing the reader’s attention, which is why he tried to “have a hook on every page” (p. 222). I think he tried too hard.
Works Cited
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Penguin, 2000.
McCaffery, Larry, and William Gibson. "An Interview with William Gibson."Mississippi Review 16.2/3 (1988): 217-236.
