sweating metaphorical bullets daily in front of my Hermes 2000

December 2, 2014 11:28 AM

William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer
posted by fearfulsymmetry (73 comments total)

On commission, if that saves anyone a click.
posted by jsavimbi at 11:40 AM on December 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

Neat story. I loved that book and the C64 game, and see echoes of it in so many later works.
posted by exogenous at 11:43 AM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

My favorite book, cheers.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:00 PM on December 2, 2014

On commission, if that saves anyone a click.

Click anyway, There's more to the story.
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:39 PM on December 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

A short story writer paid $2000 for his first story, and then sought out by an editor and paid in advance for a yet-to-be started novel. I'd classify that as historical fantasy.
posted by shivohum at 12:45 PM on December 2, 2014 [20 favorites]

Omni paid around $2,000 for a short story

I was curious, and it turns out Omni published Johnny Mnemonic in 1981, making that $2,000 story worth $5,244 in 2014 dollars. Damn.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:46 PM on December 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

On a perhaps related note, the NYTimes 100 Notable Books of 2014 came out today, and so far as I can tell, only one of them could be honestly classified as science fiction.
posted by newdaddy at 12:52 PM on December 2, 2014

I wonder why Omni paid so much more than other SF magazines at the time.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:55 PM on December 2, 2014

Also, I truly love the one book of short fiction Gibson has ever published. I wish he would write (and/or publish) in that form again.
posted by newdaddy at 1:02 PM on December 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

I wonder why Omni paid so much more than other SF magazines at the time.

It was underwritten with Penthouse money.
posted by maxsparber at 1:04 PM on December 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

By the way, the stories that Gibson published in Penthouse were "Burning Chrome", "New Rose Hotel" and "Johnny Mnemonic." He makes it sound like he just sort of stumbled on it, but these are genre classics.
posted by maxsparber at 1:06 PM on December 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's best to read the latest Gibson as soon as it comes out, I've found.^* Somehow I missed the Neuromancer buzz in '84, didn't get with the program until Mona Lisa Overdrive was new -- I quickly caught up and there was nothing like reading the Sprawl Trilogy when the Berlin wall came down. I usually re-read the latest a few years after... and now I am so meh about Neuromancer, will y'all please get over it? He's done so much better... try instead the Bridge Trilogy and (my personal favorite) Spook Country.

* So naturally, now I'm 3/4 through The Peripheral
posted by Rash at 1:06 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is good, but I want to know about the time he was sweating literal bullets daily in front of his Hermes 2000.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:07 PM on December 2, 2014

A short story writer paid $2000 for his first story, and then sought out by an editor and paid in advance for a yet-to-be started novel.

The sky above the magazine was the color of newsprint, tuned to a dead business model.
posted by escabeche at 1:07 PM on December 2, 2014 [38 favorites]

I just finished re-reading Neuromancer yesterday [*], the first time in more than a decade. Of all the books I read when I was 15 it is probably the one which has held up the best on re-reading. Not that I've tried to re-read David Edding's The Belgariad series again..

*: In preparation for readingThe Peripheral of course
posted by Baron Humbert von Gikkingen at 1:11 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I have to say, this Guardian piece is not very illuminating about his process.
posted by newdaddy at 1:12 PM on December 2, 2014

It does clearly state that he received a BA in English Lit. Is that very common for SF writers (asking innocently)?
posted by newdaddy at 1:14 PM on December 2, 2014

While I liked Neuromancer, I'm also a big Shadowrun fan, and I was always disappointed that Gibson didn't see the genre mesh as an enhancement to the cyberpunk theme that he has helped found rather than a corruption. Oh well, as the final Hobbit film is about to rake in trillions in the box office, I guess not embracing fantasy meant leaving money on the table...
posted by Metro Gnome at 1:31 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Dogfight was also originally published in Omni. I remember reading it but not know who the author was until years later, after I had come late to the game with the Sprawl Trilogy, and then read the story in Burning Chrome, and then having a lightbulb moment of lamenting how I could have missed Gibson's work to date when I had loved that one story so much.
posted by kokaku at 1:41 PM on December 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

I adored Neuromancer (and still do ofcourse). When I was 16 I swore I'd make my master thesis about Gibson, and I did. (The idea behind the thesis was that Neuromancer was most perfectly post-modernist, and one of the first novels at that).

Also a big Shadowrun fan and as a GM I always downplayed the fantasy elements. Orcs, elves and what not were creatures that inhabited our imaginary world, but they were uncommon. I only did so because we loved to explore the cyberpunk themes more than the fantasy ones.

