Boy, I feel like I've been reading this book forever! Now that's got to be a sign that I'm not totally enthrawled by the thing.
The phenomina of Cyber Space and Cyber Punk have been attributed to this book (which is why I decided I had to read it). The book is also the basis of the film Johnny Mnemonic, not a good sign, uh!
There are some interesting ideas in the book, along the lines of cybernetic enhancments. These seem to be largly trivial stuff, like an LED display wired into your retina, so you don't need one of those nurdy digital watches to tell the time. There's some interesting VR stuff too.
Unfortunately I feel that I can get everything the book has to offer by watching StarTrek NG, Voyager and The X Files. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, as this book was written in '84 and I imagine at the time it was way ahead of the competition.
One funny co-incidence is that Gibson calls one particular technology a microsoft. I guess back in '84 Bill's company wasn't big enough to be paranoid about the use of his companies monica and possibly Gibson hadn't even heard of them.
I'm now about 3/4 the way through the book and I'm having a lot of trouble trying to work out what exactly the story is. Maybe the book is just a collection of ideas that Gibson had about how the future would turn out, though I don't think that is the case. I think there's supposed to be a storey about espionage in there somewhere... |
