I had initially meant to pitch this out to Electric Literature, but I think it might be more interesting to explore the books, music, movies, and games that influenced my outlook and approach to the world. I have been sitting on this one for a while, so long that the second one I wrote about the Sandman came first.

The right book, the right record, the right movie, it doesn’t matter which medium. There are always those pieces of media that change the course of your cultural life forever. Though my life is full of those moments, the book that really changed everything was William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Often summarized as the place where Gibson foresaw the Internet and coined the term “cyberspace.” This is an insane oversimplification of the book’s long shadow. There were cyberpunk books before and after, but like Rocket to Russia or London Calling, this is the genre in its pure and distilled form.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” One of the most famous opening lines in modern science fiction is now reference to a dead technology. But it doesn’t really matter; the feeling is still there.

What sets Gibson apart from even many of his contemporaries is deft and expressive prose. It’s almost conversational, much closer to William S. Burroughs than Robert Heinlein. There are no glitzy spacemen with silver suits and square jaws; instead we get a space station full of dub loving Rastas.

However, like most counterculture, the street is where everything happens. Pulling from the noir of Dashel Hammet, our hero is the sad-sack Case. A hacker with a fried nervous system and a drug problem, he was once the best Console Cowboy around. That reputation gets him a job, a new nervous system, and new bodyguard Molly.

Molly is a street samurai with mirrored eyes and razor blades underneath her fingernails. The image of Molly launched a thousand albums, video games, and dozens of imitations in the genre.

Their patron is Armitage, a mysterious American spook bankrolling the whole job. If this all sounds like a terrible cliche, it’s because Neuromancer invented that cliche. For a fourteen-year-old boy, all the underground drugs, sex workers, and the very ever-present “otherness” felt exhilarating and transgressive.

It is probably the trick of middle-aged memory that traces the line from Gibson to punk rock and the Beats. It’s a blink of an eye to me between cracking the pages on a green paperback and listening to Jawbreaker and reading Kerouac.

While Gibson’s aesthetic was adopted by tons of EBM and Industrial bands, Sonic Youth wrote songs about The Sprawl and his contemporary fiction novel Pattern Recognition. The Matrix may have stolen most of the feel and style from the novel wholesale, a more subdued movie like Ex Machina than the Wachowskis music video as an action film.

It isn’t because Neuromancer doesn’t have action. The latter chapters juggle cinematic action in clever ways, quickly cutting between scenes with efficiency. It’s got the style chops of the Matrix too, mainly because the Wachowskis were lifting it outright.

Where Ex Machina and Neuromancer overlap is in their love of tonal storytelling combined with using science fiction to explore more general ideas about humanity. I don’t mind the Wachowskis’ philosophy textbook approach to the dialog, but it always felt like we were pausing the movie for a small essay on free will versus determinism.

Classic sci-fi was always a bit transgressive, inspiring the likes of Frank Zappa and David Bowie. But Cyberpunk, especially Neuromancer, is drawing and feeding the street in the way that classic science fiction generally didn’t. This isn’t an alien falling to earth as an allegory for humanity’s problems, nor is it an attempt to reframe the exploration stories from colonial times as strange adventures.

What we got was the street. There wasn’t some square-jawed hero; there was a junkie hacker waiting to die. Like Lou Reed’s songs about drag queens and junkies, Neuromancer is trying to talk about the people generally overlooked in most narratives. Gibson, like Reed, also has a voice that makes it all look far easier than it really is.

I’m not sure if Neuromancer inspired as many writers as Velvet Underground inspired bands. However, they both inspired people to look in the dirty corners for stories they were missing.

Photo Credit - Phil Hagelberg