I do understand Gibson's position: were I him, I would have hated the idea too. In the Sprawl universe, it would simply be nonsensical to have any kind of magic or fantasy elements as the Sprawl is built by fast-forwarding certain of today's trends (well, the eighties, but still).

I have long wondered about the Riviera illusionist in Neuromancer though... his acts hint towards the magical. I've decided it's an elaboration of Clarke's "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", meaning tech advances so fast in Neuromancer that whoever gets his hands on new technology first is considered a magician when using it.

Oh, and whenever William Gibson comes up, people need to be made aware of this series.
posted by Captain Fetid at 1:48 PM on December 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

Oh, and also. Gibson really is a visonary. From Metro Gnome's link, it appears he wrote the following in 2003:
When people are downloading your pirated texts for free, it means you're already pretty widely distributed. I view downloading as a sort of natural, organic tax on reputation.
posted by Captain Fetid at 1:55 PM on December 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

The big conflict in Shadowrun's tone is whether it's cyberpunk with fantasy elements or fantasy with cyberpunk elements, and in my experience/opinion the shitty parts almost always come from a writer thinking it's fantasy with cyberpunk elements. It a) doesn't mesh with the actual setting and b) always sucks.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:22 PM on December 2, 2014

Virtual Light 4 Eva! I had just started working as a bicycle messenger when I read this in 1994. So there may be some bias showing.
posted by Mister_A at 2:24 PM on December 2, 2014

the time he was sweating literal bullets

It was due to an implant failure from a botched procedure in a Chiba City clinic.
posted by cmfletcher at 2:27 PM on December 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

The linked article is part of a whole series on The Guardian in November, including articles and reviews and a Q and A. There was a book club event last week in London and part of the recording will be released as a podcast, probably later this month.
posted by Kattullus at 2:28 PM on December 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

I keep thinking about re-reading the first three books but am somewhat scared that they haven't aged well.
posted by octothorpe at 3:01 PM on December 2, 2014

I was in my twenties when the shockwave that was Neuromancer hit. I think I read a review in a magazine where a normally reserved critic was raving how revolutionary it was. I got a copy and realized that this was the guy that wrote Johnny Mnemonic. I think I devoured the book in a few evenings and then had to reread it. A friend of mine got married a few weeks later and before he left on their honeymoon he was complaining he had nothing to read on the plane. I lent him my copy. When he got back he reported that he got into trouble with his new wife for spending the first day of their honeymoon with his nose stuck in a book. And then he said, "what happens now? This book changes EVERYTHING."
posted by Ber at 3:02 PM on December 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

Fantastic post. I still remember opening Neuromancer at christmas, and my sci-fi loving uncle winking at me and saying "Kid, this is going to blow your mind."

Damn if he wasn't right.
posted by Sphinx at 3:03 PM on December 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

I was just lamenting yesterday that "The sky was the color of television, turned to a dead channel" doesn't make sense today. Still love that opening though.

octothorpe: Aside from what I just said, Neuromancer aged just fine.
posted by mcstayinskool at 3:16 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

my sci-fi loving uncle

I stuffed up, and have gifted the book to my nephew on two separate occasions.
posted by pompomtom at 3:20 PM on December 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

mcstayinskool: It's just bright blue now.
posted by pompomtom at 3:20 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

metafilter: Neuromancer in 2014
posted by mcstayinskool at 3:22 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Metro Gnome: "While I liked Neuromancer, I'm also a big Shadowrun fan, and I was always disappointed that Gibson didn't see the genre mesh as an enhancement to the cyberpunk theme that he has helped found rather than a corruption. Oh well, as the final Hobbit film is about to rake in trillions in the box office, I guess not embracing fantasy meant leaving money on the table..."

Just picked up Shadowrun Returns today via a Steam sale for $1.49. As I played I could not help but remember Neuromancer.
posted by Splunge at 3:23 PM on December 2, 2014

Except that you can see metafilter on your mobile phone.
posted by pompomtom at 3:24 PM on December 2, 2014

I misunderstood the 'dead channel' line for many years - I thought it was a reference to grey clouds like static, which is actually a pretty average simile. Then I was in an antique shop and saw a black and white TV that the owner had just turned on, and... yes. There was a flickering, luminous cast over the blank screen, the electron gun putting all its effort into nothing at all.

Re Shadowrun, there's a couple of Fallout-esque turn based tactical RPGs out, Last Man's Switch and Dragonfall. The first is tolerable, but the second is fantastic, with Planescape Torment level writing and much tidier mechanics. It's $15 on Steam.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:47 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

My fantasy of success, then, was that my book, once it had been met with the hostile or indifferent stares I expected, would go out of print. Then, yellowing fragrantly on the SF shelves of secondhand book shops, it might voyage forward, up the time-stream, into some vaguely distant era in which a tiny coterie of esoterics, in London perhaps, or Paris, would seize upon it, however languidly, as perhaps a somewhat good late echo of Bester, Delany or another of the writers I’d pasted, as it were, on the inside of my authorial windshield.

A laudable goal, pretty similar to my own.
posted by Artw at 3:48 PM on December 2, 2014

When I saw the gorgeously mysterious early Omni covers out in the boonies, mixed in with mainstream mags instead of squirreled away in the section for kiddies and loonies, it felt as though SF had finally arrived in some sense. So had something else, as Gibson had wiggled Brunner's Shockwave Rider ideas out of the speculative into a new, exciting era in which home computers were still viewed as a 'niche product' (words I heard from an editor), hackers just an annoyance, while Byte magazine swelled to an inch thick.

I've retained few magazines from that era, among them that one. A faint tingle of that sensation is still attached.
posted by Twang at 3:53 PM on December 2, 2014

I was just lamenting yesterday that "The sky was the color of television, turned to a dead channel" doesn't make sense today.

Uh, yeah it does. Everyone knows the sky is blue, doy!
posted by Ian A.T. at 3:56 PM on December 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

Gibson talks about his process (and a lot of other things) in this fantastic interview from Paris Review, also recently published.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:59 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

The sky was a Samsung Smart TV pop-up message, reading "NO SIGNAL".
posted by Artw at 3:59 PM on December 2, 2014 [9 favorites]

I had the good fortune of walking into a bookshop and asking about any good new Sci Fi books. This was the only time I have ever done this, before or since, and it was about a month after Neuromancer was released. The guy recommended it to me so I bought it and finished it in several days. . . .
posted by Danf at 4:13 PM on December 2, 2014

I have a paperback copy of Neuromancer that I've had since I was thirteen. It is yellow, falling apart, and moldy, but I can't get rid of it, because my uncle wrote the following inscription on the first blank page, between the pages of reviews:

"Being a nuclear reactor operator was my greatest technical feat so far. I have split the atom!
In the process, I have become hooked on something that will stay with me forever. Namely, I am an operator. When I drive my car, when I make a sandwich, when I do my job, I do it as an operator, and there's a noticeable improvement from month to month. I am, in effect, a craftsman of living.
This book exemplifies the true flavor of being an operator.
It is the operators who control machines of all kinds.
It is the proletariat who are controlled by them.
I invite you to devour this book with enthusiasm."

Heavy shit to a tween kid from his, at the time, pretty much favorite relative.
I've completely lost count of how many times I've read this book. And other than the conspicuous absence of ubiquitous cell phones and wireless internet, it has aged remarkably well.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 4:45 PM on December 2, 2014 [9 favorites]

Omni published Johnny Mnemonic in 1981, making that $2,000 story worth $5,244 in 2014 dollars. Damn.

And worth every damn penny. I still have the original pages torn from my subscription copy of Omni.
posted by drivelmeister at 4:47 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Gibson is one of my favorite writers (Pattern Recognition is usually what I give as my favorite) and I've read/heard enough interviews in my obsession to have heard chunks of what's in that Guardian thing. The times I've been lucky enough to go to readings he's done here in Chicago, I've always tried to have at least one good question to ask that he'd likely not have gotten before. I haven't always succeeded, but this one is by a large margin the best one I thought of and my favorite of the ones he's answered:

One of the dust jacket quotes on Warren Ellis' first novel, Crooked Little Vein is Gibson saying, "Stop it. You're frightening me." I'd seen them being friendly on twitter, so clearly it's tongue-in-cheek, but Gibson did some readings in the Chicago area a month or two after that book came out supporting Spook Country and one of the questions I settled on was asking him about why that for a dust jacket quote.

He chuckled and said something like the following (dug this out of notes I'd taken during the Q&A portion of the reading, wouldn't quite be verbatim):

I thought it was funny. I thought it was cooler than a standard blurb... I wanted to do, "Stop it. You're frightening me." after I saw a self-printed punk novel in Vancouver that a guy was selling beside the register in an east Vancouver coffee shop. I saw the blurbs on the cover of it, and realized that they were all fake. One attributed to Michael Turner, a friend of mine was, "Stop doing that. You're bothering me." The quote for Ellis' book is based on that... I... don't want to get more into it than that because I'm not sure how far the loudspeaker system carries. I was happy to see that Warren thanked me on the thank-yous page. I don't think anyone's ever thanked me before.

He was being literal about the loudspeaker system there. We were in a Borders in Evanston, and the general subject matter of that Warren Ellis novel is, um. Very NSFW. Didn't need the people in the kids section hearing frank discussion of some of the weird sex stuff that's in that book.
posted by sparkletone at 6:36 PM on December 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

For better or for IMHO a large chunk of worse it's certainly a very Warren Ellis book.
posted by Artw at 6:41 PM on December 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

For better or for IMHO a large chunk of worse it's certainly a very Warren Ellis book.

Yeah. I liked it well enough, I suppose, but "a very Warren Ellis novel" is also how I'd describe it to someone who asked me about it.
posted by sparkletone at 6:53 PM on December 2, 2014

I was able to ask Gibson a question (about a dearth of technological interest in dreaming, in part) in my typical concatenated style, at a session he gave at the local university. The moderator said "I don't think we're going to be able to deal with that here...", but Gibson said "No, no...I get what he's asking..." and proceeded to give a fair and thorough answer.

Bill's ok.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 7:38 PM on December 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Loved Neuromancer. Changed my outlook at an impressionable age. Like 10 million other disaffected youths, i was 'WINTERMUTE' on the early, Pleistocene-era internet. 'Pattern Recognition' was also awesome. But I don't think anything affected me as a teen (ok, 20-something) as much as the scene where they stole Dixie Flatline with the panthers providing chaos/support and Molly just dealing with reality. I read that part at least once a year. Makes me young again. William Gibson, I support you: I have bought at least two copies of almost every book you've written full-price, plus digital versions. Enjoy your rewards, my friend who doesn't know me. You have given me so much.
posted by umberto at 8:18 PM on December 2, 2014

And as pre-whatever BS, if someday in the future it turns out that William Gibson is a hideous rapist/cannibal/serial-killer/pederast/drug mogul/mafia kingpin, I don't care. His books are still great. His foibles will not detract from his insane literary greatness.
posted by umberto at 8:51 PM on December 2, 2014

Sebmojo: I misunderstood the 'dead channel' line for many years - I thought it was a reference to grey clouds like static, which is actually a pretty average simile. Then I was in an antique shop and saw a black and white TV that the owner had just turned on, and... yes. There was a flickering, luminous cast over the blank screen, the electron gun putting all its effort into nothing at all.

Yes, I know exactly what kind of image you mean. I used to fiddle with my parents cheap, old television back when I was a kid and that was what I always pictured when I saw the sky above the port.
posted by Kattullus at 4:47 AM on December 3, 2014

Quite apart from all the goodness on Neuromancer itself, this is a fascinating glance into the days before the book business was consolidated, disintermediated and hollowed out.

I mean, an unknown author getting a book contract on spec based on a single short story he got paid $2k for? Wow. That's literally impossible in today's SF market. The margins are too narrow and the clamour of .docx files spewing forth into the world is simply too loud.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:52 AM on December 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Better deal than early King got.
posted by Artw at 5:45 AM on December 3, 2014

I'm sure the $200k-odd Stephen King got in paperback advance from New American Library for Carrie soothed that particular wound.
posted by Happy Dave at 6:22 AM on December 3, 2014

The hardcover advance was already a pretty nice $2,500 in 1973 (or a little over $13,000 in 2014 dollars [and $5,000 in Gibson's 1981 dollars ...I love doing this]), but the paperback rights brought King $200k in or around 1974, I would guess, which is almost a million today.

He apparently only got another $2,500 for the film rights.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 6:59 AM on December 3, 2014

If anyone hasn't explored the Guardian link Kattullus supplied above, the live webchat he did on Nov 21st is pretty good.
posted by Happy Dave at 7:03 AM on December 3, 2014

I always liked the "dead channel" image. I saw a demo by a radio astronomer, he claimed that much of the static on an old B&W TV tuned to a dead channel was caused by cosmic microwave background radiation.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:17 AM on December 3, 2014

I mean, an unknown author getting a book contract on spec based on a single short story
Happy Dave

His arrangement was still pretty crazy, but it was actually more than one short story:

On the basis of a few more Omni sales, I was approached by the late Terry Carr, an established SF anthologist.

As maxsparber notes above, he had published three great shorts that had been getting good buzz by the early 80s. It's not so ridiculous that an SF editor looking to launch a line of debut novels from hot new SF talent would have heard about him by then. I imagine an editor like Carr would have been keeping track of what was going on in SF at the time and would be aware of someone like Gibson.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:18 AM on December 3, 2014

Danf: I had the good fortune of walking into a bookshop and asking about any good new Sci Fi books. This was the only time I have ever done this, before or since, and it was about a month after Neuromancer was released. The guy recommended it to me so I bought it and finished it in several days. . . .

I had a similar experience: after staying loyal to my Amiga until circumstances forced by to buy a PC, I walked into a videogame store and asked if anything worthwhile had recently been released. Half-Life was my first PC game.
posted by Captain Fetid at 11:19 AM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Mark Laidlaw who worked as writer and game designer on Half Life of course being frequently anthologised by Ellen Datlow, influential editor amongst the early Cyberpunks. It all lines up.
posted by Artw at 11:34 AM on December 3, 2014

William Gibson: I never imagined Facebook. The brilliant science-fiction novelist who imagined the Web tells Salon how writers missed social media's rise

Cyberspaceman: William Gibson on Life Inside and Outside the Internet. The sci-fi icon talks about the "consensual hallucination" of being online, his new book and why a great first sentence is key
posted by homunculus at 2:29 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

An Excerpt From William Gibson’s The Peripheral. "This is Chapter 17 of William Gibson’s new book, The Peripheral. This early chapter introduces us to one of the wildest characters, Conner, a wounded soldier who came back from an unnamed war missing a few limbs."
posted by homunculus at 2:31 PM on December 7, 2014

"I misunderstood the 'dead channel' line for many years - I thought it was a reference to grey clouds like static, which is actually a pretty average simile. Then I was in an antique shop and saw a black and white TV that the owner had just turned on, and... yes. There was a flickering, luminous cast over the blank screen, the electron gun putting all its effort into nothing at all. "

That's either a broken tv or a tv with no antenna. A tv tuned to a dead channel shows static. They still do as you can disable the blue screen on a lot of modern tvs. The blue screen is basically a squelch.
posted by I-baLL at 7:39 AM on December 17, 2014

Has anyone ever asked Gibson what color a television tuned to a dead channel is?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:01 AM on December 17, 2014

Has anyone ever asked Gibson what color a television tuned to a dead channel is?

Why would you need to ask? When the book was released in 1984, everyone had seen a dead channel, it was commonplace.
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:29 AM on December 17, 2014

Because every time I have seen this come up, someone argues that no, it's not static, it's that weird flickering thing tubes do when they get no signal.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:50 AM on December 17, 2014

it's that weird flickering thing tubes do when they get no signal.

I have no idea what that even means, I have never seen a CRT do anything like that. And I used to hack a lot of old B&W TVs. I know my way around vacuum tubes.

I presume the people who are arguing this, are younger people who have never seen over-the-air analog TV and always had cable. On cable, dead channels have no static. But then, those are people who probably were born after the book was originally published.

I think we can just let this be an anachronism, like old movies where people make calls from phone booths. Nobody will ever see the static of a dead TV channel again.
posted by charlie don't surf at 1:56 PM on December 17, 2014

I have no idea what that even means, I have never seen a CRT do anything like that.

Neither have I, but the people bringing it up are quite obviously not talking about modern televisions and the whole blue screen thing they do.

For example, this excerpt from Sebmojo's comment above: "Then I was in an antique shop and saw a black and white TV that the owner had just turned on, and... yes. There was a flickering, luminous cast over the blank screen, the electron gun putting all its effort into nothing at all."

Every time it comes up, someone says something similar.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:25 PM on December 17, 2014

There was a flickering, luminous cast over the blank screen, the electron gun putting all its effort into nothing at all.

I suppose that is possible, but that scenario isn't really tuned to any channel so it still makes no sense in this context. But let's not beat this metaphor to death, not even for the people who have that interpretation.
posted by charlie don't surf at 5:54 PM on December 17, 2014

I always thought of the sort of luminous black you'd get between commercials and shows, and compared it to the way the sky looks when there's heavy clouds and too much light coming from the city.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:03 PM on December 17, 2014

Since we're talking about this, I always thought of it as static, and still do.
posted by escabeche at 7:07 PM on December 17, 2014

I always thought of the sort of luminous black you'd get between commercials and shows, and compared it to the way the sky looks when there's heavy clouds and too much light coming from the city.

This is the image I always had. Unlike the other candidates, it's a vivid, accurate description of what the sky above a dense city looks like at night, especially when looking up from under a stratus cloud.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:17 PM on December 17, 2014

Audio recording of William Gibson discussing Neuromancer at The Guardian Book Club.
posted by Kattullus at 5:08 PM on December 19, 2014

People who enjoyed his article about writing Neuromancer may want to try Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of short non-fiction by Gibson. His perspective is imaginative, no matter how he conveys it.
posted by kingless at 3:14 AM on December 23, 2014